The Daily Index — Thursday, May 16, 2024 · TLDR Index

ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

TLDR Web Dev

TLDR Web Dev

HOW FACEBOOK SERVED BILLIONS OF REQUESTS PER SECOND USING MEMCACHED

Facebook used Memcached, a key-value store, to efficiently handle billions of requests per second. It achieved this by scaling Memcached at three levels: cluster, region, and worldwide. It used parallel requests and batching, optimized client-server communication, and managed congestion effectively to reduce latency. “Memcache pools” were used to reduce load on their databases.

read.engineerscodex.com · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

MAKING A POSTGRES QUERY 1,000 TIMES FASTER

This developer discovered a significant performance issue in a database query used for indexing posts in their application Mattermost. The query was initially slow due to too much filtering, but was sped up by using PostgreSQL's row constructor comparisons. To help find this speed boost, the developer used the BUFFERS option in EXPLAIN statements for detailed insights and prioritized Index Cond over Filter for efficient queries.

mattermost.com · 18 min

TLDR Web Dev

YOU PROBABLY DON'T NEED MICROSERVICES

Microservices are popular and great for scalability and team organization, but can bring problems to smaller organizations. Too many services can be hard to maintain, create excessive interdependencies, and make downsizing difficult in tough economic times.

thrownewexception.com · 7 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW NOT TO DO CODE REVIEWS

Traditional code reviews, which focus on manually finding errors, have become a bottleneck for engineering teams. With advancements in automated testing and static code analyzers, code reviews can now shift their focus from error-finding to knowledge sharing and long-term codebase health.

aviator.co · 9 min

TLDR Web Dev

I CODED SOMETHING DUMB AND I'M PROUD OF IT

This developer added a quicksort animation feature to a game to visually sort items while handling potential changes in the list being sorted. Instead of optimizing the quicksort algorithm to resume from its last state, the developer chose a simpler, inefficient solution (on purpose): the sorting illusion is created by repeatedly running the algorithm from the start until a change occurs.

plbrault.com · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW I MADE MY GITHUB PROFILE README DYNAMIC

You can add a README to your profile repository by naming it the same as your GitHub username. GitHub Actions can be used to integrate dynamic content such as real-time statistics and latest blog posts using tools like `github-readme-stats` and `metrics`.

tduyng.github.io · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

THE CARCINIZATION OF WEB FRAMEWORKS

JavaScript frameworks have evolved and converged towards a common set of features, such as immutability for developer experience and code stability, single-directional data flow for simplified state management, signals for granular reactivity, and server-side rendering (SSR) for improved SEO and performance.

toddledev.medium.com · 7 min

TLDR Web Dev

BEHIND THE SCENES OF THREADS FOR WEB (40 MINUTE AUDIO)

The Threads Web team used Meta's shared infrastructure to quickly build Threads for Web in under three months.

engineering.fb.com

TLDR Web Dev

BRANDED TYPES FOR TYPESCRIPT

Branded types in TypeScript allow developers to create new types by adding a unique tag to an existing type.

carlos-menezes.com · 2 min

TLDR Web Dev

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP SOURCE CODE

Adobe Photoshop was initially a side project, then was licensed to Adobe and became a huge commercial success.

computerhistory.org · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

THE CSS STEPPED VALUE MATH FUNCTIONS ARE NOW IN BASELINE 2024

All major browser engines now support the CSS stepped value math functions: round(), mod(), and rem().

web.dev · 2 min