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Showing posts from June, 2020

Uber's Michelangelo vs. Netflix's Metaflow

  Uber's Michelangelo vs. Netflix's Metaflow Michelangelo Pain point Without michelangelo, each team at uber that uses ML (that’s all of them - every interaction with the ride or eats app involves ML) would need to build their own data pipelines, feature stores, training clusters, model storage, etc.  It would take each team copious amounts of time to maintain and improve their systems, and common patterns/best practices would be hard to learn.  In addition, the highest priority use cases (business critical, e.g. rider/driver matching) would themselves need to ensure they have enough compute/storage/engineering resources to operate (outages, scale peaks, etc.), which would results in organizational complexity and constant prioritization battles between managers/directors/etc. Solution Michelangelo provides a single platform that makes the most common and most business critical ML use cases simple and intuitive for builders to use, while still allowing self-serve extensibi...

The Terms that Blind Us

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Blacklist.  Master-Slave Architecture.  Black Hat.  These terms helped build the foundations of software development as we know it today.  But do they support the narrative that black is bad and white is good?  And that having masters and slaves is ok?  Is it a racist act to continue to use them? Let's first address the 'rolling my eyes' crowd.  It's true that, given the power of God, of all the things to change with a snap of your fingers, this one wouldn't be the first.  Let's describe, to the best of our ability, the argument that we should continue using these terms: "these terms were not introduced with the intent to hurt people or make black people think they're less-than.  They're just part of a common vocabulary, and having that is important to the field of software development.  We need to be able to communicate with each other efficiently, and if we don't use the words that are already well-understood by most engineers/develope...