PD#557 How software engineers create value

How software engineers create value
6 minutes by James Samuel

High-impact engineers 10X the value they create by working on the most impactful features for users and aggressively decreasing the time it takes to get things out to users.

3 questions that will make you a phenomenal rubber duck
4 minutes by Dan Slimmon

Rubber ducks are great, but a human can add even more value. In this article, I’ll share my 3 favorite questions to ask when someone comes to me feeling stumped in a troubleshooting endeavor. These questions work even when you have no particular expertise in the problem domain.

How Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases
12 minutes by Engineer’s Codex

Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.

Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
30 minutes by Leslie Lamport

The concept of one event happening before another in a distributed system is examined, and is shown to define a partial ordering of the events. A distributed algorithm is given for synchronizing a system of logical clocks which can be used to totally order the events.

RSA is deceptively simple (and fun)
10 minutes by Nicole Tietz

While reading Real-World Cryptography, I came across the "million message attack". This is an attack that Daniel Bleichenbacher demonstrated in 1998, which effectively broke RSA with a particular encoding function called PKCS #1. It was only mentioned briefly, so I dug in and decided to try to understand the attack, eventually to implement it.

newsletters

Would you like to become a sponsor and advertise in one of the issues? Check out our media kit and get in touch.