We've all experienced the frustration of our smartphones crashing or freezing at the worst possible moment. So how is it that NASA can land a rover on Mars, millions of miles away, with software that works flawlessly? The answer lies in a combination of factors that set space-grade software apart from your average app.

Recently I have been reading Art of Leadership, The: Small Things, Done Well by Michael Lopp. This book is an excellent read and it covers small things that you can do to build trust and to become an authentic and true leader to your team at different stages of your leadership journey.

Anyone who has worked with advanced search systems knows the intricacy of boolean operators. AND, OR, NOT - these seemingly simple words become powerful tools in the hands of search specialists. Add in proximity operators like WITH and NEAR, throw in some parentheses for nesting, and you've got yourself a query that can pinpoint exactly what you're looking for... or so we thought. In practice, these queries can become unwieldy beasts.

When a machine learning model is trained on a dataset, not all data points contribute equally to the model's performance. Some are more valuable and influential than others. Unfortunately value of data for training purposes is often nebulous and difficult to quantify. Applying data valuation to large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3, Claude 3, Llama 3.1 and their vast training datasets has faced significant scalability challenges to date.

Microservices have become the dominant architectural paradigm for building large-scale distributed systems, but until now, their inner workings at major tech companies have remained shrouded in mystery. A recent new paper by Huye et. al - researchers at Tufts University and Meta - provides an unprecedented look under the hood at Meta's massive microservices architecture.

Personal data processing forms the backbone of many big tech service providers. Tech giants like Netflix, Meta, and Amazon employ intricate networks of microservices to automatically process user data, creating complex data flows that span multiple layers of computation.

Having a well-defined strategy is crucial for success of a modern business. A good strategy should address the core problems or challenges faced by a business, provide guiding principles on how to tackle them, and be supported by the coherent actions and right resources. In this article, we will explore the core elements of a good strategy.

The ability to deploy applications quickly and efficiently is crucial for organizations. Agile methodologies and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines have become the norm, enabling rapid release cycles and frequent updates. However, amidst the drive for speed, ensuring policy compliance is often overlooked, leading to potential security vulnerabilities and compliance risks.

In digital landscape user experience is paramount and organisations must ensure their applications and systems are functioning optimally at all times. Traditional testing and monitoring practices have long been relied upon to achieve this goal.

For big data and complex data processing, data pipelines have emerged as a popular solution for managing and manipulating data. They provide a systematic approach to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from various sources, enabling organizations to derive valuable insights. However, as with any technology trend, data pipelines have not been immune to misuse and overuse.