We’ve co-authored a paper that forecasts how malicious actors could misuse AI technology, and potential ways we can prevent and mitigate these threats. This paper is the outcome of almost a year of sustained work with our colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Center for a New American Security, the…
20 Feb 2018
Build an ETL job service by fetching data from a public API endpoint and dumping it into an AWS Redshift database.
If ‘normal’ were a circle, diversity would be that which is beyond it. The challenge of ensuring a truly diverse workforce, therefore, is to reach out further and deeper beyond the evolving circle of ‘normal’ and seek out the ‘minorities in diversity.’ This entails challenging the working definition of diversity; questioning whether the boxes we tick on recruitment forms (gender,…
19 Feb 2018
Exactly on this day, one year ago, I came back from a one month long trip to Taiwan, went straight to work from the airport and immediately moved into a new apartment after work. Since then I have cycled to work nearly every day. Fullscreen (map made with umap, routes made with GraphHopper) Alternatives and motivation Previously I lived in…
When you work with JAXB to generate Java code from XSD (or *ghasp* WSDL) files, you’re going to use the XJC tool, which is shipped with the JDK (at least until JDK 9 – with Jigsaw, it will soon be externalised into its own external dependency). Adding plugins to XJC when running it via Maven … Continue reading How to…
The benefits of Direct Debit are even greater when more customers are using it. Find out how you can maximise your Direct Debit uptake.
Every time I start a tutorial I find myself in a limbo wondering which app should I build. A to-do app? Not again!
18 Feb 2018
We spoke to agency owners and small business leaders about their top tips for success in 2018 and asked them what they wish they’d known when they were starting out. This is what they said.
17 Feb 2018
In Fall 2016 I was invited to come to Miami as part of a team that independently validated some alleged flaws in implantable cardiac devices manufactured by St. Jude Medical (now part of Abbott Labs). These flaws were discovered by a company called MedSec. The story got a lot of traction in the press at … Continue reading A few…
16 Feb 2018
On Tuesday, the SF Board of Supervisors moved to study whether a Mission laundromat is a historic resource, delaying 75 units of housing by 5 months. We wanted to look back at famous laundromats of history. Garden of Eden, 6000 BC Eating the forbidden fruit without any napkins makes quite a mess. Adam and Eve […]
Interested in learning OCaml? In the NYC area? Then this might be for you!
Not long ago, the CTO of a large organization said to us, “Innovation is not our problem. We have plenty of innovative, smart people in every department and at every level. That’s our problem. They’re disconnected. Some are off doing their own thing. Others are frustrated, and I’m concerned we may to lose them. We’re sitting on all of this…
15 Feb 2018
We’ve designed a method that encourages AIs to teach each other with examples that also make sense to humans. Our approach automatically selects the most informative examples to teach a concept—for instance, the best images to describe the concept of dogs—and experimentally we found our approach to be effective at teaching both AIs
UPDATE(2018-06-17): There are is a later blog post with newer benchmarks! One of my super nerdy interests include approximate algorithms for nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces. The problem is simple. You have say 1M points in some high-dimensional space. Now given a query point, can you find the nearest points out of the 1M set? Doing this fast turns out…
People often think of formal methods and theorem provers as forbidding tools, cool in theory but with a steep learning curve that makes them hard to use in real life. In this post, we’re going to describe a case we ran into recently where we were able to leverage theorem proving technology, Z3 in particular, to validate some real world…
14 Feb 2018
Deploy a crypto with crowd sale capability to the Ethereum network. Web3.js development + end-to-end testing is demonstrated with Truffle Suite.
Deploy a crypto with crowd sale capability to the Ethereum network. Web3.js development + end-to-end testing is demonstrated with Truffle Suite.
Write integration tests for a Solidity smart contract using JavaScript. A tutorial for deploying Smart contracts and creating a new Ethereum wallet.
Write integration tests for a Solidity smart contract using JavaScript. A tutorial for deploying Smart contracts and creating a new Ethereum wallet.
Build a cryptocurrency using the Ethereum Token Standard. A step-by-step guide for a Solidity smart contract with Truffle and OpenZeppelin.
Build a cryptocurrency using the Ethereum Token Standard. A step-by-step guide for a Solidity smart contract with Truffle and OpenZeppelin.
The post Event sourcing vs CRUD appeared first on RisingStack Engineering.
