November, 2016

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Meet the Teams Competing for the Alexa Prize

All Things Distributed

On September 29, 2016, Amazon announced the Alexa Prize , a $2.5 million university competition to advance conversational AI through voice. We received applications from leading universities across 22 countries. Each application was carefully reviewed by senior Amazon personnel against a rigorous set of criteria covering scientific contribution, technical merit, novelty, and ability to execute.

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Dockerizing MySQL at Uber Engineering

Uber Engineering

Uber Engineering’s Schemaless storage system powers some of the biggest services at Uber, such as Mezzanine. Schemaless is a scalable and highly available datastore on top of MySQL ¹ clusters. Managing these clusters was fairly easy when we had … The post Dockerizing MySQL at Uber Engineering appeared first on Uber Engineering Blog.

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TPDP Episode #11: Continuous Integration And Deployment For The Polyglot Developer

The Polyglot Developer

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) are terms that I hear thrown around quite frequently. I’ve been a software developer for a long time, but it is only recently that I’ve welcomed these terms into my life. CI and CD is the automated process of running various tasks such as unit testing or building a version controlled project.

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Programming Has Changed My Life

Professor Beekums

Sometimes I look back on my life and wonder what it would have been like if I had never started programming. Obviously my career would be different, but I believe that programming has fundamentally changed how I think. Who I am as a person has changed significantly due to solving as many software problems as I have and the changes have been for the better.

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How It Works (It Just Runs Faster): Auto Soft NUMA…

SQL Server According to Bob

Back in June, Bob Dorr gave you the thinking behind why SQL Server 2016 It Just Runs Faster due to changes in our SQL Server and NUMA configurations. Bob blogged about a new SQL Server 2016 feature called Auto Soft NUMA. As I’ve hit the road and talked more about SQL Server 2016: It Just Runs Faster , I’ve received some questions about how Auto Soft NUMA works and how to recognize how SQL Server detects a NUMA configuration and makes decisions to partition it even further.

Servers 45
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Performance Testing – Testing for Speed, Stability, and Scalability

Testlodge

We’ve all been there… you’re using a piece of software or navigating a website and everything is just running really slow. You click a button and nothing happens – or you get the spinning wheel of death – and now you’re frustrated. Even worse, this is the typical experience on that website/application. These are performance issues, and today, we’re going to talk about how these issues can be identified early on with performance testing.

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The Patrol Method and Objections to Self-Directed Agile Teams

The Agile Manager

In the previous post , we saw there are quite a few similarities between the Patrol method and self-directed Agile teams. It stands to reason that the resistance, doubt and objections faced by each from sponsors, leaders and members alike will be very similar. If that's the case, one can learn from the other. These excerpts from the 1950s edition of the Scoutmaster's Handbook will sound familiar if you've ever tried to implement a self-directed Agile team: " Some don't grasp the possibilities of

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Using Google Admob In Your NativeScript Angular Mobile App

The Polyglot Developer

I recently received a request from one of my followers for a tutorial on using Google Admob in a NativeScript Angular application. Not too long ago I had demonstrated Google Admob in a vanilla NativeScript project , but I hadn’t yet given it a shot with Angular. In case you’re unfamiliar with Admob, it is an excellent way to monetize your mobile applications with advertisements.

Google 52
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Code Reviews Are Awesome. Sometimes

Professor Beekums

Code reviews are seen as an essential part of software development. It makes a lot of sense to say that a programmer should have their work reviewed by another programmer. Authors and journalists have their work reviewed by an editor after all. Humans make mistakes and creators especially get a little tunnel vision when they are focused on making their creations.

Code 40
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How It Works (It Just Runs Faster): Non-Volatile Memory SQL Server Tail Of Log Caching on NVDIMM

SQL Server According to Bob

Note: We received feedback that there was some confusion on us calling this functionality “tail of the log caching” because our documentation and prior history has referred to the tail of the log as the portion of the hardened log that has not been backed up. This feature is actually officially called Persisted Log Buffer and is an acceleration of the hardening of the log cache as blogged by Kevin Farlee at [link].

Cache 40
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MXNet - Deep Learning Framework of Choice at AWS

All Things Distributed

Machine learning is playing an increasingly important role in many areas of our businesses and our lives and is being employed in a range of computing tasks where programming explicit algorithms is infeasible. At Amazon, machine learning has been key to many of our business processes, from recommendations to fraud detection, from inventory levels to book classification to abusive review detection.

