InfoQ Homepage Design Content on InfoQ
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Applying Test-Driven Development in the Cloud
In the cloud, application development can be treated end-to-end with its accompanying infrastructure. This makes it possible to use test-driven development (TDD) and refactoring on the full application, which can bring down maintenance costs.
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Prime Video Switched from Serverless to EC2 and ECS to Save Costs
Prime Video, Amazon’s video streaming service, has explained how it re-architected the audio/video quality inspection solution to reduce operational costs and address scalability problems. It moved the workload to EC2 and ECS compute services, and achieved a 90% reduction in operational costs as a result.
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IDPs with Poor User Experience are Destined to Fail
User Experience design is of paramount importance for implementing an Internal Developer Platform, finds Fernando Villalba. In a comprehensive blog post detailing what great design and UX (user experience) means, Villalba expands on how to leverage these best to build an IDP (internal developer platform) that is user-friendly and hence more likely to be adopted widely.
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Programming Foundations for Test Automation
Proper programming foundations can improve your test automation, making it easier to maintain testing code, and reduce stress. A foundation of the theory and basic principles of coding and programming can help to bring test automation to the next level. Object-oriented programming principles can help to overcome code smells.
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Platform Engineering Challenges: Small Teams, Build Versus Buy, and Building the Wrong Thing
The team at Syntasso wrote a series of blog posts outlining twelve challenges that platform teams face. These challenges include having a small platform team support a large organization, failing to understand the needs of the platform users, and struggling with the build-vs-buy argument.
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AirBnb Animation Engine Lottie Improves Performance by Adopting Core Animation
AirBnb has announced the fourth major iteration of its open-source vector-based animation engine Lottie. Thanks to the adoption of Core Animation, Lottie 4.0 provides significant performance improvements and reduces CPU load, says AirBnb iOS engineer Cal Stephens.
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Mythical Man Month Author and Father of the 8-Bit Byte, Fred Brooks, Dies at 91
Dr Frederick P Brooks Jr, originator of the term "architecture in computing", author of one of the first books to examine the nature of computer programming from a sociotechnical perspective, architect of the IBM 360 series of computers, university professor and person responsible for the 8-bit byte, died on 17 November at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. Dr Brooks was 91 years old.
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Kent Beck: Software Design is an Exercise in Human Relationships
In the closing keynote at QCon SF, Kent Beck spoke about how software design is an exercise in human relationships, why iterative and incremental development is the most cost effective way to build software, and how the overall cost of a software system is directly related to the cost of coupling and decoupling and the jackpot changes which result in cascaded coupling.
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Error Prone Support Introduces New Bug Checks and Refaster Templates
Picnic, the “supermarket on wheels” company, has released Error Prone Support, an open source project that extends Google's Error Prone, that contains thirty new bug checks to detect, and optionally resolve, possible mistakes during compilation of a Java project. More than fifty new Refaster rule collections are available to improve code uniformity by automatically rewriting the codebase.
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Building an Effective Platform by Focusing on End-to-End Workflows
Platform engineering teams need to focus on building end-to-end workflows versus individual tools according to Naphat Sanguansin, CTO at Prodvana. A focus on workflows will help to abstract away the complexities of running services and allow for application engineers to focus on their product.
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Preventing Serverless Vendor Lock-in with Design Patterns
Gregor Hohpe recently published an article proposing a paradigm shift to address vendor lock-in concerns on serverless cloud applications. Designing a solution using well-known patterns decouples its functional characteristics from the underlying cloud implementation, making it easier to avoid lock-in or to go multi-cloud.
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Using Data to Predict Future Usage and Increase User Insights
By identifying usage trends, you can proactively adjust load, scaling, and routing to better handle the load on particular parts of the globe when you know it will peak there. Data about how users interact with your application can be used to design future features that better mimic these patterns and ensure that new features have a better chance of solving real user problems and getting adopted.
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Slack Implements Circuit Breakers to Improve CI/CD Pipeline Availability
Slack recently published how it implemented the Circuit Breaker pattern to improve its CI/CD pipeline availability. Before this project, engineers at Slack saw challenges as peak request volumes in internal tooling caused cascade failures in dependent systems. Since completion, engineers saw increased service availability and fewer bad developer experiences like flakiness from failing services.
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Android Adds Experimental Support for Predictive Back Gestures
To help users understand where a back gesture will land them in an Android app, Google has introduced a new predictive back gesture. The new feature allows the user to decide whether they want to complete the gesture or not by showing an animated preview of the gesture outcome.
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Trivago’s Journey from PHP+Melody to Next.js and Typescript
Trivago’s platform was built using PHP and their Melody framework. A small number of engineers at Trivago maintained Melody, which was a continuity risk. Melody’s documentation and examples could not be as rich as desired due to a lack of capacity, making engineer onboarding and support much more difficult. Trivago then decided to rewrite its platform on Typescript using Next.js.