The business costs that go under the radar - and could threaten your profitability as you scale.
Learn how to create GraphQL endpoints using the Serverless Framework, Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS and a REST backend.
13 Feb 2018
We asked some of the most successful B2B SaaS entrepreneurs about how they scale, improve customer experiences and optimise every touch point. This is what they said.
Visual Studio Code: Features, Customizations and Extensions to Make You More Productive
Small ImprovementsMicrosoft's Visual Studio Code is a powerful code editor — let's look at lesser-known features, customizations and extensions that make you more productive!
As originally seen in ‘The rise of the digital city and why it’s so important’ published by ITProPortal on 6 November 2017. Digital cities will help facilitate data between parties to improve citizens lives.
12 Feb 2018
Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a cloud computing model that can be thought of as the plug-and-play of web-based application development.
Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a cloud computing model that can be thought of as the plug-and-play of web-based application development.
A breakdown of the top serverless security risks, and steps you can take to secure your serverless applications.
10 Feb 2018
Vshadow: Abusing the Volume Shadow Service for Evasion, Persistence, and Active Directory Database Extraction
Bohops[Source: blog.microsoft.com] What is Vshadow? Vshadow (vshadow.exe) is a command line utility for managing volume shadow copies. This tool is included within the Windows SDK and is signed by Microsoft (more on this later). Vshadow has a lot of functionality, including the ability to execute scripts and invoke commands in support of volume shadow snapshot […]
9 Feb 2018
How to display maps in the language of visitor: an example.
The Serverless team is distributed all over the world. Here's how we manage communication strategies and work together (remotely).
When I talk to people about how to protect themselves against security problems, often the first feeling they express is guilt or shame. That’s what I heard from my friend Lindsay the other day when I exclaimed to my old high-school crew about Meltdown and Spectre.
8 Feb 2018
With Functions, you can efficiently save all published JSON messages to your database.
With Functions, you can efficiently save all published JSON messages to your database.
7 Feb 2018
The post How N26 builds its modern banking software with JavaScript & Microservices. appeared first on RisingStack Engineering.
539 devs who use Node.js in production told us why they love using it, what are they using it for, and what are the greatest problems they face with it. The post Why Developers Love Node.js & what’s their main issue with it? Survey Results. appeared first on RisingStack Engineering.
We’ve built a system for automatically figuring out which object is meant by a word by having a neural network decide if the word belongs to each of about 100 automatically-discovered “types” (non-exclusive categories).
6 Feb 2018
At Clever, one of our tenets is “Always a Student”, and in that spirit of learning we wanted to share the changes we made to fix memory allocation issues in AWS Elastic Container Service related to swappiness. Swappiness is a Linux Kernel setting that specifies how likely it is for a page in memory to be […] The post Swappiness…
Sampling is a Bazaarvoice product that allows consumers to join communities and claim a limited amount of free products. In return consumers provide honest & authentic product reviews for the products they sample. Products are released to consumers for reviews at the same time. This causes a rush to claim these products. This is an […]
Need a serverless way to give your app updated data in real-time? Try this solution with Websockets and Lambda.
5 Feb 2018
A really geeky way to start a Monday morning is to be nerd-sniped by the cool Fermat’s Library twitter account… … reading up on the cool Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula thinking “Can This be Done in SQL?™” As we all know from a previous article, SQL is turing complete, so the answer must be yes. And … Continue reading Calculating Tupper’s…
Making it easier to manage serverless applications from within the Atom editor
In Part One, we shared what we learned about chatbots in general and our users, based on our experience of asking users to interact with a chatbot that was still part (or largely) human. Now, we’re excited to pass on a few specific tips and tricks for others who are designing (or thinking about designing) bots themselves.
4 Feb 2018
It would be ridiculous to plan a bus trip up the side of a steep and winding mountain road, planning every detail of the trip in advance, and then demand that the driver checks with you for any deviations along the way. Every break or sharp turn to avoid plunging off a cliff would become a point needing your input.…
2 Feb 2018
This time we joined forces with our friends from IT Girls. They are promoting tech among women, and helping them start a career in it. Together, we are organizing a series of meetups and workshops about React. Last night, my colleague Nemanja and myself had a pleasure to give the first talk in the series. We are planning to have…
1 Feb 2018
Our newest team member, Charmmie, entered the tech industry from a career in high fashion. Here's her story.
