WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Performance engineering will be riskier than Moore’s Law ever was. Companies may not know the benefits of their efforts until after they’ve invested substantial programmer time. And speed-ups may be sporadic, uneven, and unpredictable. But as we reach the physical limits of microprocessors, focusing on software performance engineering seems like the best option for most programmers to get more out of their computers.

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it... Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. We built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build.

Learn about the Spotify model and how it helped Spotify scale agile by emphasizing the importance of culture and network.

The Technology Radar is an opinionated guide to technology frontiers. Read the latest here.

The cybersecurity skills gap has been plaguing enterprises for years—but despite garnering much discussion and media coverage, little progress is being made.

State of Cybersecurity 2020 looks at questions such as:

• How long does it take to fill a cybersecurity role with a qualified candidate?
• What percentage of cybersecurity candidates are qualified for the role?
• Is retention improving or worsening?
• Which cybersecurity skills are in the highest demand?
• Are HR teams informed partners in the search for qualified cybersecurity candidates?
• Are cybersecurity teams becoming more gender-balanced, and are diversity programs doing enough to help?
• What can companies do to staff up more quickly and find better-qualified candidates?

Developers own the whole process. There are no release managers, sign offs, or windows that developers are allowed to make releases in.
We have infrastructure to limit the blast radius of bad changes
Unfortunately, sometimes things will break, and that’s ok. We have built our infrastructure to limit the blast radius of bad changes. Most importantly, we trust each of our developers to be responsible and own the recovery if their change goes bad.
Developers can fast track a fix using /shipit --emergency
Once a fix has been prepared (either a fix-forward or revert), developers can fast track their fix to the front of the line with a single /shipit --emergency command. To help our developers make decisions quickly, we don’t have multiple recovery protocols, and instead, just have a single emergency feature that takes the quickest path to recovery.

Learn how Scrum@Scale (S@S) scales scrum and focuses on the entire ecosystem of teams in order to transform overall organizational culture.

Want to give your coding chops a public workout? Then prove what you can do with the BBC Micro Bot. Billed as the world’s first “8-bit cloud,” and launched on 11 February, the BBC Micro Bot is a Twitter account that waits for people to tweet at it. Then the bot takes the tweet, runs it through an emulator of the classic 1980s BBC Microcomputer running Basic, and tweets back an animated gif of three seconds of the emulator’s output.

Facebook uses over 20,000 deep features to characterize each account, providing a snapshot of how each profile behaves to make it difficult for attackers to game the system by changing tactics.

For the past decade, ThoughtWorks Technology Radar has been the definitive guide to what's hot and what's not in tech.

Building the infrastructure to manage the lifecycle of machine learning models remains a challenge for most organizations. While we have seen tremendous advancements in machine/deep learning…

Here is an analogy that can help you explain how bad in shapr some code is, and that a refactoring is necessary to make it evolve.

Linus Torvalds transformed technology twice — first with the Linux kernel, which helps power the Internet, and again with Git, the source code management system used by developers worldwide. In a rare interview with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Torvalds discusses with remarkable openness the personality traits that prompted his unique philosophy of work, engineering and life. "I am not a visionary, I'm an engineer," Torvalds says. "I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds ... but I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in."

The next evolution of AWS Single Sign-On enables enterprises that use Azure AD to leverage their existing identity store with AWS Single Sign-On. Additionally, automatic synchronization of user identities, and groups, from Azure AD is also supported.

Curious to know what technologies are used on your competitor’s website?

As soon as the power turns on, hackers can gain an advantage.

you’ll learn about some of the expert roles that are often the hardest to find or are only required in specific situations. This paper details these roles, their responsibilities and the cross-functional processes that are required to successfully hunt for, respond to and prevent threats as part of a world-class security organization.

We launched a new product portfolio as a series of specialized clouds: Acquia Drupal Cloud, Acquia Content Cloud and Acquia Marketing Cloud. Each cloud is composed of a suite of products designed to help customers design, organize and execute solutions tailored to their needs, whether they’re a developer, digital marketer, content creator, IT professional or anyone else involved in shaping the digital ecosystem.

We've been working on isolating the 1,500 services that power Monzo. The sheer size and complexity of our platform made this difficult. But by protecting us against compromised services, it makes Monzo more secure. 

In the Security team at Monzo, one of our goals is to move towards a completely zero trust platform. This means that in theory, we'd be able to run malicious code inside our platform with no risk – the code wouldn't be able to interact with anything dangerous without the security team granting special access.

The idea is that we don't want to trust just anything simply because it's inside our platform. Instead, we want individual services to be trusted based on a short and deliberate list of which other services they're allowed to interact with. This makes an attack substantially more difficult.

This post will discuss the different architectures that have been prominent in previous years and how they’ve influenced the architecture of today. 

SketchAdapt, program-writing artificial intelligence system, learns how to compose short, high-level programs, while letting a second set of algorithms find the right sub-programs to fill in the details.

Common characteristics of microservice architectures that we saw in the field:
- Componentization via Services
- Organized around Business Capabilities
- Products not Projects
- Smart endpoints and dumb pipes
- Decentralized Governance
- Decentralized Data Management
- Infrastructure Automation
- Design for failure
- Evolutionary Design

We are in the midst of an open source renaissance. But how do you turn an open source project into a business? a16z's Peter Levine and Jennifer Li cover the complete go-to-market from community management to enterprise sales.