IoT AI: Watch with Alexa

Take Alexa with you everywhere you go with this sleek smartwatch – BGR

"Seamleasly integrated with Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based voice service. Just tap and ask Alexa, to enjoy thousands of skills on the go, such as hearing the latest news, weather and traffic reports, check sport scores, and much more.
Connect tastefully blends the longevity of an analog watch with smartwatch convenience – lasting 3-5 days on a single charge and up to 2 years on analog. Supports iOS 8/android 4.0.3 and later"

Amazon.com: GUESS Men's Stainless Steel Connect Smart Watch - Amazon Alexa, iOS and Android Compatible, Color Black (Model: C0001G5): Watches
$199

AI book: Life 3.0 & Cloud FPGA customizable HW

podcast interview with MIT Physicist Max Tegmark on Life 3.0: What We Do Makes a Difference
@ Singularity.FM

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Max Tegmark: 9781101946596: Amazon.com: Books

The concept is interesting:

• Life 1.0: improvements by evolution, random changes & natural selection
• Life 2.0: improvements by learning: chancing "software" 
• Life 3.0: improvements by design: intentional optimizing of "hardware" 

While for human and other live biological species this concept is still a challenge,
for "cloud based" computers this is already a reality!

Besides options to select HW for the task, such as faster IO, more memory, GPU,

they also offer FPGA: modifiable processors, where microcode can be changed to optimize for specific tasks, such as database, web servers, AI etc, it is possible to speed up 10 or more times.

FPGAs and the New Era of Cloud-based 'Hardware Microservices' - The New Stack

Amazon and Microsoft already offer such option on their clouds:

Developer Preview – EC2 Instances (F1) with Programmable Hardware | AWS News Blog

Inside the Microsoft FPGA-based configurable cloud
"Azure Accelerated Networking... The bandwidth between two VMs inside Azure, even with a 40-gigabit network adapter on each VM, is only around 4Gbps per second; with FPGA-accelerated networking, that goes up to 25Gbps, with five to ten times less latency"

For Google FPGA optimization seems to be not sufficient:
they prefer complete custom HW design, in particular for AI tasks. 

Google answered some of our questions about its fancy new AI chip - Recode

"Google's answer: FPGAs are much less power efficient than ASICs due to their programmable nature. The TPU has an instruction set, so as TensorFlow programs change or new algorithms are developed they can run on the TPU."

Periodic Table of DevOps Tools

Periodic Table of DevOps Tools

12-Factor Web Apps

"The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service (web) apps:"

The Twelve-Factor App

• Codebase One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys
• Dependencies Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies
• Config Store config in the environment
• Backing services Treat backing services as attached resources
• Build, release, run Strictly separate build and run stages
• Processes Execute the app as one or more stateless processes
• Port binding Export services via port binding
• Concurrency Scale out via the process model
• Disposability Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown
• Dev/prod parity Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible
• Logs Treat logs as event streams
• Admin processes Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes

Twelve-Factor App methodology - Wikipedia

Stack Overflow for Teams

Announcing Stack Overflow for Teams – Joel on Software

for some things it may be better than Slack or MS Office Teams...

Stack Overflow for Teams

"Stack Overflow for Teams is a private, secure home for your team’s questions and answers. No more digging through stale wikis and lost emails—give your team back the time it needs to build better products."