When you’re a company the size of Facebook with more than two billion users on millions of servers, running thousands of configuration changes every day involving trillions of configuration checks, as you can imagine, configuration is kind of a big deal. As with most things with Facebook, they face scale problems few companies have to deal and often reach the limits of mere mortal tools.

To solve their unique issues, the company developed a new configuration delivery process called Location Aware Delivery or LAD for short. Before developing LAD, the company had been using an open source tool called Zoo Keeper to distribute configuration data, and while that tool worked, it had some fairly substantial limitations for a company the size of Facebook.

Perhaps the largest of those was being limited to 5 MB distributions with configurations limited to 2500 subscribers at a time. To give you a sense of how configuration works, it involves delivering a Facebook service like Messenger in real time with the correct configuration. That could mean delivering it in English for one user and Spanish for another, all on the fly across millions of servers.

Facebook wanted to create a tool that overcame those limitations, separated the data from the distribution mechanism, had a latency time of less than five seconds and supported 10X more files than Zoo Keeper. Oh yes, and it wanted all of that to run on millions of clients and handle the crazy update rates and traffic spikes that only Facebook could bring to the table.

The product the Facebook engineering team created, LAD (wonder how the Dodgers feel about this), consists of a couple of parts: A proxy that sits on every single machine in the Facebook family and delivers configuration files to any machine that wants or needs one. The second piece is a distributor, which as the name implies delivers configuration information. It achieves this by checking for new updates, and when it finds them, it creates a distribution tree for a set of machines, which are looking for an update.

As Facebook’s Ali Haider-Zaveri wrote in a blog post announcing the new distribution method, the tree methodology helps solve a number of problems Facebook faced when distributing configuration updates at extreme volume. “By leveraging a tree, LAD ensures that updates are pushed only to interested proxies rather than to all machines in the fleet. In addition, a parent machine can directly send updates to its children, which ensures that no single machine near the root is overwhelmed,” Haider-Zaveri wrote.

As for those limitations, the company has been able to overcome those too. Instead of a 5 MB update limit, they have increased it to 100 MB, and instead of 2500 user limit, they have increased it to 40,000.

Such a system didn’t come easily. It required testing and retesting, but it has reached production today — at least for now, until Facebook faces another challenge and finds a new way to do things nobody considered before (because they never reached the scale of Facebook).

via TechCrunch
How Facebook configures its millions of servers every day

Emerging venture capital firms in smaller American cities from Indianapolis to Princeton, NJ are attracting increasingly larger funding as investors see opportunities for returns beyond the coastal confines of the nation’s largest cities and the innovation epicenter of Silicon Valley.

For the last four years, AOL co-founder Steve Case has been criss-crossing the country preaching a gospel of economic renewal for American cities driven by startup investment and technology-based entrepreneurialism. With Case those journeys culminated in the creation of a fund called Rise of the Rest — a $150 million vehicle raised by some of tech’s highest-profile names.

Investors like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet; Jim Bryer, the former head of the National Venture Capital Association and an early investor in Facebook; Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr; and Facebook’s former President Sean Parker; came together with the family offices of some of America’s wealthiest people to back the fund.

As Schmidt told The Times, “There is a large selection of relatively undervalued businesses in the heartland between the coasts, some of which can scale quickly.”

Steve Case (Revolution LLC) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017

Case and his partner JD Vance (the author of Hillbilly Elegy) are only two of the would-be pioneers that are bringing the venture investment model to the Midwest. In fact, it has been about four years since Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen left the West Coast and Silicon Valley to launch Drive Capital — the venture capital firm they founded in Columbus, Ohio.

In that time the firm has managed to raise over half a billion dollars to invest in startups based primarily in the Midwest, and has spurred an investment revolution in areas of the country that are more synonymous with tractors than with technological innovation. 

But the Midwestern investment scene isn’t just defined by Valley transplants coming in. Some of the entrepreneurs behind the region’s home-grown success stories, like Indianapolis’ ExactTarget, have launched funds of their own to plant an entirely new crop of tech companies in the Midwest.

Homegrown Heroes

These are funds like High Alpha, which just closed its second $85 million fund, High Alpha Capital II, and raised another $16.5 million for a companion venture studio that ideates and incubates startups.

High Alpha doesn’t exclusively invest in the Midwest, but the bulk of its commitments are definitely falling outside of the typical geographies where most investors spend their time, according to High Alpha managing partner Scott Dorsey, the former chief executive of Salesforce’s Indianapolis-based ExactTarget business.

