Issue #396

10 March 2023


Issue #396
pointer.io


Friday 10th March's issue is presented by Teleport

[New Chapters] O'Reilly eBook — Identity-Native Infrastructure Access


Download your copy and learn how to prevent breaches by eliminating secrets, including the two new Secure Connectivity and Authentication chapters.

Recognition And Rewards At Work

- Lara Hogan

#Leadership #Management


“What we recognize is what we reward,” and we often reinforce behaviors accidentally e.g. when ask a team to demo an upcoming release, add a Slack emoji high-five response to a comment, we are recognizing something we like about someones behavior and signaling to those around us that we want to see more of that behavior. Lara provides us with an exercise to establish how we are recognizing and rewarding our teams and reports.

Inside Uber’s Move To The Cloud: Part 1

- Gergely Orosz

#Leadership #Management #Cloud


Gergely covers: (1) The history of Uber’s data centers. (2) Challenges of operating your own data centers - hard drives, ODM woes, and the automation of data center maintenance. (3) Incentives and pull factors from Covid-19, the Postmates acquisition, and CapEx and OpEx costs. (4) Cloud basics. A primer on data centers, regions, and availability zones. What these mean for public Cloud providers and businesses like Uber.

[New Chapters] O'Reilly eBook — Identity-Native Infrastructure Access

#BookRecommendation


Download your copy and learn how to prevent breaches by eliminating secrets, including the two new Secure Connectivity and Authentication chapters.


Promoted by Teleport

How Discord Stores Trillions Of Messages

- Bo Ingram

#Scale #Architecture #Migration


“Our Cassandra cluster exhibited serious performance issues that required increasing amounts of effort to just maintain, not improve.” Bo discusses the troubles with Cassandra and the migration to ScyllaDB, a Cassandra-compatible database written in C++.


“Always remember, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.”


― Donald Knuth


Project Management For Software Engineers

- Kevin Sookocheff

#Management


Kevin discusses the 5 phases of managing an engineering project, according to Project Management Institute: (1) Initiation: Identifying and interviewing stakeholders, developing scope statement and getting approval. (2) Planning: Creating comms, project and risk management plan. (3) Execution: Schedule accountability check-ins, adjust to feedback from delivering stepping stones. (4) Monitoring and Control: Regular status reports. (5) Closure: Confirm project is done, document lessons learned, celebrate success.


Hired’s 2023 State Of Software Engineers

#Hiring #CareerAdvice #Salary


(1) Engineers remain optimistic about the future. (2) Layoffs from May to December 2022 had the greatest impact on salaries and interview interest for junior and non-traditional engineers. (3) Demand for remote engineering talent remains high. Remote roles command higher salaries than local roles, especially in smaller markets. (4) The most in-demand coding skills and software engineering roles shifted.

Scaling Media Machine Learning At Netflix

#ML #Architecture


Netlfix’s goal in building ML infrastructure is to reduce the time from ideation to productization for the company. The team built infrastructure to (1) Access and process media data (e.g. video, image, audio, and text) (2) Training large-scale models efficiently. (3) Productize models in a self-serve fashion. (4) Store and serve model outputs for consumption.

Some Possible Reasons For 8-Bit Byte

- Julia Evans

#DeepDive


Julia explores the question: why does the x86 architecture use 8-bit bytes? Why not some other size? She evaluates a couple of options: (1) It’s a historical accident, another size - like 4 or 6 or 16 bits - would work just as well. (2) 8 bits is objectively the Best Option for some reason, even if history had played out differently we would still use 8-bit bytes. (3) Mix of 1 & 2.


Notable GitHub Repos

  • UpTrain: An OS framework to observe ML applications.

  • ResearchGPT: Assistant that allows you to have a conversation with a research paper.

  • MRSK: Upload a photo of your room to generate your dream room with AI.

  • LLaMA: Inference code for LLaMA models.


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