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About the challenge of evaluating AI chip performance using “TOPS”, a metric that means trillions of operations per second, or “tera operations per second”. By Jeremy Horwitz.

Over the past few years, mobile and laptop chips have grown to include dedicated AI processors, typically measured by TOPS as an abstract measure of capability. Apple’s A14 Bionic brings 11 TOPS of “machine learning performance” to the new iPad Air tablet, while Qualcomm’s smartphone-ready Snapdragon 865 claims a faster AI processing speed of 15 TOPS.

The article describes:

• TOPS, explained
• Apple on TOPS
• Qualcomm on TOPS
• Huawei, Mediatek, and Samsung on TOPS
• Top of the TOPS

Apple has tried to reduce its use of abstract numeric performance metrics over the years: Try as you might, you won’t find references on Apple’s website to the gigahertz speeds of its A13 Bionic or A14 Bionic chips, nor the specific capacities of its iPhone batteries – at most, it will describe the A14’s processing performance as “mind-blowing”… Mobile processors have become popular and critically important, but they’re not the only chips with dedicated AI hardware in the marketplace, nor are they the most powerful. Great article!

GitOps practices support continuous delivery in hybrid, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments. In this two-part article, we’ll build a CI/CD workflow that demonstrates the potential of combining Tekton and GitOps. You’ll also be introduced to Red Hat OpenShift Serverless, as we’ll use Knative service resources in our CI/CD workflow. By David Sancho.

Tekton is a powerful yet flexible Kubernetes-native open-source framework for creating continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems. It lets you build, test, and deploy across multiple cloud providers or on-premises systems by abstracting away the underlying implementation details.

The content of this article:

• The CI/CD workflow
• Configuring the OpenShift cluster
• Operators, namespaces, and role bindings
• Install a Knative Serving instance
• Configure the Tekton tasks and pipeline
• The demo application
• Create your own repository

… and much more. The application is based on Quarkus, which is a perfect match for serverless applications due to its fast boot time and low memory consumption. The application itself is a simple “Hello, world” REST API that greets users when the /hello URI is hit. Excellent read!

Helm umbrella charts, for those who aren’t familiar, describe and encapsulate a deployable collection of loosely couple Kubernetes components as a higher-order Helm chart. A collection of software elements that each have their own individual charts but, for whatever reason (e.g. design choices, ease of deployability, versioning complexities), must be installed or upgraded as a since atomic unit. By Christopher Parker, MSc.

A simple use case for an Umbrella chart could be that of a web application with a separate web-scraper component that populates a database. In this trivial example, the web application and scraper would each be described in their own Helm charts which can be individually deployed.

The article then explains:

• Separation of concerns
• Where is this not applicable?

Even when using umbrella charts, one might still want to control the version of the image in the sub-chart if parts of a project are making use of the sub-chart as a standalone chart. When making use of umbrella charts to deploy a multi-component stack, particularly where the sub-components of the stack will rarely, if ever, be deployed standalone, it makes sense to migrate image tag versions to the umbrella chart and maintain these here. Nice one!

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? By Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang.

Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google, Samsung and GE, have rapidly adopted the Design Thinking approach, and Design Thinking is being taught at leading universities around the world, including d.school, Stanford, Harvard and MIT.

https://public-media.interaction-design.org/images/uploads/34a545643d169a37480de10b731fb6df.jpeg

Source: : Interaction Design Foundation., CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

The article is split into:

• What is Design Thinking?
• Design Thinking’s phases
• The problem with ingrained patterns of thinking
• An example of problem solving: the encumbered vs. the fresh mind
• The power of storytelling
• Design Thinking or ‘Outside the Box’ thinking
• Science and rationality in Design Thinking

… and much more. Tim Brown (CEO of the celebrated innovation and design firm IDEO) also emphasizes that Design Thinking techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of a business. Design thinking is not only for designers but also for creative employees, freelancers, and leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product or service in order to drive new alternatives for business and society. Great!

Being such a popular language for new developers, many of those using Flutter don’t know how or where to even begin when it comes to setting up a backend for their applications. By BleylDev.

There are a few solutions available such as Firebase, which most Flutter developers use, however, authors are going to cover a more widely used backend, AWS. The hope is that by the end of this article you will be able to quickly spin up your own database, APIs for connecting to that database and the integration of those APIs into your app, so that you can quickly put together a backend for future, or current, projects in Flutter.

