Moving Beyond Boundaries: The Art of Diligence

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They also could be utilizing exploits which you have not protected against - so given all of this potential how do you know that you are not currently compromised by the bad guys? They will focus on a customer or two at a time and then shut down activities to move on to another unsuspecting victim. Most international hackers are well organized, well educated, and have development skills that most engineering managers would admire if not for the malevolent subject matter. Rarely are these hacks performed by bots, most occur by humans setting up a chain of software elements across unsuspecting entities enabling inbound and outbound access.

What can you do? Hacking is dynamic and threats are constantly evolving.

Further, for your highest value environments here are some questions that you should consider: Would you be aware of unexpected processes running? Can you model expected outbound traffic and monitor this? The answer should be yes. Then you can look for abnormalities and even correlate this traffic with other activities in your environment.

Just as you and your business are constantly evolving to service your customers and to attract new ones, the bad guys are evolving their practices too. Some of their approaches are rudimentary because we allow it but when we buckle down they have to get more innovative. Ensure that you are constantly identifying all the entry points and close them. Then remain diligent to new approaches they might take. Continue evolving your training and keep the awareness high within your staff - technical and non-technical alike.

Utilize best practices for security and continue to evolve. Utilize external or build internal expertise in the security space and ensure that those skills are dynamic and expanding. Utilize recurring testing practices to identify vulnerabilities in your environment and to prepare against emerging attack patterns. Open Source Software as a malware on ramp. Security Considerations for Technical Due Diligence. How do they ensure that the technology can support that growth?

That definition is accurate when applied to common investment objectives. The question is, what are the key attributes of software that allow it to scale, along with the anti-patterns that prevent scaling? Or, in other words, what do we look for at AKF Partners when determining scalability? While an exhaustive list is beyond the scope of this blog post, we can quickly use the Scalability Cube and apply the analytical methodology that helps us quickly determine where the application will experience issues.

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AKF Partners introduced the scalability cube, a scale design model for building resilience application architectures using patterns and practices that apply broadly to any application. The Scale Cube helps teams keep critical dimensions of system scale in mind when solutions are designed. Scalability is all about the capability of a design to support ever growing client traffic without compromising performance.

An architecture is scalable if each layer in the multi-layered architecture is scalable. For example, a well-designed application should be able to scale seamlessly as demand increases and decreases and be resilient enough to withstand the loss of one or more computer resources. A large system that must be deployed holistically is difficult to scale. In the case where your application was designed to be stateless, scale is possible by adding more machines, virtual or physical. However, adding instances requires powerful machines that are not cost-effective to scale.

Additionally, you have the added risk of extensive regression testing because you cannot update small components on their own. Instead, we recommend a microservices-based architecture using containers e. Docker that allows for independent deployment of small pieces and the scale of individual services instead of one big application. Monolithic applications have other negative effects, such as development complexity. For example, one large solution loaded in the development environment can slow down a developer and gets worse as more developers add components.

This causes slower and slower load times on development machines, and developers stomping on each other with changes or creating complex merges as they modify the same files. Another example of development complexity issue is large outdated pieces of the architecture or database where one person is an expert. That person becomes a bottleneck to changes in a specific part of the system. As well, they are now a SPOF single point of failure if they are the only resource that understands the monolithic beast.

The monolithic complexity and the rate of code change make it hard for any developer to know all the idiosyncrasies of the system, hence more defects are introduced. A decoupled system with small components helps prevents this problem. When validating database design for appropriate scale, there are some key anti-patterns to check. This design can end up blocking queries and holding up the application. Large data footprints, with significant locking, can quickly slow database performance to a crawl. Report generation can severely hamper the performance of critical user scenarios. Separating out read-only data from read-write data can positively improve scale.

For example, Customers in different geographies may be partitioned to various servers more compatible with their locations. In turn, separating out the data allows for enhanced scale since requests can be split out. Forcing less structured data into a relational database can also lead to waste and performance issues, and here, a NoSQL solution may be more suitable. We also look for mixed presentation and business logic. A software anti-pattern that can be prevalent in legacy code is not separating out the UI code from the underlying logic.

Layer separation allows putting just enough hardware against each layer for more minimal resource usage and overall cost efficiency. The separation of the business logic from SPROCs stored procedures also improves the maintainability and scalability of the system. Another key area we dig for is stateful application servers. Designing an application that stores state on an individual server is problematic for scalability. For example, if some business logic runs on one server and stores user session information or other data in a cache on only one server, all user requests must use that same server instead of a generic machine in a cluster.

