TLDR Index
TLDR Web Dev

TLDR WEB DEV 2023-09-15

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01ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

HOW INSTAGRAM SCALED TO 14 MILLION USERS WITH ONLY 3 ENGINEERS

Instagram went from 0 to 14 million users in just over a year and it did it with only three engineers. Its tech stack was surprisingly simple, using AWS extensively and a monolithic Django backend. It also used various caching tools like Redis and Memcached for better performance as it scaled. This article provides a visual explanation of Instagram’s tech stack by walking through the architecture using the life of a request.

engineercodex.substack.com5 min read

GEOLOCATION

Geolocation is the process of mapping IP addresses to a geographical location defined by latitude and longitude. There are many use cases for geolocation intelligence that are demanded by online businesses and service providers. This tutorial goes over building a geolocation database from scratch, with deep explanations and code examples along the way.

ipapi.is21 min read

5 PRINCIPLES OF UNIT TESTING

Without any guidelines, it can be difficult to write effective tests. In fact, testing code can become more complex and harder to maintain than the actual production code! These best practices for unit testing will help you to write lean, accurate, and easy-to-read testing code.

dev.to6 min read

02OPINIONS & ADVICE

HOW I BECAME AN $800K META STAFF ENGINEER

This article details one engineer's experience working with Meta and how they increased their compensation from $390,000 in 2017 to $823,000 in 2021. It covers their actions throughout the years and discusses the main lessons learned. The article discusses how to become a high earner and provides direct advice on how to achieve similar levels of success.

jointaro.com9 min read

03LAUNCHES & TOOLS

ELECTRICSQL

ElectricSQL is a local-first sync layer for web and mobile apps. It allows developers to build reactive, real-time, local-first apps directly on Postgres. The resulting apps have full-featured multi-user collaboration and conflict-free offline support.

github.comGitHub repository

POSTGRESQL 16 RELEASED

PostgreSQL 16 has notable improvements to query parallelism, bulk data loading, and logical replication. It also features more SQL/JSON syntax, new monitoring stats for your workloads, and greater flexibility in defining access control rules for the management of policies across large fleets.

postgresql.org4 min read

NPM-CHECK-UPDATES

Find newer versions of package dependencies than what your package.json allows. npm-check-updates upgrades your package.json dependencies to the latest versions, ignoring specified versions.

github.comGitHub repository

04MISCELLANEOUS

THE TYRANNY OF THE MARGINAL USER

Companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users who derive very little value from the app. The metric usually used to track if more users are using an app is DAUs, or daily active users. This means that designers and engineers start targeting “marginal users”, or people who are on the fringe of being regular users. They start changing the product to pull in these marginal users, but this usually makes the product worse for the core user base as a result.

nothinghuman.substack.com6 min read

GAME DEVELOPMENT POST-UNITY

Unity recently announced some pricing changes for game developers that received a lot of backlash. Even though they backtracked many of their changes, many game developers have lost trust in Unity. This article goes over many alternatives to Unity, such as Unreal Engine and Godot, while explaining their respective development languages, benefits, and drawbacks.

computerenhance.com9 min read