It's been a while (and everyone is well-rested after Advent Of Code!) so let's run another round of Code Golf.

Your task is navigating in a grid-like labyrinth in a clockwise spiral pattern. As it traverses the matrix, it collects characters, revealing a secret message.
Your challenge: find the shortest, most elegant code to decode this spiral cipher.
Input:
1. A multidimensional string array with comma separated characters (n x n)
2. Starting coordinates X and Y

Output:
The decoded message as a single string

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It's been a while since the new UI for Productions and DTL was published as a preview and I would like to know your opinions about it.

WARNING: This is a personal opinion, totally personal and not related with InterSystems Corporation.

I'm going to start with the Interoperabilty screen:

Production screen:

The style is sober and without frills, following the line of cloud services design, I like it.

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There is a list of numbers from 1 to 190.

AllList="1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,.....,187,188,189,190"

There is a collection of sets of these values:

List(1)="3,5,6,7,9"
List(2)="1,2,6,9"
List(3)="5,8,9"
List(4)="2,4,6,8"
List(5)="4,7,9"

What is an elegant approach in Object Script to pick the least number of list items:

  • List(1)
  • List(5)
  • List(n)

That together would cover as many numbers as possible from the AllList.

Interested in best coverage over efficiency.

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I ask ChatGPT periodically to produce ObjectScript or plain MUMPS code for string manipulation, or for implementing known algorithms etc. Occasionally, it does make mistakes or uses non-existing class members but generally not that bad. Is there any tutorial on the subject of using AI for coding, ideally specifically for ObjectScript/MUMPS? Any AI productivity advice, or tricks you are using, or another AI flavor?

Thanks in advance,
Anna

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I would like to know which are the best practices of using Streams in Interoperability messages.

I have always use %Stream.GlobalCharacter properties to hold a JSON, or a base64 document, when creating messages. This is fine and I can see the content in Visual Trace without doing anything, so I can check what is happening and resolve issues if I have, or reprocess messages if something went wrong, because I have the content.

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Hi fellow developers!

Curious if you guys use CreatedAt and LastUpdated properties in your classes?

Created to stamp when the record was created and LastUpdated when it was last updated. Where it can be useful - almost everywhere )) I find it convenient in records sorting (e.g. by creation or last update), in sync (with other systems), and so on, for better analytics.

Do you use it all the time for all the classes?

If don't, why not? What do you use instead?

What property type do you use - %TimeStamp? %DateTime?

What is the best practice to have CreatedAt filled automatically during creation and LastUpdated on every successful save (guess it could be in %OnSave)?

Please share your experience /thoughts?

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Hey everyone,

I'm diving deeper into Caché ObjectScript and would love to open a discussion around the most useful tips, tricks, and best practices you’ve learned or discovered while working with it.

Whether you're an experienced developer or just getting started, ObjectScript has its own set of quirks and powerful features—some well-documented, others hidden gems. I’m looking to compile a helpful set of ideas from the community.

Some areas I’m especially interested in:

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I know the next ones:

1. Place all different settings in environment variables. You have a different .env file for each environment, and you must add some code to Production for reading and setting these values. It's good for deploying into containers, but challenging for management when we have a large production. I mean, we have many settings that can vary depending on the environment: active flag, pool size, timeouts, and so on. Not only endpoints.

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Discussion
· Mar 21
Transforms in COS over DTL

Hi All,

After doing IRIS/Ensemble etc for 20 years I've come across a company who have very odd view, especially about DTL's and routers.

They have convinced themselves to use COS for transforms (including HL7) and for routers (and one of their 3rd party providers agree!)

Their reasons are; efficiency, compatibility, flexibility, power and re-usability.

Of course these reasons are wrong!

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Over the past several years, the InterSystems Developer Community has accumulated more than 1,000 open-source projects. Many of them serve as examples and learning materials — but a significant number have become useful tools, libraries, integrations, and real-world components used in production.

Some of these projects are mine, and like many community developers, I’ve seen the same recurring problem:

  • It’s easy to create an open-source project.
  • It’s hard to maintain, support, and develop it sustainably — especially without funding.

Writing code is one thing.
Supporting it for years, keeping up with new IRIS versions, building CI pipelines, writing documentation, fixing issues, reviewing PRs — all of this demands both time and motivation, and the biggest motivator is often financial support.

This is not a new challenge.
The global open-source world has faced this for decades and has developed various models to support OSS ecosystems.

I believe it’s time for the InterSystems community to start a discussion about adopting a similar model.

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Background

Embeddings is a new IRIS feature empowering the latest capability in AI semantic search.
This presents as a new kind of column on a table that holds vector data.
The embedding column supports search for another existing column of the same table.
As records are added or updated to the table, the supported column is passed through an AI model and the semantic signature is returned.
This signature information is stored as the vector for future search comparison.

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Once upon a time in Ensemble Management Portal the pool size of each component (Business Host) within the production was displayed in the Production Configuration page.

This information was very useful, especially when a production have tens or hundreds of components.

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Hi,

We very much appreciate the interest in the Developer Community for IRIS Vector Search and hope our technology has helped many of you build innovative applications or advanced your R&D efforts. With a dedicated index, integrated embeddings generation, and deep integration with our SQL engine now available in InterSystems IRIS, we're looking at the next frontier, and would love to hear your feedback on the technology to prioritize our investments.

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This anthropic article made me think of several InterSystems presentations and articles on the topic of data quality for AI applications. InterSystems is right that data quality is crucial for AI, but I imagined there would be room for small errors, but this study suggests otherwise. That small errors can lead to big hallucinations. What do you think of this? And how can InterSystems technology help?

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

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Hi,

We're working on new capabilities to help you build Agents and AI applications faster with InterSystems IRIS. In order to better understand which entry points and development methodologies would help you most, we've created this brief survey: Building AI solutions with InterSystems IRIS.

Filling it in should not take much more than 5 minutes, and your feedback on this exciting topic will help us fine tune our designs and prioritize the right features.

Thanks in advance!
benjamin

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