The article pays attention to:

• AWS account setup
• How to set up a NoSQL database through DynamoDB
• Configure your dev environment
• Serverless framework
• The benefit of Serverless
• How to set up a model class in our Flutter project
• How to set up Future methods to handle each type of API call

You can use this setup and expand out from it for future projects that require the use of database structures in AWS. Code examples in the article. Nice one!

Microsoft launched a new Game Development with .NET section on their site. It’s designed for current .NET developers to explore all the choices available to them when developing games. By Abdullah Hamed.

They lso launched a new game development Learn portal for .NET filled with tutorials, videos, and documentation provided by Microsoft and others in the .NET game development community. Finally, Microsoft launched a step-by-step Unity get-started tutorial that will get you started with Unity and writing C# scripts for it in no time.

The article is collection of various resources:

• .NET for game developers
• Available game engines
• Online services for your game
• .NET has a rich set of tools
• The ecosystem
• Learn more and start developing

The .NET game development ecosystem is rich. Some of the .NET game engines depend on foundational work done by the open-source community to create managed graphics APIs like SharpDX, SharpVulkan, Vulkan.NET, and Veldrid. Xamarin also enables using platform native features on iOS and Android. Great source of learning and plenty of links to further resources!

Build a Spring Boot app and deploy to K8s without writing a single line of YAML. By Daniel Bryant.

In this tutorial, authoor is going to show you how to bootstrap a Spring Boot web application, containerize this using the latest Spring buildpacks, and deploy this onto an application-ready Kubernetes cluster with the app exposed to users via the Ambassador API gateway.

You should be able to complete this in ~30 minutes without writing a single line of YAML, thanks to the power of the Spring Initializr and the K8s Initializer websites, which create all of the boilerplate code and config for you!

The article describes:

• Bring the Spring (Initializr)!
• Creating K8s config without writing a line of YAML!
• Initializing Kubernetes with the K8s initializer

You will get loads of screen grabs and all the code so you can follow this tutorial. Well done!

Cloudflare released “Automatic Platform Optimization” (APO), a new performance optimization service for WordPress sites. By Brian Li.

With APO, Workers KV distributes your WordPress site’s HTML all around the world without any manual intervention and CDN cache priming.

Author works at a WordPress hosting company and takes you through:

• Why Static Sites are Faster than WordPress
• Cloudflare automatic platform optimization for WordPress benchmarks
• How Cloudflare APO speeds up WordPress
• How to leverage Cloudflare APO correctly
• Is automatic platform optimization worth it?

For Cloudflare users on free plans, APO is a $5/month add-on. Nice one!

One of the common questions often asked by clients is “What difference will the changes you’re recommending make to our site’s speed”? By Andy Davies.

WebPageTest and DevTools can give us clues that we’re heading in the right direction but there’s a gap that neither of them quite fill – a reliable testing environment that allows us to experiment and make changes to the page being tested.

Service Workers are often described as a programmable proxy in the browser – they can intercept and rewrite requests and responses, cache and synthesise responses, and much more. Cloudflare Workers are a similar concept but instead of running in the browser they run on CDN edge nodes.

In addition to intercepting network requests, there’s a HTMLRewriter class that targets DOM nodes using CSS selectors and triggers a handler when there’s a match. The handlers can alter the matched elements, for example changing attributes, or even replacing an elements contents.

The article walks you through:

• Example usage of service workers explained
• Example Transforms
• Testing
• Gotchas

Even though author has only used the combination WebPageTest and Cloudflare Workers with a few sites, it’s clear that it’s a powerful combination and it’s likely to become a regular part of my client workflow. You will get interesting links for further reading and code examples explaining concepts in the article. Excellent!

A look into the bytecode to see how Java handles lambdas. What does a lambda expression look like inside Java code and inside the JVM? It is obviously some type of value, and Java permits only two sorts of values: primitive types and object references. By Ben Evans.

Lambdas are obviously not primitive types, so a lambda expression must therefore be some sort of expression that returns an object reference. Programmers who are familiar with inner classes might guess that the lambda is really just syntactic sugar for an anonymous implementation of Runnable.

The article then describes:

• Call sites – location in the bytecode where a method invocation instruction occurs .
• Method handles
• Bootstrapping
• Decoding the lambda’s bootstrap method
• The lambda metafactories

This article explores the fine-grained details of exactly how the JVM implements support for lambda expressions. This is one of the more complex platform features you’ll encounter, because it is deep into language implementer territory. Great article!