For its venture studio, the firms was able to bring back Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based software as a service investor, and woo new investor Foundry Capital, a Boulder, Colo.-based firm co-founded by the legendary investor Brad Feld. Both Feld and Gordon Ritter, the founder of Emergence Capital will take seats on the High Alpha Studios board.

High Alpha investments have been made in Atlanta, Chicago, Des Moines, Minneapolis, Seattle and Toronto, says Dorsey. “You have a big economic advantage where these companies don’t have to raise nearly as much money,” Dorsey says, echoing the sentiment from Schmidt. “The neat thing also is they see that there’s not just one technology company in town and if it doesn’t work out you’re packing up and moving and seeing an actual ecosystem.”

Dorsey and the High Alpha team focus their investments on marketing and automation software — an area that can run the gamut from drone use in agricultural applications to a software service that monitors company spending on business software so that the procurement process can be more efficient.

While the venture arm is one way that the firm is seeding a new generation of technology companies across the Midwest and around the country, the venture studio is focused on building businesses in Indianapolis itself, Dorsey says.

Through the studio, Dorsey and his partners have plans to start eight to 10 new software as a service businesses, and High Alpha is tapping local talent to do it. For instance, Dorsey’s former colleague Scott McCorkle, who ran the marketing cloud business for Salesforce, is now working on a company that High Alpha is incubating. 

“We are always building that stable of entrepreneurs,” Dorsey says. 

Initiatives in states like Indiana are also helping to encourage a more entrepreneurial and tech focused mindset, according to Dorsey. Like other states, Indiana is now mandating computer science classes for every grade from K-12 in public schools. The state also has created a $250 million fund-of-funds to invest in venture funds that will commit capital to companies that will bring jobs to the state. Finally, Indiana has passed a law to forego collecting sales tax on software as a service companies that are developing and selling products and services in the state.

Look Homeward (Investment) Angel

State incentives aside, there are structural reasons for the moves in the Midwest. The companies require less capital to scale compared to companies on the coasts, thanks to rising real estate prices and the intense competition for talent. Indigenous venture investors are springing up thanks to earlier bets on technology companies coming from the region.

U.S. land grant colleges, which may well be the most underappreciated heroes of American economic growth, are increasingly becoming startup hubs. With new companies emerging from Ann Arbor, Mich., Columbus, Ohio and Madison, Wis.

“At the end of the day. The world is flat and entrepreneurs are everywhere and with technology it’s possible to start a company anywhere,” says Deven Parekh, the managing director of the multi-billion dollar growth equity investment firm Insight Venture Partners. “The West Coast is not necessarily the optimal place to start a company. The cost structure is prohibitive and there’s lots of turnover.”

For some firms, the revelation of abounding opportunities in states where the wind goes sweeping through the plains isn’t all that new. Growth capital firms like Edison Partners, the Princeton, N.J.-based investor which just closed on its tenth fund with $300 million has long been an investor in far-flung geographies. Only a minority of the firm’s investments fall inside the North Atlantic corridor of Boston and New York, according to partner Chris Sugden.

The rapid growth of VC deals in NY Metro, Midwest, and LA compared to stable growth in New England.

“Two-thirds of our investments are outside of New York or Boston [and] we haven’t participated in the Valley,” Sugden says. “My fear of being a tourist is overpriced deals like overpriced restaurants with not good quality food.”

For the 30 years it has been in business, Edison has backed companies outside of the traditional investment lanes for tech investors. “These ecosystems have been in place for a long time. The challenge for them has always been scale,” Sugden says.

“What’s happening right now is an interesting theme,” he added. “People leaving the Valley and leaving New York to go back to the South and go back to the Southeast. There’s a little bit more excitement and energy in these off of coast towns.”

And exits are beginning to follow this exodus. ExactTarget planted a flag in Indianapolis’s tech ecosystem (and the recent public offering for PluralSight was another big win for the city), while Groupon did the same in Chicago. Now a new generation of entrepreneurs is getting its first taste of Valley returns. These are people like Bill Smith, whose Birmingham, Ala.-based grocery delivery business Shipt was acquired by Target for $550 million late last year.

For Sugden, the four critical components an emerging tech ecosystem need to take flight are an educational hub to produce talent, an urban center to capture it, capital to sustain it, and government and traditional industry support to accelerate it.

