C++ is a powerful programming language that has been in use for several decades. Its importance lies in its versatility and efficiency, making it a popular choice for developing software and systems across different domains. The impact of C++ is significant, as it has been used to create numerous high-performance applications, including operating systems, browsers,

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI. It is part of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) family of models, which are designed to generate human-like text based on input prompts. ChatGPT is specifically trained to carry out conversational tasks, such as answering questions, completing sentences, and engaging in dialogue. It has been

Comma is a startup aimed at solving self-driving cars. A lot of the new cars in the market have built-in stock Advanced driver assistance systems. Comma takes this system to the next level with Openpilot. Openpilot is an open-source driver assistance system. Currently, with features like Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Automated Lane Centering (ALC), Forward

Facebook was built using PHP, a programming language that was used widely in the late 90s and early 2000s. PHP allows developers to get web applications built quickly and easily, although PHP has a reputation for being difficult to scale.  In the early days of Facebook, the company was scaling rapidly on every dimension.  New

Google’s codebase is managed in a single monolithic repository. An engineer at Google can explore almost any area of the codebase within the entire company. In order to enable this, Google has built tooling to support the monolithic repo, including a virtual file system and a set of build tools. A monolithic repository is not

Software engineering is harder than it should be. There are many people who have an app idea that they are not sure how to build. Some of these people are highly technical professionals like real estate agents, scientists, and accountants. These professionals learn to use spreadsheets in their day-to-day work. Spreadsheets are also used widely

Uber manages the car rides for millions of people. The Uber system must remain operational 24/7, and the app involves financial transactions and the safety of passengers. Uber infrastructure runs across thousands of server instances and produce terabytes of monitoring data. The monitoring data is used to understand the health of the software systems as

Artificial intelligence is reshaping every aspect of our lives, from transportation to agriculture to dating. Someday, we may even create a superintelligence–a computer system that is demonstrably smarter than humans. But there is widespread disagreement on how soon we could build a superintelligence. There is not even a broad consensus on how we can define

Netflix has petabytes of data and thousands of workloads running across that data every day. These workloads generate movie recommendations for users, create dashboards for data analysts to study, and reshape data in ETL jobs, to make it more accessible across the organization. Over the last ten years, data engineering has become a key component

An instruction set defines a low level programming language for moving information throughout a computer. In the early 1970’s, the prevalent instruction set language used a large vocabulary of different instructions. One justification for a large instruction set was that it would give a programmer more freedom to express the logic of their programs. Many

Google Search allows humans to find and access information across the web. A human enters an unstructured query into the search box, the search engine provides several links as a result, and the human clicks on one of those links. That link brings up a web page, which is a set of unstructured data. Humans

Google Search is a highly interactive JavaScript application. As you enter a query, results are being automatically suggested to you before you even finish typing. When you press enter, some of your search results may be widgets that represent the weather, the price of a stock, a recipe for green bean soup, or a language

Google Brain is an engineering team focused on deep learning research and applications. One growing area of interest within Google Brain is that of generative models. A generative model uses neural networks and a large data set to create new data similar to the ones that the network has seen before. One approach to making

Airbnb began in 2008 as a monolithic Rails application serving the simple purpose of listing homes for rental. Over time, the number of listings increased dramatically, as did the number of people who were renting. With that scale, the Rails app had to be broken into different services, and entire teams were built out to

GraphQL allows developers to communicate with all of their different data backends through a consistent query interface. A GraphQL query can be translated into queries to MySQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, or whatever kind of API or backend is needed to fulfill the GraphQL query. GraphQL users need to set up a GraphQL server to fulfill this

Stock traders have access to high volumes of information to help them make decisions on whether to buy an asset. A trader who is considering buying a share of Google stock can find charts, reports, and statistical tools to help with their decision. There are a variety of machine learning products to help a technical

In the smartphone market there are two dominant operating systems: one closed source (iPhone) and one open source (Android). The market for self-driving cars could play out the same way, with a company like Tesla becoming the closed source iPhone of cars, and a company like Comma.ai developing the open source Android of self-driving cars.

React Native allows developers to reuse frontend code between mobile platforms. A user interface component written in React Native can be used in both iOS and Android codebases. Since React Native allows for code reuse, this can save time for developers, in contrast to a model where completely separate teams have to create frontend logic

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit double about every two years. Moore’s Law is less like a “law” and more like an observation or a prediction. Moore’s Law is ending. We can no longer fit an increasing amount of transistors in the same amount of space with a

Applications of artificial intelligence are permeating our everyday lives. We notice it in small ways–improvements to speech recognition; better quality products being recommended to us; cheaper goods and services that have dropped in price because of more intelligent production. But what can we quantitatively say about the rate at which artificial intelligence is improving? How