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Back in 2004, Eric Ries was working on a startup called IMVU and Steve Blank was an investor and advisor for them. Steve had a methodology he called “Customer Development.” This was later released in a book called The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Eric combined Steve’s framework, the manufacturing practices of Toyota from Japan and Agile software development in what became The Lean Startup. By Benjamin Arritt.

The process of creating a plan, setting milestones and delegating tasks to employees will not work with the start up because they don’t truly know what their customers want, which approaches are best and what will be sustainable.

Eric Ries

In this summary you will find outline for the book, including:

• Vison
  • Start ups need to be managed differently from established companies
  • The purpose of a start up is to find a sustainable business model
  • Find your sustainable business model through validated learning
  • The leap of faith assumptions: test your value and growth hypothesis
• Steer
  • Develop a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to test your idea in the market
  • Build, measure and learn (BML) as fast and as often as possible
  • Use split-tests to optimize your product
  • Vanity metrics are often flattering but misleading and do not help you find a sustainable business model
  • To find the right business model for your company you usually have to pivot
  • Every startup should focus on one engine of growth
• Accelerate
  • Batch
  • Grow
  • Adapt
  • Innovate

… and much more. Very useful summary for anybody trying to create their first startup!

In 2020, the world shifted to remote work with most companies transitioning to hybrid or remote arrangements. At the time of this report (October 2022), over 50% of respondents had no definitive plan to return to the office. Like it or not, remote work is here to stay. By Vivian Guo.

Regardless of whether you are working in an office, it is almost guaranteed you will be interacting and working with remote workers. For engineering organizations with distributed teams, this presents a unique challenge of maintaining connection and collaboration across geographic barriers.

Distributed workforces have fundamentally changed how engineering teams collaborate with each other and the key processes and tools needed to enable successful software development. This year’s report explores how exactly the shift to remote work has impacted engineering organizations. Follow link to article and download this extensive pdf report. Good read!

A lot has changed - Memory, Storage, and CPU are cheaper and available on demand. Cloud technologies have also disrupted this domain; we now have Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Scaling, Load Balancing, and DR responsibilities have been delegated to the Cloud service providers. By Giri Venkatesan.

In an ideal world, a messaging broker would never need to open the payload - it can be simply passing messages between producers and consumers based on subscription. Not all consumers are equal; they may be built to handle subsets of messages even if they are of the same class. For example, a Tax Calculation service would need to process the message differently based on the country or region the message is originating from.

Fortunately, MQTT-based brokers adopted the hierarchical representation of topics from the get-go.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/message-routing-topics-thought-shift-giri-venkatesan/

The benefits of such a hierarchical scheme don’t stop there. Now we can use wild cards at any level to capture a broader range of message topics in a subscription:

• Single-level wildcard: ‘*’
  • All credit card transactions from store 1049, with transaction number beginning ‘4’
  • quickpay/credit/*/4*/01049
• Multi-level wildcard: ‘>’
  • All debit transaction to be cleared at bank 18
  • quickpay/debit/0018/>
  • Literals at each level are treated as Strings - hence wildcard usage on data types like latitude/longitude coordinates and other custom identifiers would also benefit
  • bustrak/gps_updt/*/*/45.3*/-75.7*

With support for versioning, topics can be altered dynamically without affecting the existing subscribers and overall architecture. Good read!

In the next few years, companies will build over 500 million new applications, more than has been developed in the previous 40 years combined (see IDC article). API operations enable innovation. By Lewis Tang.

The main focus of this article:

• How GraphQL works
• Options for running GraphQL on AWS
  • Fully managed using AWS AppSync
  • Self-Managed GraphQL

Modernizing APIs with GraphQL gives your frontend application the ability to fetch just the data that’s needed from multiple data sources with an API call. You can build modern mobile and web applications faster, because GraphQL simplifies API management. You have flexibility to run an open-source GraphQL implementation most closely aligned with your needs on AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, and Amazon EKS. With AWS AppSync, you can set up GraphQL quickly and increase your development velocity by reducing the amount of non-business API logic code. Easy!

Since technology usage is often an organization’s highest expenditure after personnel costs, effectively forecasting cloud spend is vital to planning, negotiating, and achieving sustainable economies of scale as you grow and mature your business on the cloud. So, what can you can do to more accurately predict future cloud costs? In particular, how can you forecast your AWS spend for the next month, quarter, or year? By John Klacynski.

The first blog in the series focuses on the best practices you can implement to improve financial predictability:

• Increase cross-functional collaboration
• Perform driver-based forecasting
• Establish governance and accountability

Product teams are now empowered to create annual, quarterly, monthly, or even daily budgets depending on business needs. These reports give product teams the ability to spot anomalies early and take timely action to prevent cost or usage overage, or inefficient utilization or resource coverage of your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. Thanks to tools like AWS Budgets, which lets you set custom budgets, alerts, and triggered actions related to exceeding or falling below desired thresholds, you can build a decentralized cloud spend forecast. Good read!

The ability to jump directly to a specific line of code that caused an error, without restarting, redeploying or adding more code, is where the magic happens in shift-left observability. By Shahar Fogel.

Because the truth is that while traditional APM and monitoring are critical, they are providing data that is often more interesting to Ops than to developers.

The last few years have seen their share of changes in DevOps. Those trends are highlighted by containers and microservices, security responsibility spreading to more teams and trying to automate as much as possible.

