Worth Reading: Coding is hard

8 May 2017

Of course, sitting in front of a computer writing code isn’t going to improve your physical health. JavaScript is great for building apps, not abs. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch, though, to suggest that learning how to program is healthy for your brain. Healthier, at least, than bingeing Iron Fist or…

Worth Reading: Commodifying words

5 May 2017

Words (and by extension their constituent letters) are as free to utter and use as is the air sustaining life. No one owns them. There is no toll fee to be paid to dictionary makers who curate them. There are, however, two carve-outs from this public domain, namely words and letters businesses use as designations…

Worth Reading: Hackers use drones and lasers to bypass air gap

5 May 2017

When hackers infect computers with malware, they generally communicate with their code over the internet via a command-and-control server. But firewalls and intrusion detection systems can block communication going to and from suspicious domains and IP addresses. To bypass these normal detection methods, researchers in Israel have devised a novel way to communicate covertly with…

Worth Reading: Domain names fade

4 May 2017

The internet has changed and evolved ever since it’s ancestors first came to life in the late 1960’s. Some technology fades away and is forgotten; other aspects continue but are overlaid, like geological sediments, so that they are now longer visible but are still present under the surface. The Domain Name System — both the…

Worth Reading: Test Strategy for Samza/Kafka Services

4 May 2017

Over a decade ago, test strategies invested heavily in UI-driven tests. Backend and mid-tier services were tested using automated UI-based tests. While UI-based tests have certain merits, such as testing user flows, they are also time-consuming and fragile. The strong coupling of tests with UI caused several problems … —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

Worth Reading: A trillion edge graph on a single node

3 May 2017

Efficiently and quickly chewing through one trillion edges of a complex graph is no longer in itself a standalone achievement, but doing so on a single node, albeit with some acceleration and ultra-fast storage, is definitely worth noting. There are many paths to processing trillions of edges efficiently and with high performance as demonstrated by…