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Distributed SQLite databases sacrifice consistency, transactions, and scalability. Traditional databases like PostgreSQL, paired with effective HTTP caching for speed, are better choices than using distributed SQLite. The upside to SQLite databases is that they are really fast, but at some point, the maintenance overhead outweighs the speed benefits.
Optimistic UI is a technique used to improve the perceived performance of web applications by updating the UI instantly in response to user actions, even before getting a response from the server. React's experimental hook useOptimistic() simplifies the implementation of Optimistic UI by providing a way to manage temporary optimistic state alongside the true state. Internally, useOptimistic() leverages React's update mechanism but adds a special revertLane for easy switching between optimistic and true states.
Responsive images in HTML are a way to provide multiple versions of an image, optimized for different screen sizes, resolutions, and layout conditions. The browser will automatically select the most appropriate image source for the current display and layout. To implement responsive images, you can use the srcset and sizes attributes on the `img` element, or use the `picture` and `source` elements for more advanced techniques like art direction. Modern browsers also support features such as lazy loading with sizes=auto.
This author worked full-time on an open-source project for 503 days and learned a large number of lessons, such as how to interact properly with project users and contributors. He shares the importance of using your online presence to find opportunities and embracing feedback during code reviews instead of being defensive.
Managing up is about helping your manager help you, improving your work relationship and team success by understanding their needs, and aligning your efforts with their goals. This strategy includes effective communication, proactive sharing of goals and challenges, and offering solutions that can make the team better.
Architects should help guide engineering teams by making strategic, high-impact decisions while still allowing team members to have ownership of various parts of the team’s overall work. This means carefully considering decisions and their reversibility, along with documenting potential impact before acting.
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Shorebird is code push for Flutter. It also includes other tools in Dart, such as libraries for verifying JWTs and interacting with Redis.
A code snippet you can paste into your dev console on any website. It allows you to visualize the DOM of a webpage in 3D.
C++ Insights is a tool that makes the “behind-the-scenes” of C++ compilation visible to the developer.
Mainframe banking systems are written in COBOL. The industry faces challenges due to an aging workforce and the difficulty of migrating away from legacy systems like IMS. This author’s mother, a COBOL programmer, describes the challenges of maintaining complex, intertwined systems with huge amounts of sensitive data and the need for modernization in the industry.
Ethernet faced challenges from competing technologies and inherent limits in its original design during the 1980s. Digital Equipment Corp. engineer Mark Kempf's invention of the learning bridge, a device that selectively forwards packets between Ethernet LANs, addressed these challenges and allowed for the migration to Ethernet.
Cloudflare experienced a major power failure at a critical data center for the second time in five months, providing a real-world test of the resilience improvements initiated following the first incident. Code Orange, a company-wide initiative to prioritize reliability, led teams across Cloudflare to make their systems more resilient. The most recent outage resulted in significantly less downtime and impact on customer-facing services compared to the prior event.
Andrej Karpathy has put together a GPT-2 implementation in just 1,000 lines of code in a single file.
Linear has completely redesigned its application to address design debt, realign with evolving business goals, and continue improving their user experience.
Software is never truly done. Instead of chasing perfectionism, use timeboxing and user feedback to make software better.
Cloudflare launched twenty new products for developers and a system for easier coding on its platform, such as introducing a JavaScript-native RPC system for streamlined Cloudflare Workers communication.