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Thoughtful URL design strikes a balance between the needs of computers and humans. For example, StackOverflow’s URLs combine a unique identifier and a human-readable slug, so both computers and humans can understand a URL without having to visit it. Slack incorporates natural language sentences into URLs. GitHub and NPM map well to their respective domain semantics, making navigation efficient.
Earlier this year, Google announced that INP (Interaction to Next Paint) is going out of experimental mode and will replace First Input Delay (FID) as a Core Web Vital in April 2024. This post takes real world data to attempt to correlate INP with real user behavior and business metrics. The short conclusion is that as INP gets worse, business metrics, like conversion rates for sales, tend to suffer.
This article explores the effects of CPU requests and limits in Kubernetes and the differences between the default CPU Manager policy and the static policy. To demonstrate these concepts, the article uses scenarios where setting CPU limits is advisable, such as benchmarking, multi-tenant environments, predictability, and Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. It delves into the details of the CPU Manager's static policy, including how it assigns CPU cores to containers and the associated metrics to monitor.
It’s common for software projects to lack adequate quality assurance measures, leading to last-minute QA sprints and unreliable software releases. Budget constraints frequently lead companies to cut QA efforts, resulting in rushed and error-prone releases. In order to convince management of the importance of QA, it’s important to frame it in terms of cost savings and efficiency gains and start with a minimal effective dose of QA measures.
Shortly after being promoted to mid-level engineer, this author made a subtle mistake by focusing on tasks that, while technically impressive, didn't align with the company's priorities for senior-level engineers. He received an "exceeds expectations" rating but didn’t make progress towards a promotion. To progress from mid-level to senior, it's crucial to consider the "why" behind your work and ensure it aligns with what's most important to your personal interests, team, and company all at once.
One effective strategy to reach the senior level as an engineer is to become an expert in a specific area, whether it's a technical skill or a product domain. To determine your expertise, consider what aligns with team or company impact, what you're good at, and what you're passionate about. To become known as an expert, focus on being visible and adding value, such as giving presentations, leading projects, solving challenging problems, and actively contributing to your team's success.
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SecureAI Tools offers private and secure AI tools, such as AI chat functionality, the ability to chat with documents (currently supporting PDFs), and local AI model inference with support for various open-source models. It’s a self-hosted platform that comes with built-in authentication for online access, user management for sharing with family or colleagues, self-hosting optimization for quick setup, and a lightweight web app that uses an SQLite database to avoid the need for a separate container for the database. This allows data to stay local and secure.
Rot is a command-line tool for managing secrets. It can generate keys and values and rekey secrets with the latest encryption standards. Rot allows for the sharing of secrets with others, provides one-way encryption for production secrets, and allows for secure storage of secrets in Git.
Tool sharpening refers to the process of improving or upgrading the tools and software one uses for work. This author shares a personal experience of transitioning from one text editor (NEdit) to another (Vim) and later to Neovim, highlighting the considerations, challenges, and benefits of such transitions. As engineers, there is a cost of time and effort in adopting new tools. At the same time, it’s important to periodically reevaluate tool choices and configurations to ensure they enable one to be as productive as possible.
Good documentation enables smoother project handovers, reduces dependencies on core team members, and simplifies onboarding for new team members. This is a playbook for creating intuitive documentation, including the importance of creating a simple manifesto or vision, establishing an intuitive folder structure, and automating documentation creation where it adds value. It includes practical examples and templates for organizing documentation, covering topics like architecture, onboarding guides, and specialist path guides.
Tracing helps track and understand what is going on within a program or software system. This post covers one engineer’s favorite tracing tools, which include eBPF, QEMU, Perfetto, and some custom-built ones.
Meta is introducing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default for personal conversations on Messenger to enhance privacy and security. It has published technical whitepapers explaining the cryptographic protocols for message transmission and encrypted storage.
Gooey is a way to turn a Python 3 console program into a GUI application with one line of code.
An API for accessing random images where you can specify size or choose an image based on ID.