“I’ve seen first-hand the incredible entrepreneurs trying to build great businesses outside of Silicon Valley,” said Vance, in a statement announcing the Rise of the Rest fund last year. “They often possess all the ingredients for success, but struggle to find enough investment capital to break through and have a positive impact on their region.”

via TechCrunch
Midwest rising

Easier way to change oil

I have had my oil changed by the dealer, a local mechanic and even those Jiffy people. They’ve all done a good job, but I like changing my own oil. It’s a bit of a meditative exercise and gives me a chance to see what’s going on with my car. While I enjoy doing the oil change, my least favorite part of changing my oil is getting underneath the car, removing the drain plug and draining the oil. Dealing with the jack, stripping the drain plug every now and again, and spilling the used oil were nearly enough to stop me from changing my oil.

A friend of mine recently had his car serviced at a local dealership and he told me about a new machine that they used to drain the oil without jacking the car or removing the drain plug. The oil change technician inserted a probe into the dipstick tube and used a vacuum to drain the oil. This sounded very interesting and encouraged me to research more about this system and see if it was small enough to be used at home.

My research revealed that there were a number of these systems available for the do-it-yourselfer. After I compared features of the different brands, I settled on the Topsider. Originally designed for the boating market, the Topsider is all-metal. This feature was the one that seemed most important to me. The majority of other vacuum oil changers were made of plastic and I was concerned that the plastic would become brittle over time.

Changing the oil is really simple:

1. Make sure the engine is warm to make the oil flow easily
2. Place tube in dipstick tube
3. Close pinch valve on hose
4. Pump the canister 50 times to build vacuum
5. Release the pinch valve

It takes about 8 minutes for the oil to leave your engine. I usually use this time to remove the oil filter, open oil bottles, etc. Most dipsticks reach all the way to the bottom of the oil pan. I push the hose til I feel the bottom of the pan. When I first got it, I would open my drain plug after vacuuming and very little came out (a few drops) so I suspect the vacuum gets most of the oil out. It will pull sludge out as well up through the tube. The can holds 2 gallons of oil. Once the oil is out of your car you can remove the vacuum pump and suction tube and seal the container for transport to your recycling center.

I think the clincher for me was discovering that this was the technique that Mercedes was using in its dealerships (albeit using a commercial machine).

— Kurt Wendelken

07/18/18

via Cool Tools
Topside Oil Changer

Excuse us as we mangle U.S. history (apologies to Paul Revere), but “CrunchMatch is coming! CrunchMatch is coming!

CrunchMatch is TechCrunch’s free business match-making service that connects early-stage startup founders and investors who share similar business interests and profiles. And if you bought — or plan to buy — Founder, Investor or Insiders passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2018, you get access to this awesome time-saving tool. CrunchMatch kicks off in two weeks, when you’ll receive an invitation to fill out your business profile.

CrunchMatch is an indispensable tool to have at your fingertips while you attend Disrupt SF 2018 — our biggest Disrupt event ever. We’ve moved to Moscone Center West, which provides three times the floor space. And we’ll need every square foot of it to accommodate 10,000+ attendees and the more than 1,200 exhibitors and sponsors you’ll find in Startup Alley, the show floor and the very heartbeat of Disrupt.

Here’s how CrunchMatch, powered by our partner Brella, works. If you purchase a Founder pass or a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, you’ll receive an invitation to provide information about your early-stage startup — its tech category, funding stage, where it’s located and its current funding status.

If you purchase an Investor or an Insider pass, you’ll receive an invitation to create a profile specifying your investment categories, the funding stage you’re looking for and your preferred geographic locations. CrunchMatch takes all that information and works its algorithmic magic to match suitable founders and investors based on the profile information they provide.

The platform lets you act on its recommendations. You can send, receive, accept and decline invitations, set up appointment meetings and reserve private meeting space in our dedicated CrunchMatch lounge.

What does this mean in the real-world sense? Good question. It means you can save yourself a lot of time by not talking to the wrong people. You have three days at the show, and CrunchMatch helps you make the most of it. It’s great on-the-fly too, so if you see a promising company competing in Startup Battlefield, use CrunchMatch to help you set up a meeting within minutes.

Take it from Michael Kocan, an early-stage investor at Trend Discovery, who had this to say about his CrunchMatch experience:

“I get the most value from Disrupt at the intersection of CrunchMatch and Startup Battlefield. I can quickly schedule a meeting for later that day. I had over 35 meetings with startups that I pre-vetted using CrunchMatch, and I made a significant investment in one.”

