The Daily Index — Monday, August 28, 2023 · TLDR Index

ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

TLDR Web Dev

TLDR Web Dev

AURORA SERVERLESS – A MIGRATION STORY

A team that swapped databases almost every other month finally settled on AWS Aurora Serverless V2. This article breaks down their application architecture and use cases for their database and explains why they would continuously switch. The team eventually landed on Aurora Serverless, which was nice because scaling was taken care of. However, Aurora was still in development at the time and therefore a bit unstable.

theguardian.com · 11 min

TLDR Web Dev

WRITING A PACKAGE MANAGER

Writing a package manager is not easy, but it’s a great exercise in building something that’s not usually built. This tutorial goes through design decisions made, tradeoffs considered, and implementation details when writing a package manager with many visual examples.

antonz.org · 17 min

TLDR Web Dev

DESIGNER

Collaboration is a hard but necessary aspect of working in teams. This article provides actionable advice on how to overcome the two most common challenges when working with your designer or product manager: adding scope and slow responses. It also provides a guide to building a working relationship that will make you one of their favorite engineers to work with.

open.substack.com · 10 min

TLDR Web Dev

SOME TACTICS FOR WRITING IN PUBLIC

Many people shy away from writing in public for fear of receiving negative comments. This article explains some tactics that can help make the comments on blog posts more informative and useful.

jvns.ca · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW TO MAKE TIME FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In today’s fast-paced business world, continuous learning is not just a buzzword, it is a necessity. However, balancing its undeniable value with the pressing demands of the average workday is tricky. This article offers tips that make it easier to prioritize professional development.

forbes.com · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

WASHING YOUR CODE: NAMING IS HARD

Naming is one of the hardest problems in programming. Bad naming can make debugging difficult and codebases harder to understand. This article takes a look at naming anti-patterns and how to fix them. It lays out some rules for clear naming. For example, the shorter the scope of a variable, the shorter its name should be.

sapegin.me · 21 min

TLDR Web Dev

WE SHOULD ALL BE ROOTING FOR BORING AI

Applying Generative AI in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible or even why the problem occurred. Everyone agrees that humans should make the final call, but that is made harder by technology that acts unpredictably, especially in fast-moving conflict situations. Until we are able to reliably make Generative AI hallucinate less and be more predictable, it should be applied first to more “boring” applications, like AI in Google Docs. This is already happening - for example, Google has started rolling out the “Write with AI” feature for Google Docs and Slides.

technologyreview.com · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

AN EXCRUCIATINGLY DETAILED GUIDE TO SSH

A complete and opinionated SSH guide for those interested in learning the ins and outs of SSH commands.

grahamhelton.com · 15 min

TLDR Web Dev

WHY NOTE-TAKING APPS DON’T MAKE YOU SMARTER

For decades now, software tools have promised to make working life easier, but are they really effective?

theverge.com · 10 min