TLDR WEB DEV 2024-11-27

THE COMPUTING INDUSTRY DOESN'T CARE ABOUT PERFORMANCE: HOW I MADE THINGS FASTER IN MY PAJAMAS

A software engineer, working independently, was able to make huge performance improvements in various apps, including a 30% faster Uber app startup, a 3x speed increase in Android UI display, and an 11% speedup in Lucene. These optimizations were accomplished through the use of automated tools and techniques that focused on identifying and resolving inefficiencies in code, such as overly broad synchronization blocks and dynamic method dispatches. While there's often a lack of incentive to make significant performance improvements, there are many cases where there's low-hanging fruit.

FEATURE-BASED REACT ARCHITECTURE

Using a feature-based architecture in React apps can make them easier to maintain and scale. This article goes over how to decouple components and data fetching functions. Focusing each on a single feature avoids intertwining vertical features and creating overly complex functions. This approach initially leads to multiple data requests but can be later optimized using `Promise.all` for parallel fetching to improve performance.

WHAT I WISH SOMEONE TOLD ME ABOUT POSTGRES

This is a collection of tips and advice for working with Postgres databases. It covers how to improve psql usage, optimize queries, and understand the impact of locks and JSONB on application performance. It is important to normalize data and follow the recommendations of the Postgres developers.

I DIDN'T NEED KUBERNETES, AND YOU PROBABLY DON'T EITHER

This developer found that Google Cloud Run's pay-per-use model, fast scaling, and lack of cluster management overhead made it a better choice cost-wise compared to Kubernetes. Despite some minor workflow inconveniences in Cloud Run, the overall experience was better.

I HAVE 30 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE AND STILL NEED A MENTOR. YOU DO TOO

Mentorship should be a continuous process and not just for onboarding. Even people with lots of experience can benefit from mentoring because there is always knowledge to transfer and things to learn from others' experiences.

JEKYLL SQLITE

The Jekyll-SQLite plugin allows Jekyll users to use SQLite databases as data sources for their websites. It supports site-level, per-page, and prepared queries, which can use existing data as parameters.

JSONTR.EE

jsontr.ee is a lightweight JavaScript library that visualizes JSON data as interactive, dynamically-positioned tree diagrams using SVG.

BUILDING LLMS IS PROBABLY NOT GOING BE A BRILLIANT BUSINESS

LLMs are likely to be an unprofitable business, just like airlines, an industry with historically poor profitability. This is due to an unfavorable industry structure for LLM makers, characterized by a powerful single supplier (Nvidia), high buyer fickleness, numerous competitors, and easy market entry for new players.

WHICH IDES DO SOFTWARE ENGINEERS LOVE, AND WHY?

ARCHETYPES OF LLM APPS

There are three levels of LLM application within businesses: foundational building blocks (chat, embeddings, and semantic search), basic applications (code generation, summarization, and analysis), and advanced applications (RAG, agents, and swarms).

1 BILLION NESTED LOOP ITERATIONS

A benchmark of one billion nested loop iterations across various programming languages revealed that C/clang and Rust were the fastest (0.50 seconds), while Python and R were the slowest (over 70 seconds).

HOW FAST DOES JAVA COMPILE?

The Java compiler is extremely fast, but build tools add a lot of overhead.