ADP has been around for more than 70 years, fulfilling payroll and other human resources services. Payroll processing is a complex business, involving the movement of money in accordance with regulatory and legal strictures.  From an engineering point of view, ADP has decades of software behind it, and a bright future of a platform company

Software companies can be funded in a variety of ways: venture capital, self-funding, and debt, among others. In order to receive financing, a company is evaluated on its ability to generate future cash flows. After all, a valuation is a number that summarizes the present value of future cash flows. Determining that valuation number is

GitHub has been a social network for developers for many years. Most social networks are centered around mobile applications, but GitHub sits squarely in a developer’s browser-based desktop workflow. As a result, the design of a mobile app for GitHub is less straightforward. GitHub did acquire a popular mobile client called GitHawk, which was developed

A service mesh provides routing, load balancing, policy management, and other features to a set of services that need to communicate with each other. The mesh can simplify operations across these different services by providing an interface to configure them.  There are lots of different vendors who offer service mesh technology: AWS has AppMesh, Google

Netflix runs all of its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. This includes business logic, data infrastructure, and machine learning. By tightly coupling itself to AWS, Netflix has been able to move faster and have strong defaults about engineering decisions. And today, AWS has such an expanse of services that it can be used as a

WordPress has been a dominant force in the world of online publishing for many years because of how battle-tested it is. WordPress is the definitive leader in CMS technology. But there have always been alternatives.  Drupal, Ghost, and other open source CMSes. More recently, there has been an emergence of the headless CMS, such as

M3 is a scalable metrics database originally built to host Uber’s rapidly growing data storage from Prometheus. When Rob Skillington was at Uber, he helped design, implement, and deploy M3. Since leaving Uber, he has co-founded a company around a hosted version of M3 called Chronosphere. If you have access to a scalable metrics database,

Developing machine learning models is not easy. From the perspective of the machine learning researcher, there is the iterative process of tuning hyperparameters and selecting relevant features. From the perspective of the operations engineer, there is a handoff from development to production, and the management of GPU clusters to parallelize model training. In the last

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 the author of The Good Parts of AWS. An excerpt from

The modern release workflow involves multiple stakeholders: engineers, management, designers, and product managers. It is a collaborative process that is often held together with brittle workflows. A developer deploys a new build to an ad hoc staging environment and pastes a link to that environment in Slack. Other stakeholders click on that link, then send