Attendees used the CrunchMatch platform last year at Disrupt SF 2017 where it helped create more than 1,300 meetings, and we expect to triple that number at Disrupt SF 2018. That’s gonna save a whole lot of shoe leather.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7, and CrunchMatch can help anyone with a Founder, Investor or Insider pass navigate the show more efficiently. If you haven’t bought a ticket yet, you can buy your passes right here. If you have, good on ya! And keep your eye peeled for your profile invitation in a few weeks. We can’t wait to see you in San Francisco!

via TechCrunch
CrunchMatch at Disrupt SF 2018 opening soon for founders and investors

The Parkland kids were probably feeling a little desperate. Their 15 minutes of fame was coming to an end, so they had to do something. They decided a bus tour was just the thing. Not only would it make a few national headlines at the start, but it would create local headlines all over the country.

Oh, and they could try and keep up the pressure on our right to keep and bear arms.

To their credit, they’re not just hitting friendly areas like New York, Massachusetts, or California. They’re also going to places like Texas. I’ll give them credit for that.

But they’re still wasting their time.

Students who survived the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, joined young activists from Texas in a series of panel discussions on gun control last week.

Their vision for gun violence prevention is in stark contrast with state lawmakers’ plans.

The Parkland students are on a national summer road tour with other young activists. Their goal is to keep the gun control conversation going, and get people who care about that issue to show up at the polls.

Cameron Kasky was a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a former classmate entered his school and killed 17 people in February.

He said the “Never Again” movement he and his classmates created is not calling for a “national collection of guns,” just some restrictions to gun access.

“This is us taking a problem that has not been fixed and saying, surprisingly enough, if you look at history, not addressing a problem will not fix that problem,” Kasky said.

Much of the town hall in San Antonio focused on bringing change to a red state known for its pro-gun-rights politicians. Panelists talked about common arguments, and starting a dialogue about gun rights.

Here’s the problem with that. Where are they trying to start that dialogue? They’re starting it with people who already agree with them. Their bus tour involves setting up in places where the audience is mostly going to be made up of people who already support them.

Gun rights activists have little interest in attending, though some do thankfully.

Even then, there’s no real dialogue being opened. Of course, they don’t really want a dialogue. They aren’t interested in listening to the other side. Every time I’ve tried to engage people like that, I’m accused of wanting to see more people slaughtered in mass shootings which, as I’ve noted before, really pisses me off. However, it tells me that they don’t want a dialogue. They don’t want a discussion. They want to lecture.

Which is why few pro-gun activists will attend.

In other words, this entire bus tour is about preaching to the choir. They’re reaching out to supporters. They’re not actually reaching anyone who doesn’t already agree with them and hang on their every word like a pathetic little sycophant.

Which is what this is really about. They’re not going to accomplish anything, but they get to feel like they are because they see all their little foot soldiers who won’t accomplish anything either, but they can at least feel like they have.

Good job, kiddos.

The post Why The Parkland-Inspired ‘Never Again’ Tour Will Never Accomplish Anything appeared first on Bearing Arms.

via Bearing Arms
Why The Parkland-Inspired ‘Never Again’ Tour Will Never Accomplish Anything

via Ars Technica
3D-printed gun lawsuit ends after 3+ years—in gun publishers’ favor

July 4^th, American Independence day when we think about the resolve of American patriots, give thanks for their foresight and courage. We review what they went through and the tools that made victories possible.

And both of those things, Washington and guns were lacking in Poland on July 4^th 1946. Poland has been in the news a lot as of late. For those that don’t know it, July 4^th was the anniversary of the 72nd anniversary of the Kielce pogrom. No, no, the Kielce pogrom occurred after WWII had ended. Kielce

Kielce was occupied on 4 September 1939 by the German army. Approximately 24,000 Jews lived in the town, a third of all its inhabitants.

…..

On 31 March 1941 the Kielce Ghetto was established. Jews from the surrounding villages were forced to move into the ghetto.

The ghetto liquidation took place from 20 – 24 August 1942

…..

In March 1943, during a selection in the Kielce camp, the SS killed all Jewish doctors and their families, and in May 1943 a group of children. After the May selection the Germans established several work camps.

…

After the war around 150 Jews left their hidings and returned to Kielce. They found a place in their former parish hall, waiting for a possibility to emigrate to Palestine.

…..

In June 1946 they were accused of having committed a ritual murder on a missing Polish boy. On 1 July 1946 a furious crowd gathered round the building and on 4 July 1946 they killed 42 Jews. (At least, most likely more. ~S)

…

Until today historians discuss who provoked this anti-Jewish riot. Many inhabitants participated in the pogrom and around 100 people were arrested by the communist police; among them people who did not participate in the crime but being known as anti-communists.

