Software Engineer Insights
Cloud news + analysis + trends. App building. Provisioning. Runtime. Data Analytics. Business Applications.
LLMs vs reinforcement learning in coding
LLMs lack the accuracy and deterministic behavior of reinforcement learning while offering more generality, which makes them weak at problem solving in coding.
Why frontend expertise is “more than just coding”
For Employers: hire front-end developers at the outset or hire performance and accessibility consultants later to fix issues, which can be harder and more expensive down the line.
Validating updates at scale with replay traffic testing at Netflix
To validate updates made to its complex microservices architecture, Netflix leverages a technique called replay traffic testing before migrating production traffic to the updated service
Datadog State of Application Security Report: top findings
Service risk grows by the number of 3rd party dependencies. Java, Node.js, and python services with 300+ 3rd party dependencies have at least one high or critical CVSS severity vulnerability
Fleet management at Spotify with 7500 changes per week
Spotify moved from a squad-first, to a fleet-first mindset – a way of applying changes to an entire fleet of components at once
How Lyft’s ML platform speeds ML development
Despite a 286% increase in total runs (execution of a data/ML task), and 424% increase in production runs, Lyft’s AWS-based ML platform LyftLearn cost 6% less in 2022 than in 2021
Deep dive into data streaming landscape of 2023
Emerges as a software category by itself, with segmentation based on whether the data streaming product uses Apache Kafka or not, and degree of compatibility with it
A framework to evaluate generative AI projects
A risk-demand framework to evaluate suitability for generative AI approaches, two “buckets” of new generative AI features in Vertex AI.
Building a modern data strategy: Google whitepaper
How LinkedIn leveraged Apache Beam; how Spotify does product decisioning with sequential testing. Also updates for Clean Rooms, Amazon EMR, Digital Sovereignty Explorer
Migration from Lambda to Kubernetes, and more
Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, AWS Data Exchange, AWS Database Migration Service, Azure VMWare updates, Amazon Neptune, Vertex AI generative AI tools
Next in cloud-native: “Cloud-bound” applications
Flexera cloud report 2023, Florence Foundation model, CNCF whitepaper on edge native principles, Azure WAF guided investigation
NPW Insights (Free): Week 4/4 for Software Engineer
AlloyDB goes global. Amazon Neptune, Kinesis and Timestream updates. SageMaker new feature. Azure VMWare Solution for government. Google Cloud Threat Detection and Response Team
NPW Insights (Free): Week 3/4 for Software Engineer
Future of Wasm, Google-IDC data trends report, AWS Glue Crawler integration with Lake Formation, WAF for App Runner. Document AI Workbench updates. CloudNativeSecurityCon 2023 highlights
NPW Insights (Free): Week 2/4 for Software Engineer
Confidential GKE Nodes on C2D VMs, new metrics in App Runner, Serverless for Hyperscale in Azure SQL
NPW V2.0 for Software Engineer
Updates in Dataplex, AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Run, Azure Functions, Azure Application Gateway, Pub/Sub Lite