How the most popular venture capital firm extends the CCP’s control through the influence of its Chinese partners. | Continue reading

One of the most painful parts of getting started on a new development team is getting one’s environment set up.  Whether it’s undocumented steps, overly complex setups, or simply the challenges of understanding how the pieces fit together, getting a dev environment up often feels … | Continue reading

Here is the full audiobook for “Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software”. Continue listening to the end to hear my most recent album “Simulation”. | Continue reading

Switching to a new language is always a big step, especially when only one of your team members has prior experience with that language. Early this year, we switched Stream’s primary programming language from Python to Go. This post will explain some of the reasons why we decided … | Continue reading

Newer machine learning tooling is often focused on streamlining the workflows and developer experience. One such tool is BentoML. BentoML is a workflow that allows data scientists and developers to ship models more effectively. Chaoyu Yang is the creator of BentoML and he joins t … | Continue reading

AWS has over 150 different services. Databases, log management, edge computing, and lots of others. Instead of being overwhelmed by all of these products, an engineering team can simplify their workflow by focusing on a small subset of AWS services–the defaults. Daniel Vassalo is … | Continue reading

Kubernetes has become a highly usable platform for deploying and managing distributed systems.  The user experience for Kubernetes is great, but is still not as simple as a full-on serverless implementation–at least, that has been a long-held assumption. Why would you manage your … | Continue reading

For many applications, a transactional MySQL database is the source of truth. To make a MySQL database scale, some developers deploy their database using Vitess, a sharding system built on top of Kubernetes.  Jiten Vaidya and Anthony Yeh work at PlanetScale, a company that focuse … | Continue reading

Machine learning is widely understood by the software community. But it is still hard to build a company around machine learning, because there is not easy access to large, unique data sets. Scale is a platform for training and validating data that is used for machine learning. M … | Continue reading

Photo credit: Elisabeth Fall Ben Horowitz started Loudcloud with Marc Andreessen in 1999. He ran the company for eight years and chronicled his experience in his first book The Hard Thing About Hard Things. In his time running Loudcloud, the dotcom bubble burst, but Loudcloud nee … | Continue reading

Parse was a backend-as-a-service company that started in 2011 with the initial focus of making the cloud easier to use for mobile developers. Parse had several novel engineering challenges. In 2011, it was not easy to build on top of AWS, nor was it easy to build within the young … | Continue reading

A time series database is optimized for the storage of high volumes of sequential data across time. Time series databases are often organized as columnar data stores that can write large volumes of data quickly. These systems can sometimes tolerate data loss, because the data the … | Continue reading

“Internet of Things” is a term used to describe the increasing connectivity and intelligence of physical objects within our lives.  IoT has manifested within enterprises under the term “Industrial IoT,” as wireless connectivity and machine learning have started to improve devices … | Continue reading

Africa is rapidly adopting the same software and hardware technologies that have transformed the western world over the last few decades. But access to computers and technology education is still uneven. Where there is access to computers, smartphone adoption often comes before a … | Continue reading

Growing a software business requires an understanding of engineering, sales, and marketing. As we learn software engineering, we also pick up some knowledge about how a business should operate. We know that there are customers, and that our product needs to be scalable to serve m … | Continue reading

In a cloud infrastructure environment, failures happen regularly. The servers can fail, the network can fail, and software bugs can crash your software unexpectedly. The amount of failures that can occur in cloud infrastructure is one reason why storage is often separated from ap … | Continue reading

Social media has transformed our lives. It has also transformed how wars are fought. P.W. Singer’s new book “Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media” describes the far-reaching impact of social media on the tactics and strategies used by military, business, and everyday citize … | Continue reading

“The best computer science is the kind where the theory is inspired by some practical problem, you develop a better theoretical understanding of what you want to do, and that feeds back into better practice.”Continue reading… | Continue reading

Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes are revolutionizing the way applications are being developed and deployed. With the rise of the microservices architecture and decoupling of infrastructure from application logic from the developer’s point of view, developers are beco … | Continue reading

The major Chinese cloud providers have all adopted Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration system. The biggest publicly sized Kubernetes cluster in the world runs at JD.com, the Chinese e-commerce giant. Just like American tech companies, the Chinese know that open so … | Continue reading

Stream processing and distributed database management are concerns that most enterprises dealing with data analytics and real-time data processing have. Most enterprises today use data to keep an edge over the competition. Managed data platform services make it easier for enterpr … | Continue reading

Engineers who start companies often find themselves building something they have no experience with: a hiring process. Hiring engineers today is not as systematic as building software. We don’t have lots of data that tells us what makes for an effective programming interview ques … | Continue reading

The New York Times is one of the largest and most respected media publications today. The Times must continue to innovate with the articles and content they write and also the digital experiences used to deliver award-winning content to serve their millions of subscribers. Over t … | Continue reading

Gone are the days of the monolithic SQL database application. Startups and enterprise are leveraging distributed datastores spread across the cloud to solve their data problems. The business requires faster velocity and the data requirements are skyrocketing in complexity. Today’ … | Continue reading