News

The traits of serverless architecture

Whenever new technologies emerge, the first priority for a technologist is to understand the implication of adopting it. Serverless architecture is a case in point. Unfortunately, much of the current literature around serverless architecture focuses solely on its benefits.

Supercharging Data Delivery: The New League Patcher

For the past 8 years, League has been using a patching system called RADS (Riot Application Distribution System) to deliver updates. RADS is a custom patching solution based on binary deltas that we built with League in mind. While RADS has served us well, we felt we had an opportunity to improve some key areas of the patching experience.

EGG: A toolkit for language emergence simulations with neural networks

Announcing HashiCorp Vault 1.2

We are excited to announce the public availability of HashiCorp Vault 1.2. Vault is a tool to provide secrets management, data encryption, and identity management for any infrastructure and application. Vault 1.2 is focused on supporting new architectures for automated credential and cryptographic key management at a global, highly-distributed scale.

Introducing Uber Poet, an Open Source Mock App Generator for Determining Faster Swift Builds

Mapping roads through deep learning and weakly supervised training

Creating accurate maps today is a painstaking, time-consuming manual process, even with access to satellite imagery and mapping software. Many regions — particularly in the developing world — remain largely unmapped. To help close this gap, Facebook AI researchers and engineers have developed a new method that uses deep learning and weakly supervised training to predict road networks from commercially available high-resolution satellite imagery.

Supporting Dynamic Type at Airbnb

Since iOS 7, Dynamic Type has allowed users to choose a prefered font size for their phone. At Airbnb, we try to build an app that our entire community can use — since Dynamic Type is a critical accessibility feature, we knew supporting it would make more people able to effectively use our app, some of them probably for the first time. To validate the importance of this feature, we examined the data and saw as much as 30% of people using our app had a preferred font size that was not the default.

A Half Century Ago, Better Transistors and Switching Regulators Revolutionized the Design of Computer Power Supplies

Troubleshooting with Kiali

Recently I came across this excellent post from Cindy Sridharan, which throws a bunch of good ideas about how to improve the troubleshooting experience with microservices. I think that Kiali already has a good approach in that regard, which doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement. Kiali is meant to be the Istio console.

Unplugging From Digital Controls to Safeguard Power Grids

Late last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to mandate federal research on a radically ‘retro’approach to protect power grids from cyber attack: unplugging or otherwise isolating the most criticalequipment from grid operators’ digital control systems. Angus King, an independent senator from Maine whose identical bill passedthe Senate last month, says such a managed retreat from networked controls may berequired to thwart the grid’s most sophisticated online adversaries. Grid cyber experts say the Securing Energy Infrastructure Act moving through Congress isa particular testament toMichael Assante, a gifted and passionate cybersecurity expert whodied earlier this monthfrom leukaemia at the age of 48.