Cloud platforms are often categorized as providing either Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service. On one side of the spectrum are IaaS giants such as AWS, which provide a broad range of services for building infrastructure. On the other are PaaS providers such as Heroku and Netlify which abstract away the lower-level choices and focus on developer experience.

Yelp.com is a crowdsourced review platform focused on restaurants and local businesses. Originally created as an email-based recommendation service, Yelp re-launched in its modern form in 2005. At the time, its focus on user-created reviews and social interactions was fairly novel, and made it stand out from competitors such as Angie’s List and CitySearch. Since

Studies show that people in “maker” professions such as developers and writers are most productive when they can carve out dedicated time for focused work, without the frequent context-switching that comes with an irregular meeting schedule. Meetings and other non-development work are necessary parts of the job, but a team will be much more productive

A “co-location” center is a data center that leases out networking and compute infrastructure to retail clients. Co-location centers host clients with a wide variety of infrastructure strategies, from small retail customers, to medium-size teams running hybrid cloud models, to large corporate clients who prefer not to incur the capital cost of building their own

Prediction Markets provide an exchange for trading based on the outcome of events. Most prediction markets are centralized- they operate like a casino, where betting takes place under the supervision of one central governing organization. This makes the market less efficient than it otherwise might be: the central organization is a business, and it makes

In the past several years, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for orchestrating containerized, stateless applications. Tools such as StatefulSets and Persistent Volumes have helped developers build stateful applications on Kubernetes, but this can quickly become difficult to manage as an application scales. Tasks such as machine learning, distributed AI, and big data analytics often

Over the past few years, the conventional wisdom around the value proposition of Big Data has begun to shift. While the prevailing attitude towards Big Data may once have been “bigger is better,” many organizations today recognize that broad-scale data collection comes with its own set of risks. Data privacy is becoming a hotly debated

Serverless computing refers to an architectural pattern where server-side code is run on-demand by cloud providers, who also handle server resource allocation and operations. Of course, there is a server involved on the provider’s side, but administrative functions to manage that server such as capacity planning, configuration, or management of containers are handled behind-the-scenes, allowing

Blockchain technology has a wide variety of potential applications. Fields such as finance, supply chain management, and even voting have seen innovations driven by the development of distributed applications built on blockchains, called DApps. However, developing a DApp on a blockchain often requires low-level knowledge about cryptographic protocols or particular networks. Since no one blockchain

The incredible advances in machine learning research in recent years often take time to propagate out into usage in the field. One reason for this is that such “state-of-the-art” results for machine learning performance rely on the use of handwritten, idiosyncratic optimizations for specific hardware models or operating contexts. When developers are building ML-powered systems