Still today some people suspect that the pogrom was provoked by communists for eliminating opponents of the new regime in Poland.

Because Communism is a G-dless “religion” for one thing. Because they were coming back to reclaim their property for another.

If only they had some warning that their “neighbors” were going to “suddenly turn on them” they certainly would have been better prepared to defend themselves after all they had just been through. If only law enforcement had know ahead of time, they could have been prepared to defend the Jews like the brave British Constables (pppffffttt) did in 1929 Hevron massacreⁱ. From the Jewish Virtual Library

The Jews had no adequate means for self-defense since the police had confiscated the few pistols among them just one day previously. In this pogrom, the largest attack on Jews following the Nazi era, 60–70 Jews were murdered, including children and pregnant women, and around 100 were injured

And this is all just in Kielce! I recently read a book called Defy The Darkness by Joe Rosenblum. Joe lived in Poland prior to WWII, he went through several concentration camps and survived as well as saving others. And he will very well tell you what it was like living in Poland before, during and after nazi occupation. He will also tell you what it was like living in more than one concentration camp, and how he managed to survive. He also survived surgery by the infamous Dr. Mengele, who actually did operate on Joe, despite him being a Jew, to save his life. As to the German people not knowing what was going on? Pffftt, he told what it was like being on one of those death camp marches when they were being marched through German towns. It’s also interesting that Mengele didn’t believe any of the bad stuff said about the Jews. He thought they were brilliant people who had done nothing wrong to the Germans.

But why were so many Polish Jews sitting ducks? Well, at one time Poland had the greatest tolerance and acceptance of Jews. History of the Jews in Poland

The history of the Jews in Poland dates back over 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the Partitions of Poland which began in 1772, in particular, with the discrimination and persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire.

Another reason is some refused to see reality, they refused to accept it, even as they were on their way to the death camps. This is another article well worth reading, it’s not long either.

On one occasion, my grandfather told me, his unit of partisan fighters blew up a railroad bridge and waited in ambush. When the train eventually approached and was forced to stop in order to avoid plummeting into the canyon depths, the partisans charged aboard and killed all of the Nazi troops who were manning the cars. Afterwards, the partisans opened a passenger car from which they had heard the sound of people talking excitedly and crying. Inside was a group of Jews dressed in their finest clothes and grasping suitcases filled with their possessions as if they were on their way to a long vacation. The Jews on board were shocked and apprehensive about the strange-looking people from the woods who had attacked their train and killed all of the Nazi soldiers, initially refusing to believe that their liberators were Jewish themselves.

Yes, no doubt the Polish people had the highest regard for the Jews living among themselves.

House in Kielce, Poland, found to be made of Jewish gravestones. To be quite honest, it wasn’t a house, it was a cowshed. Suspect the nazis did not build many cowsheds while they were there.

An article from the Daniel Pipes web site (article not written by Mr. Pipes, but rather by a contributor) Poland had a terrible long history of anti-Semitism before the World War II and is still. He ends his column by saying

Finally, not all Poles are bad….

No doubt, but in the radio show Phantom Nation the host points out,

Many Poles lost their lives trying to help the Jews. Yad Vashem has honored almost 7 thousand Christians, but out of a country of 35 million in 1939, that’s not that many people . Of the 3 million Polish Jews that lost their lives, 200 thousand were murdered by at least as many Polish Christians, not nazis. The Polish nation has a history of violence against the Jews. Bibi can’t see the serious anti-Jews acts, he thinks with a nice statement they will love us. For Poles, WWII was about the nazi aggression to Poles, they have not room for what the Poles did to the Jews. The host points out Bibi’s exceedingly weak response to Poland’s new laws.

It’s really a good program, you can listen to the whole show.

Other sources also chide Bibi for his very weak response. Which of course if why I truly feel Moshe Feiglin would be a far better leader. Controversy Over Israel-Poland Joint Statement

A couple of items you may or not know, Poland wanted to ship all the Jews to….Madagascar, and the Evian Conference on Jewish refugees preceded and enabled giving validity to the 1942 Wannsee Protocol. France, betraying Jews since looooong before Sarah Halimi was murdered.

Joe Rosenblum also looked very Aryan, that’s how he managed to work on a farm, survive and help support his family.

And today?

Poland’s official anti-Semitism, basically, you’re forbidden to suggest Poland had anything to do with the slaughter of Jews. Do so and you get a fine and jail time.

Not surprisingly, many Israelis and holocaust survivors objected to this. The law was put on a freeze.