This prevents adding new machine instances that can field any request that a load balancer passes its way. Caching is a great practice for performance, but it cannot interfere with horizontal scale. Actions on the system that trigger processing times of minutes or more can affect scalability e. Blocking operations exasperate the problem.

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Look for solutions that queue up long-running requests, execute them in the background, send events when they are complete asynchronous communication and do not tie up key application and database servers. Communication with dependent systems for long-running requests using synchronous methods also affects performance, scale, and reliability. Common solutions for intersystem communication and asynchronous messaging include RabbitMQ and Kafka.

Again, the list above is not exhaustive but outlines some key areas that AKF Partners look for when evaluating an architecture for scalability. No matter the size of company or size of the investment, we can help. You utilize crowdsourced design, development and validation to conveniently speed your engineering. So just pull a library down off the web, build your project, and your company is ready to go. Or is that the best approach? This code will be running in critical environments - like your SaaS servers, internal systems, or on customer systems. Convenience comes at a price and there are some well known situations of hacks embedded in popular open source libraries.

What is the best approach to getting the benefits of OSS and maintaining the integrity of your solution? Good practices are a necessity to ensure a high level of security. Just like when you utilize OSS and then test functionality, scale, and load - you should be validating against vulnerabilities. Pre-production vulnerability and penetration testing is a good start.

Also, utilize good internal process and reviews.

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Always utilize known good repositories and validate the project sponsors. Perform diligence on the committers just like you would for your own employees. You likely perform some type of background check on your employees before making an offer - whether going to a third party or simply looking them up on linkedin and asking around. OSS committers have the same risk to your company - why not do the same for them? That may not be true for your OSS solutions, and as such your responsibility for validation is at least slightly higher.

There are plenty of projects coming from reputable sources that you can rely on. Ensure that your path to production is only coming from artifacts which have been built on internal sources which were either developed or reviewed by your team. Also, be intentional about OSS library upgrades, this should planned and part of the process. Be diligent in your approach to ensure you only see the upside of open source. Here are the top 20 most repeated failures and recommendations: Yes, we know that it takes additional engineering work and additional testing to make nearly any change backwards compatible but in our experience that work has the greatest ROI of any work you can do.

The one thing that is most likely to give you an opportunity to find other work i. You are sending your team the wrong message! A release has nothing to do with creating shareholder value and very often it is not even the end of your work with a specific product offering or set of features.

See 10 below on incenting a culture of excellence. Does your operations team get surprised about some new feature and its associated load on a database? Does engineering get surprised by some new firewall or routing infrastructure resulting in dropped connections? The simpler the solution, the lower the cost and the faster the time to market.

If you get blank stares from peers or within your organization when you explain a design do not assume that you have a team of idiots — assume that you have made the solution overly complex and ask for assistance in resolving the complexity. In the engineering world, a failure to look back into the past and find the most commonly repeated mistakes is a failure to maximize the value of the team.

In the operations world, a failure to correlate past site incidents and find thematically related root causes is a guarantee to continue to fight the same fires over and over. The best and easiest way to improve our future performance is to track our past failures, group them into groups of causation and treat the root cause rather than the symptoms.

Keep incident logs and review them monthly and quarterly for repeating issues and improve your performance. Perform post mortems of projects and site incidents and review them quarterly for themes. If you are a hyper growth SaaS site, however, you do not want to be locked into a vendor for your future business viability; rather you want to make sure that the scalability of your site is a core competency and that it is built into your architecture. This is not to say that after you design your system to scale horizontally that you will not rely upon some technology to help you; rather, once you define how you can horizontally scale you want to be able to use any of a number of different commodity systems to meet your needs.

As an example, most popular databases and NoSQL solutions provide for multiple types of native replication to keep hosts in synch. QA is a risk mitigation function and it should be treated as such. Defects are an engineering problem and that is where the problem should be treated. If you are finding a large number of bugs in QA, do not reward QA — figure out how to fix the problem in engineering! Consider implementing test driven design as part of your PDLC. If you find problems in production, do not punish QA; figure out how you created them in engineering.

All of this is not to say that QA should not be held responsible for helping to mitigate risk — they should — but your quality problems are an engineering issue and should be treated within engineering. The best projects we have seen with the greatest returns have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary in design. Go ahead and paint that vivid description of the ideal future, but approach it as a series of small but potentially rapid steps to get to that future. And if you do not have architects who can help paint that roadmap from here to there, go find some new architects.

If each of your services are designed to be Eliminate synchronous calls wherever possible and create fault-isolative architectures to help you identify problems quickly.

