News

How Airbnb is Moving 10x Faster at Scale with GraphQL and Apollo

Stopping a Wildfire with a Low-Cost Sensor Network

Now that the smoke from the November fires that burned huge swaths of Californiahas begun to clear, talk has turned to how to prevent future disasters. ASilicon Valley startup has an idea. Team Lali, part of the Hacking House’s first class of would be entrepreneurs, had a solution—a low cost wireless sensor network—looking for a problem.

Flutter 1.0: Google’s Portable UI Toolkit

Today, at Flutter Live, we’re announcing Flutter 1.0, the first stable release of Google’s UI toolkit for creating beautiful, native experiences for iOS and Android from a single codebase. Cross-platform mobile development today is full of compromise. Developers are forced to choose between either building the same app multiple times for multiple operating systems, or to accept a lowest common denominator solution that trades native speed and accuracy for portability.

Sessionizing Uber Trips in Real Time

Uber’s many data flows required modeling the data associated with a specific task, such as a rider trip, into a state machine. The state machine lets engineers focus on just the events needed to successfully accomplish a trip. In one sense, Uber’s challenge of efficiently matching riders and drivers in the real world comes down to the question of how to collect, store, and logically arrange data.

Crossplane lowers the barrier to a multi-cloud future

Cloud computing has become the dominant IT paradigm and multi-cloud looks poised to be the primary approach, with 81 percent of enterprises already adopting a multi-cloud strategy. A multi-cloud strategy prevents vendor lock-in, which is increasingly important as three major providers (AWS, GCP, and Azure) dominate the market. Despite the many benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, deploying across multiple clouds is still incredibly complex.

IBM Reveals 8-Bit Analog Chip With Phase-Change Memory

Today at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, IBM reported a new 8-bit analog chip. But the true development was less about analog chips catching up to their digital peers and more a radical rethink of chip architecture. This chip is the first to perform 8-bit calculations right where information is stored.

Kubernetes’ first major security hole discovered

Kubernetes has become the most popular cloud container orchestration system by far, so it was only a matter of time until its first major security hole was discovered. And the bug, CVE-2018-1002105, aka the Kubernetes privilege escalation flaw, is a doozy. It’s a CVSS 9.8 critical security hole.

Using AI and satellite imagery for disaster insights

A framework for using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on satellite imagery to identify the areas most severely affected by a disaster. This new method has the potential to produce more accurate information in far less time than current manual methods. Ultimately, the goal of this research is to allow rescue workers to quickly identify where aid is needed most, without relying on manually annotated, disaster-specific data sets.

Amazon is coming to company data centers, and that should scare Cisco, HPE and Dell

How Uber’s New Driver App Overcomes Network Lag

This article is the third in a series covering how Uber’s mobile engineering team developed the newest version of our driver app, codenamed Carbon, a core component of our ridesharing business. Among other new features, the app lets our population of over three million driver-partners find fares, get directions, and track their earnings. We began designing the new app in conjunction with feedback from our driver-partners in 2017, and began rolling it out for production in September 2018.