And then, there is the decision on how to “commemorate” the Kielce pogrom.

Historian Prof. Jan Grabowski, author of the book Hunt for the Jews, sparked public outcry in Poland when he determined that more than 200,000 Jews in Poland were murdered directly or indirectly by locals and that most citizens of the occupied state stood idly by, even when they understood what was taking place…..

Nowhere in the program is there mention of Polish assistance, complicity, or even acquiescence in the atrocities committed against the Jews in Kielce. Indeed, from the program it is difficult to guess who, if anybody, murdered Jews in Kielce, as it appears the entire Polish population was busy assisting them.

So basically, academia decided rather than look at what really happened, they would just celebrate the minority event of some of the righteous helping Jews and ignore how many Jews were killed by their fellow Poles. As you can tell, academia planned the event. Let’s ignore the tragedy of what happened to the Jews and just talk about the few that may have tried to help.

It would be easier to accept that Poland is no longer this way if they weren’t trying to force people to stop discussing and learning history, because those who ignore it, or cover it up? Are doomed to repeat it.

via The Zelman Partisans
Poland

Most enterprise software is delivered as a service these days because paying an expert to manage a complex application just makes too much sense. But that service has to work, and based on the experiences of two prominent CIOs speaking at our recent GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit, some prominent SaaS companies still have a ways to go.

“We’ve learned to ‘trust but verify’ going forward, even with some of the large SaaS providers,” said Charu Jain, CIO at Alaska Airlines, on a panel discussion during the event that also featured Janice Newell, CIO of Providence St. Joseph Health and 451 Research analyst Nancy Gohring. Uptime guarantees and the service-level agreements that enforce them are table stakes for a lot of large SaaS deals, but despite their promises, not all vendors follow through on crucial services like disaster recovery.

Newell shared a painful tale of an unnamed SaaS provider (she ducked my request to name and shame during the Q&A session) that was providing cloud-based speech recognition services to Providence St. Joseph’s thousands of doctors. Doctors have been using voice recorders to take notes for decades, freeing their hands to examine patients or monitor equipment, and when that service went down, “it was not a pleasant day,” Newell said, in quite the understatement.

Turns out that SaaS provider had been hit with the WannaCry ransomware, which disrupted tech operations around the globe last year before it was contained. Getting hit with such an attack is bad enough, but in this case, it was even worse: “we found out that one of our SaaS providers, whom we thought had all of this great disaster-recovery capability, business-continuity capability, we found out they in fact did not have this capability,” she said.

The service remained down for an astonishing 30 days, during which Providence St. Joseph moved its speech-recognition users back onto its own hardware.

Alaska hasn’t run into anything quite that bad, but it has seen enough to require that SaaS vendors clearly demonstrate their disaster-recovery capabilities and plans for redundant services should something go wrong, Jain said. “Some of our larger SaaS providers are on their own journey” figuring out how to deliver distributed services with scale and reliability, she said.

Watch the full video of this GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit session above, and see additional coverage here.

via GeekWire
How to deal with SaaS slackers: CIOs share lessons from unreliable Software as a Service vendors

via Dilbert Daily Strip
Comic for July 15, 2018

namespace App\Models;

use App\User;
use Chelout\RelationshipEvents\Concerns\HasManyEvents;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Country extends Model
{
    use HasManyEvents;

    protected $fillable = [
        'name',
    ];

    public function users()
    {
        return $this->hasMany(User::class);
    }

    public static function boot()
    {
        parent::boot();

        static::hasManySaving(function ($parent, $related) {
            Log::info("Saving user's country {$parent->name}.");
        });

        static::hasManySaved(function ($parent, $related) {
            Log::info("User's country is now set to {$parent->name}.");
        });
    }
}

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Chelout\RelationshipEvents\Concerns\HasBelongsToEvents;

class User extends Model
{
    use HasBelongsToEvents;

    /**
     * Get the country associated with the user.
     */
    public function country()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Country::class);
    }

    protected static function boot()
    {
        parent::boot();

        static::belongsToAssociating(function ($relation, $related, $parent) {
            Log::info("Associating country {$parent->name} with user.");
        });

        static::belongsToAssociated(function ($relation, $related, $parent) {
            Log::info("User has been assosiated with country {$parent->name}.");
        });
    }
}

$country = App\Models\Country::first();

$user = factory(User::class)->create([
    'name' => 'John Smith',
]);

// Assosiate user with country
// This will fire belongsToAssociating and belongsToAssociated events
$user->country()->associate($country);

via Laravel News
Laravel Relationship Events