You will never know what your team can do unless you find out how far they can go. Set aggressive yet achievable goals and motivate them with your vision. Understand that people make mistakes and that we will all ultimately fail somewhere, but expect that no failure will happen twice. If you do not expect excellence and lead by example, you will get less than excellence and you will fail in your mission of maximizing shareholder wealth.

If you did not do it then, the time to think about scaling for the future is right now! That is not to say that you have to implement everything on the day you launch, but that you should have thought about how it is that you are going to scale your application services and your database services. You should have made conscious decisions about tradeoffs between speed to market and scalability and you should have ensured that the code will not preclude any of the concepts we have discussed in our scalability postings.

Hold quarterly scalability meetings where you discuss what you need to do to scale to 10x your current volume and create projects out of the action items. Approach your scale needs in evolutionary rather than revolutionary fashion as in 8 above. The point of relying upon third parties to scale was not meant as an excuse to build everything yourselves.

The real point to be made is that you have to focus on your core competencies and not dilute your engineering efforts with things that other companies or open source providers can do better than you. Unless you are building databases as a business, you are probably not the best database builder. And if you are not the best database builder, you have no business building your own databases for your SaaS platform.

Focus on what you should be the best at: Let other companies focus on the other things you need like routers, operating systems, application servers, databases, firewalls, load balancers and the like. The real problem, regardless of the lifecycle you use, is likely one of commitment and measurement.

For instance, in most Agile lifecycles there needs to be consistent involvement from the business or product owner. A lack of involvement leads to misunderstandings and delayed products. Another very common problem is an incomplete understanding or training on the existing PDLC. Everyone in the organization should have a working knowledge of the entire process and how their roles fit within it. The Top Five Most Common PDLC Failures 14 Inability to Hire Great People Quickly Often when growing an engineering team quickly the engineering managers will push back on hiring plans and state that they cannot possibly find, interview, and hire engineers that meet their high standards.

Basically, this guy figured out how to connect brain synapsis with machines so that the electrical impulses that you THINK will be sent to a machine that will then DO. I had to read this book with a dictionary in hand. May 31, Veena Somareddy rated it it was amazing. Indepth knowledge of how your brain works and interacting with BMI's. A really long book, but Dr. Miguel is at the forefront of the BMI technologies, so its worth a read. Great Book about Neuroscience field. Agir bir dili var , zaman alan bir kitap.

Okumak keyifli ama populer bilim kitabi modunda okunmasi zor. Mar 31, Drew rated it really liked it. Looked back over this review and can't recall why I only gave this three stars. The book itself is written as well as any non-fiction popular science title, but the research it describes is simply incredible. The reader gets a first-person account of how some of the most amazing brain research is being done and by about half-way through the book, will understand the fundamental shift in thinking away from the static model of the mammalian brain.

If that sounds dry and boring- consider this: A collection of neurons is responsible for say, moving your left arm. To connect a device to be controlled by your brain then, would just! When you tried to move your left arm then, it would trigger those sensors and operate a mechanical arm. Turns out though, the brain is much more plastic than previously imagined.

It is possible to reroute the neurons for the left arm to instead control the right eyelid- or to hook up those sensors to an entirely different part of the brain and let the subject learn how to operate the external machine much like a child learns to walk. Understanding this pattern has so many implications, not only for brain-machine interfaces, but ways to improve brain treatment and maybe insight into building self-organizing robotics and computing.

If you're at all interested in learning how the brain works at least the motor cortex anyway , this book will give you deep insights in an accessible way. It reads like a story, not like a research paper. Mar 31, David Everling rated it really liked it Recommended to David by: A neuroscience memoir of thought-provoking work, experimental brain interfaces and thought control tests told through the lens of Nicolelis' own academic history and Brazilian based life story.

The book offers specific and compelling evidence for not only controlling robotic systems remotely, but also for how our brain is naturally built to incorporate external apparatus and sense data directly into the body map and further into the sense of self, for brain connected robotics that restore the ab A neuroscience memoir of thought-provoking work, experimental brain interfaces and thought control tests told through the lens of Nicolelis' own academic history and Brazilian based life story.

The book offers specific and compelling evidence for not only controlling robotic systems remotely, but also for how our brain is naturally built to incorporate external apparatus and sense data directly into the body map and further into the sense of self, for brain connected robotics that restore the ability to walk to the paralyzed, for thought-based personal interaction, and even for direct brain to brain connections that create literal brain networks and a higher order of complexity. Very inspiring concrete experiments to shake some of these formerly sci-fi concepts loose from their intermediate fiction.

