Month: August 2021

ListenSubscribe COVID-19 has created massive changes to the way we work, not only bringing the remote work experience to the masses but creating an opportunity to redesign offices to suit flex workers. In this week’s podcast episode, Greg Nokes welcomes Lisa Marshall, Senior Vice President of Technology, People, Innovation & Learning at Salesforce. Marshall shares… Continue reading 116. Success From Anywhere

Organizations embrace micro-services and event-driven APIs in their technology platforms to try to achieve the promise of greater agility, increased innovation, and more autonomy for their development teams. However, after the initial success, it is not unusual for organizations to face difficulties when they try to scale their distributed platforms. At this point, with the… Continue reading API Federation: growing scalable API landscapes

Peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) hardware continues to push the boundaries of computing thanks to advances in transfer speeds, the number of available lanes for simultaneous data delivery, and a comparatively small footprint on motherboards. Today, PCIe connectivity-based hardware delivers faster data transfers and is one of the de facto methods to connect components to… Continue reading How Facebook deals with PCIe faults to keep our data centers running reliably

Sales representatives deal with hundreds of emails everyday. To help them prioritize, Salesforce offers critical insights on emails received. These insights are either generated by our deep learning models or defined by the customer by matching keywords using regex expressions. Insights are generated in real time in our microservice architecture, which is built using Kafka… Continue reading Real-time Einstein Insights Using Kafka Streams

What the research is:  A first-of-its-kind study detailing our backbone management strategy to ensure high service performance throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic moved most social interactions online and caused an unprecedented stress test on our global network infrastructure with tens of data center regions. At this scale, failures such as fiber cuts, router misconfigurations,… Continue reading Risk-driven backbone management during COVID-19 and beyond

ZippyDB is the largest strongly consistent, geographically distributed key-value store at Facebook. Since we first deployed ZippyDB in 2012, this key-value store has expanded rapidly, and today, ZippyDB serves a number of use cases, ranging from metadata for a distributed filesystem, counting events for both internal and external purposes, to product data that’s used for… Continue reading How we built a general purpose key value store for Facebook with ZippyDB

We are releasing Winterfell, our implementation of a STARK prover/verifier to Crates.io  Winterfell is an easy to use open source implementation of STARKs for security and privacy applications. One potential application for Winterfell’s zero-knowledge proofs is blockchain privacy and scalability.  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Clarke’s Third Law What if the average… Continue reading Open sourcing Winterfell: A STARK prover and verifier

ListenSubscribe In this episode, Ian, Laura, and Wesley talk about the importance of communication skills, specifically writing, for people in technical roles. Ian calls writing the single most important meta skill you can have. And the good news is that you can get better at it, with deliberate practice! Ian and Wesley both come from… Continue reading 118. Why Writing Matters for Engineers