TLDR Index
TLDR Web Dev

TLDR WEB DEV 2024-06-17

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01GENERAL

Sponsored

COLLABORATING ON APIS IS EASIER WITH POSTMAN

For dev teams relying on APIs, collaboration is crucial. To ship better software, API producers and consumers need to share, discover, and reuse high-quality API assets.

postman.comSponsor

02ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

THE STORY OF REFORMATTING 100K FILES AT GOOGLE IN 2012

In 2012, Google embarked on a project to reformat all Bazel BUILD files, which was tough because of inconsistent formatting and a variety of developer preferences. A new tool called Buildifier, which strictly enforced a unified style, was developed to automate this process. The rollout was successful - it allowed for better code maintenance and enabled large-scale changes that were previously considered impossible.

laurent.le-brun.eu6 min read

DEMYSTIFYING INP: NEW TOOLS AND ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a Core Web Vital metric that measures the time it takes for a web page to respond to user interaction. It can be optimized by minimizing JavaScript execution time, shortening event handler duration, and reducing the amount of DOM that needs to be re-rendered.

vercel.com12 min read

HOW GITHUB REBUILT THEIR PUSH PROCESSING SYSTEM

GitHub revamped its code push handling system by transitioning from a single monolithic job to a decoupled architecture using Apache Kafka. This change involved breaking down the original large job into smaller, independent tasks based on dependencies and ownership. They improved reliability by enabling targeted retries and reduced latency by allowing parallel processing.

blog.quastor.org9 min read

03OPINIONS & ADVICE

GOOD CODE IS RARELY READ

Good code should prioritize ease of use over readability. It should be intuitive and self-explanatory and shouldn't require much reading to understand its purpose and functionality.

alexmolas.com3 min read

GEN AI WILL INCREASE DEMAND FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

This author believes that generative AI will increase demand for software engineers. He compares it to autopilot systems on airplanes which made piloting more accessible and grew the aviation industry, leading to increased demand and higher salaries for pilots. While the specific skillset required for software engineers might change due to generative AI, general skills like communication, problem-solving, and creativity will remain and be even more important.

roarepally.com3 min read

WHY STRUCTURE AND INTERPRETATION OF COMPUTER PROGRAMS MATTERS

The textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), revolutionized introductory computer science education by focusing on big-picture ideas like abstraction and functions as data, rather than just programming language details. It chose Scheme as the teaching language, which allowed students to grasp concepts without getting bogged down in syntax. SICP set a high bar for student expectations, challenging them with complex tasks like building interpreters. The SICP course has been very popular at UC Berkeley and has served well in educating computer science students that do well in industry and graduate school.

people.eecs.berkeley.edu6 min read

04LAUNCHES & TOOLS

HTMD

HTMD is an HTML to Markdown converter for Rust. It is fast and has minimal dependencies and a range of options.

github.comGitHub repository

JSONTREE.JS

JsonTree.js is a lightweight JavaScript library that generates customizable tree views to better visualize JSON data.

github.comGitHub repository

DGM.JS

DGM.js is an infinite canvas with smart shapes. It supports smart shapes, headless components (React), multi-page support, hand-drawn styles, real-time collaboration, and various import options.

github.comGitHub repository

05MISCELLANEOUS

PERPLEXITY AI IS LYING ABOUT THEIR USER AGENT

Perplexity AI claims to use a user agent called PerplexityBot, but it actually uses a generic Chrome user agent. It is likely doing this to scrape content from websites that disallow scraping in their robots.txt files.

rknight.me5 min read

POSTGRES IS ALL YOU NEED, EVEN FOR VECTORS

PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension offers an efficient way to store and query embeddings. It offers simplified querying, data consistency, and better performance compared to using separate databases for relational and vector data.

anyblockers.com5 min read

THE ARCHITECTURE BEHIND A ONE-PERSON TECH STARTUP

This post breaks down the setup for a one-person SaaS tech startup, from load balancing to cron job monitoring to payments and subscriptions. The author uses a Kubernetes cluster on AWS, Cloudflare for load balancing and caching, ingress-nginx for routing traffic within the cluster, Flux for automatic deployments, and RDS for database management.

anthonynsimon.com27 min read