Indeed the specifics of the experimental methods are sharp enough to be double-edged, disengaging from the overall visionary narrative to bring the reader back down into the due diligence of science and Nicolelis' experience as researcher and academic, which, while important to establish the validity of the book's premise, are less accessible than the grand ideas described in the preceding paragraph. Still, Nicolelis does it right by interspersing anecdotes of Brazilian football matches or personal history to keep the book moving.

Valeu muito a pena a leitura. Jul 01, Emily rated it really liked it Shelves: Beyond Boundaries is a very interesting but difficult read. Nicolelis describes his innovative experiments with brain-machine interfaces BMIs and discusses the clinical and philosophical implications of these new neuroscience technologies. He's done some truly incredible research--for instance, he designed a project in which electrical brain activity was transmitted from Durham, NC to Kyoto, Japan in real time, allowing a monkey to control an overseas robot with its mind alone.

This book i Beyond Boundaries is a very interesting but difficult read. This book is extremely well-written but highly technical; I had to read certain parts several times to understand them. Nicolelis works at Duke! Jan 14, Lance rated it it was amazing.

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I wouldn't say this is for the lay person unless you're already familiar with neuroanatomy and some college level math. I wasn't as familiar as I had hoped with Nicolelis' research, and had to look up things frequently in the beginning, but that's also why I read the book, to learn something right? I loved the level of detail throughout the book, and though at first I thought the author was a little too fanciful with his real-world anecdotes, they grew on me to the point of adoration! This is a I wouldn't say this is for the lay person unless you're already familiar with neuroanatomy and some college level math.

This is a great read for those interested in brain machine interfaces and is a solid overview of the work and people that have made it an actual thing today. May 05, Jian rated it really liked it. First is his post-doc advisor is a still-active neuroscientist in my department. Obama's brain project just set out this year. Some people say this book is the reason for this marathon project. After monthly observation read , I found this book do touch your brain to re-think about methods of studying human brain, are we on the right track of neural signal recording.

Sep 02, Alderlv rated it really liked it. Sep 22, Hom Sack rated it did not like it. This book reads more like a text book. There is too much detail and is too technical for a general audience. Too much time is spent wasted? But if you have nothing better to read, this book will do. Jul 26, Gabriel rated it really liked it. It's an amazing book that leads us to the way Nicolelis defeated a huge challenge which was proving that the mind is relativistic, against the majority of the neuroscientists, and how we can use it to transcend our body and perceptions.

I repeat, it's amazing.

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The game arcade in this video was custom built from scratch by Peter and student volunteers. There are controls for 4 simultaneous players. Six games have already been created. The Arcade remains on site for students to continue game testing and development. Established in , The Bessies acknowledge outstanding creative work by independent artists in the fields of dance and related performance in New York City. Vita repurposed motion capture data collected from Company dancers and transformed the data into alluring images projected into the stage performance.

Canemaker is one of the leading figures in American animation. An award-winning animator of profoundly original and personal films, he is also the author of numerous works on the medium's history. Canemaker shared his insights on animation history while introducing a selection of his own work including "Bottom's Dream", a meditation on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and his Oscar-winning short "The Moon and the Son". Mike Altman wrote, "Lots of changes: The exhibit highlighted artists exploring the connection between science and technology and the artists' inspiration and creative processes.

Recent job change for German: Last summer she presented "Visualizing the A Scale: Ian Butterfield is heading into his 5th year at BlueSky Studios. He was recently promoted to Senior Materials Technical Director. Last year he finished work on Ice Age: Scrat the squirrel , Manny the mammoth ,. Ellie the girl mammoth and a variety of other characters, props and sets.

On the short, he made materials for Scrat, the time machine, and the sword Excalibur. Ian also worked on test projects. Wooksang Chang had his short film, " ToyArtist: He is very busy and wishes everyone well. Tom DeFanti wrote to say his new "coordinates" are: Todd Fechter is living in Dallas, TX and freelancing until the upcoming Spring semester when he will be teaching full time at the University of Texas, Dallas. He plans to pursue a tenure track position beginning Autumn He and his wife Jaime had their first child, Ella on August 23rd.

Todd says, "she is awesome I love being a dad! It is a biennial award of which John is the 7th recipient. My specialties reside with Linux-based high-end graphics workstations used in engineering animation, and complex computation. My dedicated support client is DreamWorks Animation. She adds, "I was doing 3D art models, textures, etc.

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