Everyone’s heard of the power of big data. But not every business is going to be transformed simply by being able to analyze more data. Take retail: here, the challenges aren’t around lacking data; rather, it’s about being able to access the right information at the right time that’s business critical. In this article, I’ll explore how Thoughtworks helped a…
Global In-House centers (GICs) are near-shore or offshore based wholly owned subsidiaries of big, old-guard, businesses, typically headquartered in the US and Europe (or the global north). They typically support knowledge-intensive processes, back office, and IT operations. The GIC phenomenon began on the basis of labor arbitrage and grew on the back of talent quality and availability, primarily in India…
31 Jan 2018
We’re releasing a new batch of seven unsolved problems which have come up in the course of our research at OpenAI.
Introduction Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) “is a set of development tools available in the form of a Visual Studio add-in (project templates) and a runtime that allows Microsoft Office 2003 and later versions of Office applications to host the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR) to expose their functionality via .NET” (Wikipedia). For […]
The MapTiler Team won the Copernicus Masters award granted by the European Space Agency.
So testing, right? We should do it. The thing is, testing is hard, and good testing is reaaaaaaally hard, and tbh I’m pretty bad at testing. So I end up not testing my apps, and then I feel guilty about it, but I’ll stop you now: you can’t run guilt on Travis. If this sounds familiar, then this blog post…
30 Jan 2018
We recently reached the size of 14 people in Development, and our goal is to get to 16 developers/designers in the next couple of months. An interesting question we faced and discussed in this context is that of “optimal team size”. In the past year we’ve typically worked in teams of three or four, but […]
Build a multi-region, multi-master application with Serverless and DynamoDB Global Tables
ServerlessWe're going to create a multi-region, multi-master, geo-routed application—all in about 30 minutes.
29 Jan 2018
React Router switched to component based routing starting with the version 4. Redirects are now done by rendering a Redirect component, like this:Please note that you can use included withRouter decorator but it can cause update blocking and introduce side effects. This is small subset of it. <Redirect to='/redirect-url-here' /> What I usually do is to keep redirectTo property in…
28 Jan 2018
I’m interrupting the regular programming for a quick announcement: we’re looking for data engineers at Better. You would be the first one to join and would work a lot directly with me. Some fun things you could work on (these are all projects I’m working on right now): Building a forecasting model using MCMC to predict volume the next few…
The ideas of agile are great. It’s the way it has been codified into rituals and certifications and rolled out mindlessly that misses the point. When people talk about Lean, the conversation often ends at process optimization, waste, and quality, and misses so much of what the Lean mindset offers. Design Thinking is held high as the new magic trick…
26 Jan 2018
Need to quickly catch up on this past quarter's announcements? Here are the top three topics to tune in on: The Platform API for Partners provides many official endpoints that allow you to introspect security settings, discover other customer instances of the same add-on, and much more. With the Platform API, add-ons have an OAuth […] The post FY18 Q4…
Apple introduced automated UI testing in Xcode 7. This was a great addition for developers because this native support promised, among other things, an improvement in the flakiness notoriously associated with automation tests. As many of us developers have experienced, tests can sometimes fail even when there has been no modification to the test or underlying feature code.
25 Jan 2018
This is the final part of a three-part series of articles exploring well-factored service architecture. Read Part One to know more about benefits of well-factored services.
24 Jan 2018
The Platform API for Partners provides many official endpoints that the App Info API doesn’t support. These endpoints let you introspect security settings, discover other customer instances of the same add-on, and much more. Platform API for Partners endpoints are also more consistent and “better traveled.” Heroku uses these endpoints internally, and customers also use […] The post Updated Platform…
Our foray into mixing design thinking with agile development—what worked, and what didn't.
SoundCloud consists of hundreds of millions of tracks, people, albums, and playlists, and navigating this vast collection of music and personalities poses a large challenge, particularly with so many covers, remixes, and original works all in one place.
23 Jan 2018
The following is the story of how Randall Degges created a simple API to solve the common problem of external IP address lookup and how he scaled it from zero to over 10 thousand requests per second (30B/month!) using Node.js and Go on Heroku. Several years ago I created a free web service, ipify. It […] The post Scaling ipify…
8 Tips & Tricks to build better React apps in 2018. Follow these best practices to become a better coder. Which one did you miss so far? The post 8 Tips to Build Awesome React.js Apps in 2018 appeared first on RisingStack Engineering.
