The Tech Caffeine #18: This Week In Tech

Strong Vs Weak Forces of Architecture, Learnings From Building Production Database, Azure Chaos Studio, REST API Security Best Practices

Nov 15, 2021

✳️ This Week’s Featured Articles ✳️

The strong and weak forces of architecture

Good technical design decisions are very dependent on context. Teams that regularly work together on common goals are able to communicate regularly and negotiate changes quickly. These teams exhibit a strong force of alignment and can make technology and design decisions that harness that strong force. As we zoom out in a larger organization an increasingly weak force exists between teams and divisions that work independently and have less frequent collaboration. Recognizing the differences in these strong and weak forces allows us to make better decisions and give better guidance for each level, allowing for more empowered teams that can move faster.

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Why being a mentor benefits you too

Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting your tech career journey, there’s always something new to learn.

Getting a mentor is a great way to fast forward your personal development, but becoming a mentor yourself can improve your own technical and core skills too!

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42 things I learned from building a production database

Facebook Systems researcher - Mahesh Balakrishnan shares the things he learned as the tech lead for Delos.

Delos is currently replacing all uses of ZooKeeper at Facebook.

My intent in publishing this is to help others in similar roles (leading teams that are building new infra at large companies); much of it may not generalize to different settings.

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Expand Your ML Models with Transfer Learning

The approach to taking an existing model and applying it to a different problem is called transfer learning. You might be in the middle of training a model and then the business problem shifts. Now you have this model that has been going through the training process with a specific dataset and you need to adapt the model to handle this new problem

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Microsoft Announces Azure Chaos Studio in Public Preview

At the recent Ignite, Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Chaos Studio, a fully-managed experimentation service to help customers track, measure, and mitigate faults with controlled chaos engineering to improve the resilience of their cloud applications.

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Learnings from ‘The engineering leader’s guide to data-driven leadership’

Data-driven leaders are empowered to make decisions based on facts, rather than instincts. They use metrics to gain visibility over their teams, spot problems and celebrate and communicate successfully with the wider business.

What, why, and how should you be measuring as an engineering leader?

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