The Daily Index — Monday, November 27, 2023 · TLDR Index

ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

TLDR Web Dev

TLDR Web Dev

THE ARCHITECTURE OF DOORDASH'S CACHING SYSTEM

DoorDash transitioned from a Python monolith to a microservices architecture, using Kotlin and gRPC for service communication. To minimize latency, it focused on reducing network requests, primarily by implementing caching with Caffeine for local caching and Redis Lettuce for distributed caching. However, different teams independently creating caching solutions led to issues like cache staleness, lack of runtime controls, inadequate metrics, and inconsistent key schemas. To address this, DoorDash developed a shared caching library with features like layered caching (request local, local, and Redis caches), runtime feature flags for customization, and observability tools to monitor cache performance.

blog.quastor.org · 11 min

TLDR Web Dev

REFLECTING ON 18 YEARS AT GOOGLE

Ian Hickson, the creator of Flutter (cross-platform app SDK) reflects on their 18-year tenure at Google, from its early post-IPO days to recent years. Initially, Google's culture was driven by a genuine desire to do good, guided by the "don't be evil" principle. However, over time, cultural shifts occurred, with less transparency and a shift in focus from user benefit to company and individual gain. Recently, Google's morale has declined, especially due to layoffs, and Hickson perceives a lack of visionary leadership and an increase in inept middle management.

ln.hixie.ch · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

EFFICIENT COMMUNICATION

Meetings are often seen as detrimental to the productivity of software engineers. Writing is a more efficient alternative to reduce the load of meetings. There are several advantages to writing: it enables faster information consumption as reading is quicker than listening, facilitates easier referencing and searching of technical content, and typically results in higher quality outcomes due to focused preparation.

developing.dev · 3 min

TLDR Web Dev

WHAT IS A STAFF ENGINEER?

Staff Engineers in big-tech companies like Meta are highly experienced technical leaders who play various roles like Tech Lead, Coding Machine, or Fixer. They differ from Senior Engineers in their focus on team rather than individual impact and have a broader organizational influence. Their duties include building domain strategies, clarifying project plans, de-risking projects, and ensuring team health.

newsletter.techleadmentor.com · 10 min

TLDR Web Dev

MAKING A FONT

The author shares their experience of creating a font for the first time. Previously relying on digital text drawing, which sometimes led to inconsistent text size and readability, they decided to design a font based on their own handwriting. This endeavor involved learning about font anatomy, such as ascenders, baselines, and x-heights, and experimenting with two iterations of the font. The final design was derived from writing sentences naturally on paper, scanning them, and cleaning them up digitally. They used software to successfully create a TrueType font (TTF).

kokorobot.ca · 8 min