Code as a Service
Supposedly the KIM-1 is 50 years old. Nobody seems to know the exact date it first shipped, but January 1976 is the consensus so today seems as good a day as any.What s a KIM-1 I hear some of you ask? Well history is strange stuff, written by the victors, and retrospectively, but it has become [ ]
What if I were to tell you that I had discovered a way to run software projects that s efficient, effective, reliable, even pleasant? Please continue… , I hope you say. Up front I ll let you know this isn t a new discovery. In fact it s a story that begins a long time ago in an office far, [ ]
Online education coding platforms such as CodeAcademy have existed for years but I ve always found them to provide a rather artificial sandboxed environment that doesn t easily translate to real world coding. Meanwhile a new category of sites that allow running code snippets in a browser environment have appeared. I m thinking here of Rust Playground, JS [ ]
Through a post on Hacker News, and via its cited article, I found myself transported back to the days when we wrote locking primitive implementations, tussling with the challenges of porting across many CPU architectures and operating systems. I worked on code like this in BerkeleyDB and also Netscape s NSPR library, long long ago. Somehow [ ]
I noticed this talk by my former colleague (at Netscape and AOL) Jim Roskind, who now works at Amazon.com. He gives a great introduction to the phenomenon of congestion collapse in complex queueing systems. His examples include familiar scenarios such as busy highways, and phone call routing. Then he proceeds to show how the same [ ]
Most of the time, adding a library or package as a dependency to a JavaScript project using yarn (or its ancestor npm) is as simple as typing yarn add the-pkg-i-want to get the latest version. But this article is not about that. This article is for when things aren t so simple. To really understand exactly what happens during package resolution, [ ]
Big news for those of us who like to go off-piste with our cloud hosted machines: until now value cloud provider Digital Ocean only allowed machines to be created from their curated set of OS images (although with some trickery and effort you could bypass this restriction). That s changed with today s announcement that they now allow user-supplied images (BYOI?). There is one catch though : images…
I noticed some amazing work published earlier this week by researches from EUROCOM, and to be presented at ACM CCS 2018. They were able to recover encryption keys from an IoT type SoC from noise leaked onto the chip s Bluetooth radio s RF output. This would allow, for example, compromise of otherwise encrypted communications from IoT [ ]
In the early days of an application, deploying new features and functionality are at the top of the list. As the number of users grows and the traffic increases, other issues make their way to the forefront. Whether because of complaints from users, monitoring alerts about overloaded machines, or even a whopping AWS bill, it becomes important to be able to answer the question, "What is my…
In our Cyber Security Consulting Practice we get deep into the authentication weeds helping clients ensure their authentication systems are up to date with the latest best practices. So it was with interest that we saw this recent post by Ian Maddox on that very subject via the Google Cloud Platform Blog. One of the key concepts [ ]