Podcast listeners usually find out about a new podcast in one of two ways: either a friend recommends that podcast or the Apple podcast charts rank that new podcast highly. The Apple podcast charts are created using an algorithm that is not public. Many people believe that the chart ranking of a podcast is based
Many devices in our world are not “smart.” Air conditioners, electric guitars, power outlets, and factory conveyor belts, just to name a few. There are exciting software applications that we could build around these devices, but we need to be able to interface with them programmatically. We need to be able to know the state
Edge computing refers to computation involving drones, connected cars, smart factories, or IoT sensors. Any software deployment that is not a large centralized server installation could qualify as an edge device–even a smartphone. Today, much of our heavy computation takes place in the cloud–a set of remote data centers some distance away from our client
React Native allows developers to build native applications for iOS and Android using components written in the React JavaScript framework. These ReactJS components render to native application code by going over a JavaScript bridge, a message bus that communicates between JavaScript code and native iOS or Android runtimes. For most mobile application use cases, React
In the early days of YouTube, there were scalability problems with the MySQL database that hosted the data model for all of YouTube’s videos. The state of the art solution to scaling MySQL at the time was known as “application-level sharding.” To scale a database using application-level sharding, you break up the database into shards–disjoint
Zoox is a full-stack self-driving car company. Zoox engineers work on everything a self-driving car company needs, from the physical car itself to the algorithms running on the car to the ride hailing system which the company plans to use to drive around riders. Since starting in 2014, Zoox has grown to over 500 employees.
DoorDash is a food delivery company where users find restaurants to order from. When a user opens the DoorDash app, the user can search for types of food or specific restaurants from the search bar or they can scroll through the feed section and look at recommendations that the app gives them within their local
The nature of software projects is changing. Projects are using a wider variety of cloud providers and SaaS tools. Projects are being broken up into more git repositories, and the code in those repositories are being deployed into small microservices. With the increased number of tools, repositories, and deployment targets, it can become difficult to
A Kubernetes cluster presents multiple potential attack surfaces: the cluster itself, a node running on the cluster, a pod running in the node, a container running in a pod. If you are managing your own Kubernetes cluster, you need to be aware of the security settings on your etcd, your API server, and your container