Acquisitions are part of the technology industry. A successful corporation will often have an “exit”, either going public or becoming acquired. And with each of these corporations, there is a set of stories that narrate the company from beginning to end.  Acquired is a podcast that tells the stories of companies such as YouTube, Instagram,

Ray is a general purpose distributed computing framework. At a low level, Ray provides fault-tolerant primitives that support applications running across multiple processors. At a higher level, Ray supports scalable reinforcement learning, including the common problem of hyperparameter tuning. In a previous episode, we explored the primitives of Ray as well as Anyscale, the business

Pandas is a Python data analysis library, and an essential tool in data science. Pandas allows users to load large quantities of data into a data structure called a dataframe, over which the user can call mathematical operations. When the data fits entirely into memory this works well, but sometimes there is too much data

A large codebase cannot be searched with naive indexing algorithms. In order to search through a codebase the size of Uber’s it is necessary to build a much more sophisticated indexing system than simple pure text search. Sourcegraph is a system for universal code search. It allows developers to more easily onboard to a new

Users do not use web applications in the way that you might expect. And it is not easy to get the data that is necessary to get a full picture. But a newer API within browsers does make this more possible by capturing DOM mutations.  The change capture of these DOM mutations can be stored

Managing microservices becomes a challenge as the number of services within the organization grows. With that many services comes more interdependencies–downstream and upstream services that may be impacted by an update to your service.  One solution to this problem: a dashboard and newsfeed system that lets you see into the health and changes across your

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