(Image Source: blogs.technet.microsoft.com) Introduction A few weeks ago, I wrote about Executing Commands and Bypassing AppLocker with PowerShell Diagnostic Scripts. Overall, it was a viable technique that allowed for the loading of .NET/C# assemblies. However, PowerShell Constraint Language Mode proved to be a viable mechanism for defeating this technique if strictly enforced by UMCI/system policies […]
Short one today. I'm continuing to release small libraries. So let me present react-ratio, another small React component. You probably guessed what it does - creates element with the given aspect ratio. Check the demo or grab the source code
22 Jan 2018
Last week, I passed my one year anniversary as head of the US Digital Service (USDS). So when Mr. Money Mustache asked for an interview, I was delighted to talk about some of the work that the USDS does. If you aren’t familiar with Mr. Money Mustache, he writes about a philosophy of badassity in […]
We’re excited to announce that we comply with the soon-to-be-enforced European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
We’re excited to announce that we comply with the soon-to-be-enforced European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Take your Serverless development to the next level. Check out our most popular community plugins.
I just released tiny library called has-tabbed. Again, it is a small piece of code I regularly copy from project to project. I always considered it too insignificant for releasing it as a standalone package. When user presses tab key, it adds CSS classBy default --tabbed is used, but it accepts custom class as parameter. to html element. Then, if…
21 Jan 2018
I have recently received a job offer to work on a blockchain implementation. While the offer was very generous, I had to turn it down. In this post I want to collect the thoughts that went into my decision process leading to this conclusion. Introduction I have not touched blockchain technology much before, other than reading the original Bitcoin paper…
We’re living in a world dominated by connected devices and one where consumers are not afraid to use them and more importantly can afford them. This new world and new way of thinking and interacting is putting extra pressure on brands to deliver superior, quicker and more seamless personalised customer experiences. Traditional ways of marketing and working simply won’t cut…
19 Jan 2018
This is the first part of a two-part series. You can read the second part here.
18 Jan 2018
Today, we’re excited to announce a major update to Heroku Postgres with a new lineup of production plans. These plans are the first component of Heroku Postgres PGX, the next generation of our managed Postgres solution. PGX Plans introduce larger database sizes, more generous resource allocations, and a broader set of options to suit your […] The post Heroku Postgres…
AWS Lambda Golang support is one of the most exciting announcements of 2018. Here's a quick template for using Go with the Serverless Framework!
Back in 2016, the SoundCloud People Team collaborated with engineering management in an effort to bring more junior engineers into the…
Instead of thinking of digital cities as the final destination, leaders should think of how can they transform their cities into citizen-centric organisations. Digital cities are like live organisms. Those that will enable different parties to work together on top of a shared, secured infrastructure, will realise greater innovation that will hopefully create better, healthier lives, for generations to come.
17 Jan 2018
Turns out having a toddler isn’t super compatible with reading. I used to read ~100 books/year as a teenager, but it has slowly deteriorated to maybe 20-30 books, at most. And I don’t even finish all of them because life is too short! Some books are just not that interesting. So what were some of the books worth mentioning? Economics…
16 Jan 2018
Last week Apple made an announcement describing changes to the iCloud service for users residing in mainland China. Beginning on February 28th, all users who have specified China as their country/region will have their iCloud data transferred to the GCBD cloud services operator in Guizhou, China. Chinese news sources optimistically describe the move as a way to … Continue reading…
PubNub has taken all our expanded PubNub Data Stream Network features and have made them available those with MQTT devices.
PubNub has taken all our expanded PubNub Data Stream Network features and have made them available those with MQTT devices.
What does a distro provide? The most popular docker base container image is either busybox, or scratch. This is driven by a movement that is equal parts puritanical and pragmatic. The puritan asks “Why do I need to run init(1) just to run my process?” The pragmatist asks “Why do I need a 700 meg […]
Get the basics on Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) and how to avoid problems with your Serverless web APIs on Lambda.
15 Jan 2018
Intro # So it’s that time of year again when my girlfriend and I decided we wanted to move, after a few months of searching we found a very cosy (and a not so cosy rent price to go with it) flat in Zone 1/2, London. Without boring you with a life story, the aim of this move was to…