Split Your Overwhelmed Teams:
Two Teams of Five is Not the Same as One Team of Ten
This team?s low morale and high stress were a result of the members feeling overwhelmed by too many responsibilities. The 10-by-10 communication structure made it difficult to achieve consensus, there were too many meetings, and everyone was suffering from the high cognitive load. By splitting into two teams, each can be more nimble, which the manager likes, and have a lower cognitive load, which the team likes. There is more opportunity for repetition, which lets people develop skills and demonstrate them. Altogether, this helps reduce stress and improve morale.
Literate Executables
Literate executables redefine the relationship between compiled binaries and source code to be that of chicken and egg, so it's easy to derive either from the other. This episode of Drill Bits provides a general-purpose literacy tool and showcases the advantages of literacy by retrofitting it onto everyone's favorite command-line utility.
OSS Supply-chain Security: What Will It Take?
While enterprise security teams naturally tend to turn their focus primarily to direct attacks on their own infrastructure, cybercrime exploits now are increasingly aimed at easier targets upstream. This has led to a perfect storm, since virtually all significant codebase repositories at this point include at least some amount of open-source software. But opportunities also abound there for the authors of malware. The broader cybercrime world, meanwhile, has noted that open-source supply chains are generally easy to penetrate. What's being done at this point to address the apparent risks?
The Elephant in the Room:
It's time to get the POSIX elephant off our necks.
By writing code for the elephant that is Posix, we lose the chance to take advantage of modern hardware.
OCCAM-v2: Combining Static and Dynamic Analysis for Effective and Efficient Whole-program Specialization:
Leveraging scalable pointer analysis, value analysis, and dynamic analysis
OCCAM-v2 leverages scalable pointer analysis, value analysis, and dynamic analysis to create an effective and efficient tool for specializing LLVM bitcode. The extent of the code-size reduction achieved depends on the specific deployment configuration. Each application that is to be specialized is accompanied by a manifest that specifies concrete arguments that are known a priori, as well as a count of residual arguments that will be provided at runtime. The best case for partial evaluation occurs when the arguments are completely concretely specified. OCCAM-v2 uses a pointer analysis to devirtualize calls, allowing it to eliminate the entire body of functions that are not reachable by any direct calls. The hybrid analysis feature can handle cases that are challenging for static analysis, such as input loops, string processing, and external data (in files, for example). On the suite of evaluated programs, OCCAM-v2 was able to reduce the instruction count by 40.6 percent on average, taking a median of 2.4 seconds.
Reinventing Backend Subsetting at Google:
Designing an algorithm with reduced connection churn that could replace deterministic subsetting
Backend subsetting is useful for reducing costs and may even be necessary for operating within the system limits. For more than a decade, Google used deterministic subsetting as its default backend subsetting algorithm, but although this algorithm balances the number of connections per backend task, deterministic subsetting has a high level of connection churn. Our goal at Google was to design an algorithm with reduced connection churn that could replace deterministic subsetting as the default backend subsetting algorithm.