Parse notes
In 1990, half of AT&T's phone network went down as a result of one line of C code that contained a buggy implementation of call handling. The outage affected over a hundred thousand Americans and the company lost $60 million. This article goes over the buggy piece of code that was deployed by AT&T and how engineers fixed it.
A new official React doc that explains how to animate a progress element using the new useTransition hook, which lets you update state without blocking UI.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures webpage instability caused by unexpected movements of elements. Background images can make CLS worse, since CLS calculations consider all page elements. To make sure that CLS isn't affected negatively by background images, developers should include width and height attributes on images and iframes.
Selling developer tools is challenging because developers typically lack the authority to make purchasing decisions. Successful tech companies often bypass IT and target revenue-generating business units. Simply making a tool popular doesn't guarantee profitability, especially with open-source software.
Allegro, a major e-commerce platform, successfully transformed its monolithic application into a microservices architecture. Along the way, it shifted away from physical servers to a cloud-based infrastructure, which led to a much better developer experience. It also made large investments in tooling and infrastructure to reduce manual work for its engineers. Allegro made sure to allow room for experimentation, but also kept teams accountable for their architectural decisions.
Paid search engine Kagi has spread itself too thin with multiple niche projects. The product is also starting to become over-reliant on AI, which leads to inaccuracy and bias that goes against what Kagi was in the beginning.
Sponsored
Sentry's new Autofix [13] feature understands what your users are doing when an error occurs, analyzes the error, generates a fix and even opens a pull request for your review. It's like having a junior developer ready to help on-demand. Learn more [13] or request to join
Next.js 14.2 offers faster local development with Turbopack improvements, along with clearer error messages and improved overlay design. It also has less memory usage during builds.
Turn Google Sheets into a database. Developers can perform CRUD operations on spreadsheets using APIs.
Supabase's Index Advisor is a PostgreSQL extension that recommends indexes to improve query performance.
Employees at startups should learn to understand their stock options as they are not an intuitive thing to understand. This article goes over the basics of stock options and how employees should gauge potential upside (or downside). Engineering managers should make sure that employees get additional stock option grants as they grow within the company.
This author decided to learn deep learning after running an education company for 8 years. They focused on the fundamentals with resources like "The Deep Learning Book", taught as they learned, and implemented foundational papers. They eventually developed their own tools in the data extraction space, which led to a job offer from a research lab.
This author, who works at a startup with several LLM-powered features, shares useful insights from using GPT. For text analysis and extraction, vague prompts often outperform overly specific instructions. The chat API itself is usually enough for most needs and most people won't need to use more complex tech like vector databases or Langchain. For a better user experience, it was useful to mimic the variable typing speed of chatbots.
Devin AI, the “first AI Software Engineer,” was misrepresented - for example, in one of its demos, Devin is shown fixing errors in the source of a GitHub repository, but the errors it's fixing are bugs that Devin itself created.
The author's best manager was amazing because of their transparent communication (especially about career growth), technical competency, high but fair performance bar, credibility, and focus on impactful work instead of internal politics.
The FCC's proposed net neutrality rules would allow mobile internet providers to create "5G fast lanes" where certain apps get preferential treatment.
The potential to embed JavaScript in PDFs is often thought of as a security vulnerability, but in reality, it's intended by PDF rendering software.
The problems startups solve are either hair-on-fire problems, “unchangeable” pain points, or non-problems that are solved by unbelievable visions (like the iPhone).