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For a long time, we have dreamt about systems able to answer questions related to a set of text documents — a next-gen search engine. As developers, we spend a significant portion of our time reading through documentation, trying to solve a specific problem. We are not alone. People in many other fields face similar problems. Addressing this issue could save an immense amount of time. The problem of answering a question from a set of text documents has been studied for quite some time. However, only the recent improvements…

Innovation is at the core of Profiq's mission. Arguably, the most innovative development in technology recently is ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI. In an earlier article, we explored OpenAI’s Codex model, which we used for code generation and editing. In this follow-up article, we share our experience leveraging OpenAI’s models programmatically via its API, for creating a plugin for Jetbrains IDEs. Querying OpenAI from the IDE We’ve been using ChatGPT from the browser in various ways to aid with our daily software development and QA. When the interaction with ChatGPT involves…

If you've been following the news in the IT world, you’ve surely heard about OpenAI. For the past few months, this company has made headlines with its excellent AI language models. OpenAI is best-known for ChatGPT, a user-friendly, chatbot-like tool that’s being used to simplify the content creation process. Beside ChatGPT, their offering also used to include the now deprecated Codex API, which served not only for code generation, but also for manipulating existing code. Some companies already use a variant of the Codex model in their tools. For example,…

More and more companies are integrating machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) into their products. Last year was unusually fruitful. We experienced the release of Github Copilot, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT and many other interesting AI services. Getting your company onboard with ML and AI can be challenging. The number of experts in this field is still far below market demand. The path to become an AI professional is rigorous and long. You need to master aspects of software engineering, database and big data management, statistics, and many…

A well-designed API is both an important business driver and a must if you want to split your software product into smaller modules. Whether you decide to deploy your app as a set of microservices or separate the client-side rendered frontend from the backend, you need to think about how the individual components will interact with each other. Externally, a high-quality API can be a huge selling point. This is especially true in the B2B world; letting customers access your service programmatically can help them improve their products or create…

Having fun is the best way to learn.  Albert Einstein It all started two years ago when our colleague Petr brought his new Beta fish to the office. Before long, everyone knew how to care for the fish and the aquarium. Then, we bought a new tank, and a few months later, an even bigger one.  Fast-forward to Christmas 2020. Since our office closes for nearly two weeks, no one would be available to take care of the fish and the aquarium. So, we moved the fish to our older,…

Carl Jung once said, “The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” Like Jung, we believe play can fuel innovation, and sometimes, the wilder the idea, the better. ? You might be wondering why would we submerge a PC in liquid (in our case, mineral oil)? To that, we reply, “Why does anyone climb Mount Everest? Because they can.” So, we did! We created a Linux PC from upcycled computer parts, submerged it in mineral oil, lit it with LED light strips, and added a LEGO ship, because no aquarium…

At profiq, we are always interested in learning something new, and trying novel technologies. One of these technologies is Elixir—a functional programming language whose main strengths lie in fault tolerance and scalability through concurrency. This makes it a good candidate for backend development, especially when it comes to high-traffic web applications. We, for example, utilize Elixir’s properties in cooperation with Divvy to handle a large number of financial transactions. But, this, of course, is not its only use. As it turns out, Elixir can do a lot more. One of…

In an earlier article, we introduced you to Presto, an open-source, distributed SQL query engine. It lets you use SQL to query data from many types of storage solutions. This includes data sources that don’t support SQL natively; for example, a JSON file stored on AWS S3. What’s even more interesting, is that Presto lets you perform joins across multiple databases based on different technologies. In our view, Presto is a great tool for organizations that store their data in multiple data sources, and want to analyze this data without…

It is not uncommon for companies to use multiple data stores based on different technologies. We can easily imagine an organization using relational databases for transactional data, a NoSQL database such as MongoDB for semi-structured data, and an S3 bucket for large datasets. When performing analytical tasks, we often need to combine data from all of these sources. Traditionally, this meant gathering everything in one place: a data warehouse or a data lake. This brings a lot of issues; movement of data takes time, and we also need to perform…