Chatbots became widely popular around 2016 with the growth of chat platforms like Slack and voice interfaces such as Amazon Alexa. As chatbots came into use, so did the infrastructure that enabled chatbots. NLP APIs and complete chatbot frameworks came out to make it easier for people to build chatbots. The first suite of chatbot

Serverless computing is a way of designing applications that do not directly address or deploy application code to servers. Serverless applications are composed of stateless functions-as-a-service and stateful data storage systems such as Redis or DynamoDB.  Serverless applications allow for scaling up and down the entire architecture, because each component is naturally scalable. And this

NGINX is a web server that can be used to manage the APIs across an organization. Managing these APIs involves deciding on the routing and load balancing across the servers which host them. If the traffic of a website suddenly spikes, the website needs to spin up new replica servers and update the API gateway

Web development has historically had more work being done on the server than on the client. The observability tooling has reflected this emphasis on the backend. Monitoring tools for log management and backend metrics have existed for decades, helping developers debug their server infrastructure. Today, web frontends have more work to do. Detailed components in

Zoom video chat has become an indispensable part of our lives. In a crowded market of video conferencing apps, Zoom managed to build a product that performs better than the competition, scaling with high quality to hundreds of meeting participants, and millions of concurrent users. Zoom’s rapid growth in user adoption came from its focus

Facebook applications use maps for showing users where to go. These maps can display businesses, roads, and event locations. Understanding the geographical world is also important for performing search queries that take into account a user’s location. For all of these different purposes, Facebook needs up-to-date, reliable mapping data. OpenStreetMap is an open system for

NGINX is a web server that is used as a load balancer, an API gateway, a reverse proxy, and other purposes. Core application servers such as Ruby on Rails are often supported by NGINX, which handles routing the user requests between the different application server instances.  This model of routing and load balancing between different

Shopify is a platform for selling products and building a business. It is a large e-commerce company with hundreds of engineers and several different mobile apps. Shopify’s engineering culture is willing to adopt new technologies aggressively, trying new tools that might provide significant leverage to the organization. React Native is one of those technologies. React

Ceph is a storage system that can be used for provisioning object storage, block storage, and file storage. These storage primitives can be used as the underlying medium for databases, queueing systems, and bucket storage. Ceph is used in circumstances where the developer may not want to use public cloud resources like Amazon S3. As

Data analysts need to collaborate with each other in the same way that software engineers do. They also need a high quality development environment.  These data analysts are not working with programming languages like Java and Python, so they are not using an IDE such as Eclipse. Data analysts predominantly use SQL, and the tooling