AWS 167
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Static and Dynamic Libraries

Nick Desaulniers

This is the second post in a series on memory segmentation. It covers working with static and dynamic libraries in Linux and OSX. Make sure to check out the first on object files and symbols. Let’s say we wanted to reuse some of the code from our previous project in our next one. We could continue to copy around object files, but let’s say we have a bunch and it’s hard to keep track of all of them.

C++ 48
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Intel discloses “vector+SIMD” instructions for future processors

John McCalpin

The art and science of microprocessor architecture is a never-ending struggling to balance complexity, verifiability, usability, expressiveness, compactness, ease of encoding/decoding, energy consumption, backwards compatibility, forwards compatibility, and other factors. In recent years the trend has been to increase core-level performance by the use of SIMD vector instructions, and to increase package-level performance by the addition of more and more cores.

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Working With Shared Providers In A NativeScript Angular App

The Polyglot Developer

When building a NativeScript application with Angular , there are certain scenarios where you might want to share functions and variables across the pages of the application. There are other scenarios where you might want to pull similar functions into a class for code cleanliness. Both of these scenarios would find value in using Angular shared providers.

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Balancing The Desire To Under-Engineer and Over-Engineer

Professor Beekums

Software development is a balancing act of spending too little time planning out a project and spending too much time. If we under-engineer the project by not planning enough, then we will end up with lots of technical debt. The result will be lots of time wasted dealing with that technical debt. Think of it as building a house with a really shaky foundation.

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Amazon Echo vs Google Home, My First Impressions

The Polyglot Developer

I don’t typically write product reviews, but since I’m a huge advocate for the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home technologies, I think it makes sense to share some opinions. I own an Amazon Echo and a second generation Amazon Echo Dot. Today (November 4th), I received my Google Home that started shipping to everyone this week. The following is my opinion between the two brands, where each succeeds and where each falls short.

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Changing A NativeScript CSS Skin At Runtime

The Polyglot Developer

CSS is usually a subject I avoid due to me being artistically illiterate, but recently a student of mine asked me an interesting question regarding theming an Angular NativeScript application with dynamic CSS files loaded at runtime. Given the nature of Angular, it becomes difficult to load files at runtime because of how Angular compiles and builds projects.

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NativeScript For The Angular Developer

The Polyglot Developer

After months of receiving requests, I am finally pleased to announce that my course, NativeScript for the Angular Developer , is now available on Udemy. This Angular and NativeScript course is similar to the previous course I released titled, NativeScript 101 , with the exception that this time we’re using Angular instead of vanilla JavaScript. If you’re unfamiliar with NativeScript, it is a cross platform framework for developing native mobile applications.

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Send Emails With Mailgun Using NativeScript And Angular

The Polyglot Developer

Sending emails from your mobile application is often a critical aspect. For example, what if you want to be able to collect user feedback, wouldn’t email be one of the better solutions? Now let’s add to this scenario and say that the user doesn’t have email configured on their mobile device. How does the user send emails to you from your application?

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Navigating A Web Application With The Angular Router

The Polyglot Developer

I’ve been keeping up with Angular since the beta releases and if you have too you’ll know that navigation has changed about one hundred times between then and the now stable release. Navigation with the Angular Router component is a tricky subject, but understanding it is necessary for pretty much every quality Angular web application. I wrote a now obsolete tutorial on how to navigate between Angular routes back when Angular was in beta.

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Hiring Software Developers When You Are Not One

Professor Beekums

Hiring software developers is hard. It’s hard when you are a software developer and have intimate knowledge of the skillset required. It is even harder when you don’t have that skillset. I’ve met many entrepreneurs who are in the latter situation. How do these folks go about hiring developers for contract or full time? Many try by just talking to a developer.

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Bringing the Magic of Amazon AI and Alexa to Apps on AWS.

All Things Distributed

From the early days of Amazon, Machine learning (ML) has played a critical role in the value we bring to our customers. Around 20 years ago, we used machine learning in our recommendation engine to generate personalized recommendations for our customers. Today, there are thousands of machine learning scientists and developers applying machine learning in various places, from recommendations to fraud detection, from inventory levels to book classification to abusive review detection.

AWS 166
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Spice up your Analytics: Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available in N. Virginia, Oregon, and Ireland.

All Things Distributed

Previously, I wrote about Amazon QuickSight , a new service targeted at business users that aims to simplify the process of deriving insights from a wide variety of data sources quickly, easily, and at a low cost. QuickSight is a very fast, cloud-powered, business intelligence service for the 1/10th the cost of old-guard BI solutions. Today, I am very happy to announce that QuickSight is now generally available in the N.

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