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If you work in a role related to marketing, you’ve probably heard of brand personality, the human characteristics companies use to market themselves and their products. On Twitter, it’s fast food giant Wendy’s claim to fame, and it even drives impact on many of Red Hat’s own social accounts. By Alana Fialkoff.

Let’s explore how our Twitter journey can help you grow thriving open source socials of your own:

• Think of everything you know about branded social media, then open source it
• Crowdsource your gameplan
• Define Twitter as your open source sitting room: a place for informal and informative conversation
• Use community values to categorize your content
• Foster inclusive and impactful timeline experiences
• Prepare to evolve your strategy with your followers

Open surveys and community meetings left us with a list of community-generated adjectives to describe our design system’s open source community. Based on these insights, they shaped their new Twitter voice to be: Collaborative and curious, fun and friendly, informative and inviting.

Evolve your social media strategy with community voices at the heart of everything you do — cultivating enthusiastic, engaging, and empowering timeline experiences one tweet, like, and share at a time. Interesting!

As smart watches and other wearables provide users with sensors to monitor their fitness and health, they are generating a treasure trove of data. But whether all of this information actually contributes to a healthier society is up for debate. By Nicole Ferraro.

“Smart watches are growing the fastest and providing more value to end users because the amount of data you can get is fundamental to help you monitor your healthcare,”

Francisco Jeronimo, VP, European Devices, IDC

The main content is split into:

• Sensors driving adoption
• Too much data, not enough insight
• Addressing data inequality
• For better insights, make it personal
• Toward even smarter wearables

To address data inequality and provide more meaningful insights for all users, researchers say that companies working on wearables will need to offer a comprehensive analysis of health metrics, along with personalized behavioral motivators. Good read!

Welcome to this new exciting series! In this series, I will explain the basic components that are used in everyday consumer electronics gadgets. Let’s get started. By Chiratidzo Charakupa.

If you have opened a dead electronics gadget, you’ve probably seen the motherboard. On the mother board are several components. Some components have “legs” and look like strange millipedes (most of these are Integrated Circuits). Others look like tiny pieces of dirt and others just look like items from a mad scientist’s drawer.

All these individual components are either active or passive. When creating an electronics circuit, it is quite useful to know which devices are active components and which are passive. This is because the passive components behave in a completely different manner from the active components.

The article will take on a journey of learning about:

• The motherboard - a is the place where all the components are placed
• Active component - the place where all the components are placed
• Passive component - this is an electronic component that only receives energy in the electrical circuit
• Resistor
• Why do we need resistors?
• Capacitor
• Inductor
• The Golden 3
• Practical moment

Author calls Resistors, Capacitors and Inductors the Golden 3 because most electronic circuits, and the basic principles behind the complex components use the basic principles used by resistors, capacitors and inductors. Excellent read!

RustyHermit is a unikernel, which is completely written Rust. Unikernels are application images that directly contain the kernel as a library, so they do not require an installed operating system (OS). They are typical used in virtualized environments, which build the backbone of typical cloud / edge infrastructures. By @stlankes.

Unikernels can be highly optimized. For instance, we optimized the network stack of RustyHermit. RustyHermit uses smoltcp as network stack, which is completely written in Rust. As interface between guest and host operating system, we use Virtio, which is in a para-virtualized driver for KVM and widely used in virtualized Linux environments.

The article does a good job explaining:

• Virtualization Designs
• Unikernels
• RustyHermit
• Performance
• Research

RustyHermit is also a research project to evaluate new operating system designs, which improves the scalability and the security of operating systems in cloud environments. For instance, RustyHermit provides classical techniques to improve the security behavior like stack guards and separating the application stack from the libOS stack. However, a library operating system typically uses a common function call to enter the kernel. A classical separation of user- and kernel space by entering a higher privilege level is missing. Good read!

French startup ThrustMe has performed the first on-orbit tests of an innovative iodine-fueled electric propulsion system, proving its ability to change a CubeSat’s orbit. By Benjamin ChessEric Sigler.

ThrustMe’s NPT30-I2-1U, the first iodine electric propulsion system sent into space, is aboard the Beihangkongshi-1, a 12U CubeSat developed by Chinese commercial satellite maker Spacety.

After weeks of commissioning the propulsion system was tested during two 90-minute burns in late December and early January. The burns resulted in a total altitude change of 700 meters according to a ThrustMe press release. The firms says the results prove iodine to be a viable propellant for electric propulsion systems and mark a step towards commercialization of the system.

Notably the system could have an impact on space sustainability efforts. It allows a small satellite to lower its altitude, reducing its time in orbit, seeing the satellite burn up on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and helping reduce space debris in lower Earth orbit.

The European Space Agency estimates that there are 34,000 debris objects greater than 10 centimeters in size and 900,000 pieces from between 1 to 10 centimeters in orbit as of January 2021. Traveling at several kilometers per second, even the smallest fragments can threaten spacecraft, including the International Space Station. Exciting!

We’ve scaled Kubernetes clusters to 7,500 nodes, producing a scalable infrastructure for large models like GPT-3, CLIP, and DALL·E. By Benjamin ChessEric Sigler.

