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The event of the year, POST/CON [5] is the place to be if you’re looking to hear from industry leaders, gain new skills, or engage with the global API community. And there’s a 50% discount if you sign up early [5]! A small taste of what you can expect from the huge two-day event on April 30-May 1:
Properly optimizing a Next.js web application can lead to much faster load times, and thus, much better search traffic from Google. Some of the techniques that can be used to speed up a Next.js web app include using server-side rendering as much as possible, fetching server-side and hydrating client-side, bootstrapping the most important data, creating ghost components, removing excess providers, and optimizing font loading. This post goes deep into the technical aspects of each of these techniques, providing detailed images, explanations, and code examples.
Implementing clustering in large tables can help reduce BigQuery costs significantly. This article provides an example of a MERGE query and compares the costs and performance between clustered and unclustered tables. The results show that clustering can lead to a 260x reduction in data processed, 20x lower slot time, and 268x lower costs.
A recent Google paper found that most of its developers split binaries for one of the following reasons: performance improvements, fault tolerance, abstraction boundaries, and/or flexible rollouts. The paper recommends developers use modular monoliths to write applications and leverage a runtime to dynamically and automatically assign components to physical processes. This approach has worked for Google: it reduces application latency by up to 15x and costs by up to 9x.
This is one of the most original guides on offer negotiation for software engineers. It covers both the big picture and the nitty-gritty of offer negotiation, including a step-by-step process of a successful negotiation. Some of the advice offered includes trying to negotiate over the phone if possible, having alternatives, and asking for more by being motivated by more than just money. This article provides several real-life example scenarios of negotiation.
Mentoring others is often an essential part of being a senior engineer or manager. This article covers everything you need to know about finding someone to mentor and setting them up for success from start to finish. Topics range from how to find a mentee to managing your relationship to help them grow, how to provide actionable feedback in an empathetic way, and tools for crafting a growth plan with them.
Arc Browser has intuitive tab management and a good picture-in-picture mode. Firefox has cross-platform support and personal customization options. Chrome is what everybody practically uses. Safari is battery-friendly on macOS.
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QA Wolf [12] offers a cost-effective approach to getting 80% test
They build and maintain your test suite in Playwright + include unlimited parallel test runs on their infrastructure.
Panda CSS is a styling engine that generates CSS-in-JS styles in a type-safe and readable way. It is compatible with various frameworks, including Next.js, Vue, Svelte, and Astro.
Web2PDF is a CLI to convert web pages into well-formatted PDFs.
NaturalSQL is a series of LLM models that can produce accurate SQL from natural language.
The Vesuvius Challenge asked people to use AI to read an ancient library of papyrus scrolls that are now stored in Naples, Italy. The scrolls are rolled up and practically lumps of carbonized ash, so they cannot be opened without being severely damaged. A team of three won the prize of $700k for being able to read 5% of the scroll. There are now multiple new challenges and 6-figure dollar amounts available in prizes to continue reading the rest of the scroll. So far, the scroll talks philosophically about pleasure and how to enjoy life.
A couple of years back, a tweet claimed that the maximum size of a PDF is half of Germany. This post dives into this claim and proves how big PDFs can actually be. It also explains the inner structure of PDFs and how you can change page sizes. Most PDF sizes are limited only by the PDF reader and not the PDF itself. Turns out, the biggest size of a PDF is 15 million inches, or roughly the distance of Earth to the moon.
Google has donated $1 million to the Rust Foundation to enhance interoperability between the Rust programming language and C++. This move aims to improve memory safety, as memory safety errors are a significant source of vulnerabilities for Google and Microsoft.
Hacker News commenters have used LLMs to build sales call simulators, a better Apple experience using Apple Shortcuts, a real-life Pokedex, an interactive resume AI chatbot, and more.
The HTTP Garden is a collection of HTTP servers and proxies with scripts to interact with them that allow for finding vulnerabilities easier.