Ask Sendai

Like many of those in tech, we invest heavily in our cloud and data infrastructure. While seemingly routine, the ability to manage and scale our infrastructure to support our 299+ million listeners worldwide, 24/7, without missing a beat (or syllable) is crucial for the business and our brand. On top of that, our infrastructure teams are resolute when it comes to upholding a highly valued cultural goal: enabling our autonomous engineering teams (called squads) to work as freely and quickly as they possibly can.

Hiya folks, Brian ‘Penrif’ Bossé, your local friendly Tech Lead of League here. I’m taking some time in between matches of TFT to wax philosophic about game engines and how we on League make decisions around what direction to take our custom game engine. Join me on a moderately long look at one dimension of game engine design, where League currently exists on that dimension, and where we’re taking the game from there.

Petrica Voicu and Kenneth Kang talk about Hera (High Efficiency Reliable Access to data stores) – an open-source in the Go programming language – and how it helps PayPal to manage database access and deal with issues. Hera scales thousands of PayPal’s applications with connection multiplexing, read-write split, and sharding. Source: infoq.com

Another day, another custom script to analyze an A/B test. Maybe you’ve done this before and have an old script lying around. If it’s new, it’s probably going to take some time to set up, right? Not at Netflix. Suppose you’re running a new video encoding test and theorize that the two new encodes should reduce play delay, a metric describing how long it takes for a video to play after you press the start button.

Without warning on an early August evening a significant proportion of the electricity grid in the UK went dark. It was still daylight so the disruption caused was not as large as it might have been, but it does highlight how we take a stable power grid for granted. The story is a fascinating one of a 76-second chain of unexpected shutdown events in which individual systems reacted according to their programming, resulted in a partial grid load shedding — what we might refer to as a shutdown.

At Lyft, our novel driver localization algorithm detects map errors to create a hyper-accurate map from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and real-time data. We have fixed thousands of map errors in OSM in bustling urban areas. Later in the post, we share a sample of the detected map errors in Minneapolis with the OSM Community to improve the quality of the map. Why are maps important for Lyft? Lyft’s mission to build the world’s best transportation relies on its inherent geospatial capabilities.

Conductor is a workflow orchestration engine developed and open-sourced by Netflix. If you’re new to Conductor, this earlier blogpost and the documentation should help you get started and acclimatized to Conductor. In the last two years since inception, Conductor has seen wide adoption and is instrumental in running numerous core workflows at Netflix. Many of the Netflix Content and Studio Engineering services rely on Conductor for efficient processing of their business flows.

For the past 8 years, League has been using a patching system called RADS (Riot Application Distribution System) to deliver updates. RADS is a custom patching solution based on binary deltas that we built with League in mind. While RADS has served us well, we felt we had an opportunity to improve some key areas of the patching experience. We knew we could deliver updates much more quickly and more reliably by using a fundamentally different approach to patching, so we set out to build a brand new patcher based on content-defined chunking.

Computer power supplies don’t get much respect. As a tech enthusiast, you probably know what microprocessor is in your computer and how much physical memory it has, but odds are you know nothing about the power supply. Don’t feel bad—even for manufacturers, designing the power supply is an afterthought. That’s a shame, because it took considerable effort to create the power supplies found in personal computers, which represent a huge improvement from the circuits that powered other kinds of consumer electronics up until about the late 1970s.

Tucked within Norway’s fjord-riddled coast, nearly 3,500 fish pens corral upwards of 400 million salmon and trout. Not only does the country raise and ship more salmonoid overseas than any other in the world (1.1 million tons in 2018), farmed salmon is Norway’s third largest export behind crude petroleum and natural gas. In a global industry expected to quintuple by 2050, farmed salmon is a fine kettle of fish.