Uber Hack

Uber suffered a cyberattack a few weeks ago, when an 18-year-old hacker used social engineering techniques to compromise Uber’s network. The hacker downloaded their HackerOne vulnerability reports and shared screenshots of the company's internal systems, email dashboard, and Slack server.

What's interesting about this incident was the speed at which various publications and security analysts provided coverage, how quickly Uber notified the world, and how much detail we already have about what happened. A few great lessons in cybersecurity can be learnt from this incident, where the weakest link in security was ultimately a human. Read more about it here.

Uber API Gateway

It would be unfair to judge the amazing ride-share company based on the hack. So let's take a peep inside their architecture and learn more about some great technology they have built.

When Uber’s ride-sharing app makes a request to the backend, the first point of contact is Uber’s API gateway. The API gateway provides a single point of entry for all of Uber’s apps and gives a clean interface to access data, logic, or functionality from back-end microservices. Read more about it here.

Does your DVD still work

As a child, I used to collect computer magazines and CDs that came free with them (yes, I'm that old). Each of those CDs came with a trial version of some game that I enjoyed for many days. As DVDs came into the picture, I was amazed at just how much more data we could store in them. However, I found that my discs used to stop working after some years, a few earlier than others. Did you know there are different types of discs and a lot of parameters that affect their longevity? Take a look at this research paper that talks just about this.

What is an Exabyte?

An extraordinarily large unit of digital data, one Exabyte (EB) is equal to 1,000 Petabytes or one billion gigabytes (GB). Some technologists have estimated that all the words ever spoken by mankind would be equal to five Exabytes.

While most companies worry about how their data is growing exponentially and fear the day they hit terabyte limits of PostgreSQL, LinkedIn is storing exabytes of data on their Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) like a boss. Read more about it here.

Decoding Managers

Most of the managers are on leave this week, so I'm hoping they don't read this. But if you've ever wondered what exactly your manager wants from you, take a sneak peek on this almost perfect article and be that rockstar engineer your manager always wanted.