Before we get too far, it’s important to describe our workload. The applications and hardware we run with Kubernetes are pretty different from what you may encounter at a typical company. Our problems and corresponding solutions may, or may not, be a good match to your own setup!

The article describes in detail:

• Our workload
• Networking
• API Servers
• Time-series metrics with Prometheus and Grafana
• Healthchecks
• Quotas & resource usage
• Gang scheduling

One big strain on API Servers was WATCHes on Endpoints. There are a few services, such as ‘kubelet’ and ’node-exporter’ of which every node in the cluster is a member. When a node would be added or removed from the cluster, this WATCH would fire. And because typically each node itself was watching the kubelet service via kube-proxy, the # and bandwidth required in these responses would be N^2 and enormous, occasionally 1GB/s or more. EndpointSlices, launched in Kubernetes 1.17, were a huge benefit that brought this load down 1000x.

We’ve found Kubernetes to be an exceptionally flexible platform for our research needs. It has the ability to scale up to meet the most demanding workloads we’ve put on it. There are many areas yet though where it needs improvement, and the Supercomputing team at OpenAI will continue to explore how Kubernetes can scale. Nice one!

Two hot job titles that were not around or mainstream several years ago are DevOps and site reliability engineers. What can feel like DevOps engineers are a catch all around engineering efficiency, system administration, and release management tend to have oddly broad job descriptions. Site reliability engineers, on the other hand, have a more defined focus but a broad scope in the organization with the teams they support. By Ravi Lachhman.

Not to fall into the eponym of “CI/CD” while saying “DevOps/SRE”, understanding the overlap and differences between the two skill sets and organizations is important. We are people and we as people design systems. Looking at DevOps team structures, DevOps teams are focused on breaking down silos that were created by Conway’s Law.

These silos that are institutional are barriers in engineering efficiency; two or more sets of people to get features across the line with separate goals.

The article main bits:

• Conway’s Law at Play
• Two different problem sets
• DevOps vs SRE concern table
• DevOps and SRE, better together

SRE wise, providing baseline comparison coverage can be difficult; the first steps of establishing an SRE organization are SLA/SLO management and proper baselines are needed. Good read!

From Fortran to arXiv.org, these advances in programming and platforms sent biology, climate science and physics into warp speed. By Jeffrey M. Perkel.

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team gave the world the first glimpse of what a black hole actually looks like. But the image of a glowing, ring-shaped object that the group unveiled wasn’t a conventional photograph.

The article then captures the following:

• Language pioneer: the Fortran compiler (1957)
• Signal processor: fast Fourier transform (1965)
• Molecular cataloguers: biological databases (1965)
• Forecast leader: the general circulation model (1969)
• Number cruncher: BLAS (1979)
• Microscopy must-have: NIH Image (1987)
• Sequence searcher: BLAST (1990)
• Preprint powerhouse: arXiv.org (1991)
• Data explorer: IPython Notebook (2011)
• Fast learner: AlexNet (2012)

The first modern computers weren’t user-friendly. Programming was literally done by hand, by connecting banks of circuits with wires. Subsequent machine and assembly languages allowed users to program computers in code, but both still required an intimate knowledge of the computer’s architecture, putting the languages out of reach of many scientists. Good trip down the history lanes!

By making off-the-rack machine learning models accessible for anyone to use, cloud ML services like Amazon Personalize help make ML-driven customer experiences available to teams at any scale. By @mparticle. You no longer need in-house data science and machine learning experts to get the benefit of propensity scoring or product recommendations.

The article then describes:

• Key challenges with machine learning
• Collecting and supplying quality user data
• Making ML insights available and actionable
• The project: personalized product recommendations
• Collect data with a CDP
• Capture product interactions
• Create the AWS assets
• Create a Kinesis stream

… and more. Once we’ve set up the infrastructure to generate, continuously refine, and activate ML insights, the final piece of the puzzle is to figure out what works and what doesn’t. You will also get code and screen shots explaining the steps in the article. Well done!

The days of implicitly trusting connected devices that are behind the traditional enterprise firewalled network with its “hard” perimeter are no longer. By Jason Soroko.

Risk officers and security professionals should consider ALL connected traffic to be on a hostile network. This requires authentication at the user, device, and application level and therefore digital identities comprise the new perimeter. If every endpoint is its own edge, it is becoming increasingly challenging to secure thanks to the ever-expanding ecosystem of multi-cloud environments, BYOD devices, IoT, and unprecedented levels of remote work accelerated by COVID-19.

The article main points are:

• Zero Trust is a set of principles, not a check-the-box-activity
• Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is foundational to Zero Trust
• Zero Trust requires governance, policy, and enforcement through a centralized place
• Migration to Zero Trust can be step-by-step
  • Secure servers and applications
  • Secure network access endpoints
  • Secure device endpoints
  • Secure email
  • Replace passwords for people with user certificates

Even with the help of automation and single-pane-of-glass management, migrating an entire organization to Zero Trust may seem daunting. Fortunately, organizations don’t have to implement certificates en masse, all at once. IT teams can ease the transition by implementing Zero Trust on a step-by-step basis to make the process as painless as possible. Nice one!