iOS & Android Development

Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus or its augmented reality glasses to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked Mark Lucovsky, a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT, with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according to The Information’s Alex Heath. To be clear, Facebook’s smartphone apps will remain available on Android. “We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us,” says Facebook’s VP of Hardware, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth. “We don’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case. And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.” TechCrunch

The scientific evidence indicates quite clearly that individuals’ personalities play a significant role in determining team performance. In particular, personality affects: What role you have within the team How you interact with the rest of the team Whether your values (core beliefs) align with the team’s In our own work we found that psychological team roles are largely a product of people’s personalities. For example, consider team members who are: Results-oriented. Team members who naturally organize work and take charge tend to be socially self-confident, competitive, and energetic. Relationship-focused. Team members who naturally focus on relationships, are attuned to others' feelings, and are good at building cohesion tend to be warm, diplomatic, and approachable. Process and rule followers. Team members who pay attention to details, processes, and rules tend to be reliable, organized, and conscientious. Innovative and disruptive thinkers. Team members who n...

How Amazon builds and operates software There’s no question the world will be a better place if everyone can innovate more quickly and efficiently. And if stuff just works better. For that reason, I’m excited that we are sharing what we’ve learned with you in The Amazon Builders’ Library. -Charlie Bell, SVP, Amazon Web Services Available so far: Avoiding insurmountable queue backlogs Challenges with distributed systems Going faster with continuous delivery Ensuring rollback safety during deployments Static stability using availability zones Avoiding fallback in distributed systems Caching challenges and strategies Leader election in distributed systems Timeouts, retries and backoff with jitter Using load shedding to avoid overload Implementing health checks Workload isolation using shuffle-sharding Instrumenting distributed systems for operational visibility Amazon