You could argue that the common denominator is making everything cloud native — containers epitomize emphasis on architects, more things are offered “as a service,” and scale is seemingly automated by moving everything to off-premises (on-demand) servers. But the big “philosophical” shift is to “shift left.” This means giving devs necessary access to real-time production data. That makes your entire operation more mobile and dynamic. Your dev teams gain the independence to move thromoja kancelariaugh production-level code without having to wait for Ops to grant them that access on a case-by-case basis. That’s why we elevate live debugging at Rookout to the same level of importance as remote debugging or the three pillars of observability.

The article further deals with:

• Advancing on the leftward front
• Example of developer-first observability in action
• Cost-effective with money and time

Whatever production debugging solution you choose should integrate directly with monitoring and APM platforms. This will dramatically increase enterprise agility and velocity when it comes to diagnosing and pinpointing the root cause of performance issues. The ability to jump directly from a Datadog alert or anomaly to a specific line of code that caused an error, without restarting, redeploying, or adding more code, is where the magic happens in shift-left observability. Good read!

MQTT serves as a tool to connect many types of IoT devices in deployments of all magnitudes. It originally started in 1999 for oil and gas pipelines to communicate over remote satellites. By MobiDev.

What you will learn:

• Why Is MQTT used in IoT development?
• An example of an MQTT 5.0 small system deployment
• Which clients support MQTT 5.0 and Python?
• Pros and cons of an MQTT v5.0 local network
• Major practical differences between MQTT v3.1.1 and v5.0
• MQTT 5 challenges

MQTT v5.0 is a suitable option for local IoT device communication if you have a central device that can host a message broker for communication between devices and/or the host. Despite its drawbacks (most of which were eliminated in MQTT v5.0), this protocol can be used for communication between small-to-medium sized networks of IoT devices. Interesting!

Advertising on the internet is a nuisance — getting in the way of your browsing, using your bandwidth, and lumbering you with trackers that send your data to people you might not want to have it. Installing ad blockers on each of your devices is time-consuming; and some of your devices, like smart TVs or other smart devices, won’t have a local ad-blocking option available. By raspberrypi.com.

Pi-hole is what’s known as a DNS sinkhole. DNS (Domain Name System) is like an address book for the internet. Pi-hole gets into the middle of this process and filters the lookups so that if your device tries to show you an advert it can block it. Everything else is displayed as normal, but the ads will be missing.

Further in the article:

• How does Pi-hole work?
• What you’ll need
• Choosing the right Raspberry Pi and accessories
• Installing Raspberry Pi OS Lite
• Starting and updating your Raspberry Pi
• Creating a static IP address for your Raspberry Pi
• Installing Pi-hole
• Changing your router’s default DNS server to Pi-hole
• Accessing and administering Pi-hole
• Using Pi-hole as a DHCP server

…and more. This is depth tutorial with screen shots and detaield explanation of each step. Pi-hole can make a big difference to your overall internet experience, reducing the number of banners, pop-ups, videos, and other types of advertising you are compelled to see. How effective it is depends on the websites you visit and the blacklist you use. There are a number of sites dedicated to testing the effectiveness of ad-blockers: Adblock Tester, for example, scored 57 out of 100 with Pi-hole running, and only 27 out of 100 without it (MacOS and Safari browser). Superb!

Stress and burnout are having a massive impact on cybersecurity teams, leaving people and businesses more vulnerable than ever. Cybersecurity professionals are “reaching their breaking point” as ransomware attacks increase and create new risks for people and businesses. By Owen Hughes.

A global study of 1,100 cybersecurity professionals by Mimecast found that one-third are considering leaving their role in the next two years due to stress and burnout.

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of cybersecurity leaders surveyed by Mimecast said they had experienced at least one ransomware attack in the past year, while 77% said the number of cyberattacks against their company had either increased or stayed the same since 2021… These attacks have “personal consequences” for the wellbeing of cybersecurity professionals, Mimecast found: more than half (54%) of respondents agreed that ransomware attacks had a negative impact on their mental health, while 56% reported that their role gets more stressful each year.

One-third of teams reported an increased number of burnout-related absences following an attack. In addition, 34% of cybersecurity leaders reported difficulties in recruiting IT staff once an attack has taken place, making it even more difficult for organizations to prevent incidents in the future. Follow the link to the full article for more details!

With the race towards autonomy becoming fiercer, the costs to use these new enabling technologies are rising exponentially. Moreover, the need for talent and experts across the world is forcing companies to shift to remote work. You’ve probably heard of virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and vGPUs (virtual GPUs), but why would you need one and how could they help your company? By Bertrand Boisseau.

In order to validate autonomous driving (AD) and ADAS systems, algorithms have to go through intense simulations. These simulations require building virtual scenes that replicate very realistic environments where driving scenarios can be tested.

In tihs article you will get info on:

• Setting the stage for autonomous vehicle validation
• Early work on simulations kicks off
• GPUs add much-needed power but scalability issues arise
• Enter VDIs
• vGPUs save the day

Use of NVIDIA virtual GPUs enables the teams now provision virtual GPU devices on-demand, without buying additional hardware. This allows them to allocate GPU resources on the fly to VMs. By doing so, not only do they increase efficiency by improving resource consumption, they also accelerate the way their developers work. Nice one!