Meet Michelangelo: Uber’s machine learning platform (2019) - an overview of Uber’s work in “ML platforms”. I’ve seen these sort of systems for “industrial grade” model building and modelling pop-up more and more recently, and Uber’s take is quite interesting and comprehensive.

Why are there no empires in Age of Empires (2019) - a nifty blog I stumbled upon recently which looks at pop culture representations of history and how accurate or non-accurate they are. This post is about historical empires and their diversity, and how no empire building game (from AoE, to Civ, to Europa Universalis) really captures this.

File systems unfit as distributed storage backends (2019) - an overview of a recent paper from the Ceph team, and how they finally decided to go all-in on amanging disks for the Ceph object store, rather than rely on the file system and it’s bad fit to the issues posed by such systems.

Using spatial data with Amazon Redshift (2019) - AWS recently added spatial datatype support to Redshift, and this is a tutorial for performing some interesting aggregations with them.

Maintaing platform-product fit (2019) - an analysis of some of the problem platform teams end up having in tech companies - not enough visibility in roadmaps, not enough staffing etc. Will proposes some simple ground rules here - dedicated staffing quotas, known investment percentages, etc. so that you sidestep some of these problems.