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TWINNY

Twinny is a completely free AI code completion plugin for VS Code. It uses local or API-hosted LLMs to power its code completion and is compatible with multiple tools and frameworks, like Ollama and LM Studio.

VUE-I18N-NEXT

An internationalization plugin for Vue.js.

CORENET

Apple CoreNet is a deep neural network toolkit that allows researchers and engineers to train standard and novel small and large-scale models for a variety of tasks, like object classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation.

THE MAN WHO KILLED GOOGLE SEARCH

Google Search's search quality has been reportedly declining since 2019 due to revenue pressures. In 2020, Prabhakar Raghavan, the former head of Yahoo Search, replaced Ben Gomes, a dedicated search engineer who prioritized user experience, as the head of Google Search. Raghavan's focus on advertising and growth metrics prioritized profit over search quality, leading to more ad-heavy search.

HELP US INVENT CSS GRID LEVEL 3, AKA “MASONRY” LAYOUT

A potential implementation of CSS Grid Level 3 called the “Masonry layout” allows for much more flexibility in designing web pages. Developers would be able to define grid columns, use subgrid functionalities, and explicitly place grid items. Level 3 is still being developed, so the WebKit team is inviting feedback from the web development community to guide the direction of this CSS specification.

APPLE'S RISKY BET ON CARPLAY

Apple's latest version of CarPlay deeply integrates with a car's entire infotainment system. While some carmakers are excited to partner with Apple, others see CarPlay 2 as a threat to their own software platforms and brands. Apple has to balance control over the user experience with carmaker desires, while carmakers need to see how much CarPlay is a factor in car buying decisions.

NONCOMPETES ARE DEAD—AND TECH WORKERS ARE FREE TO ROAM

The FTC has banned most noncompete agreements that will allow tech workers to freely move between jobs, potentially leading to higher wages and more tech entrepreneurship.

MAP OF THE WEB

This is a network visualization of 50,000 blogs and links.

DJANGO FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES

Django's reputation for complexity is somewhat unfair because it often stems from a comparison with oversimplified Flask examples.

Read the documentation and see Paragraph code examples

4 SOFTWARE DESIGN PRINCIPLES I LEARNED THE HARD WAY

This author built a large-scale service and found certain principles reappearing throughout the implementation. It's useful to prioritize a single source of truth and minimize mutable state when building something from scratch. Developers should also make sure not to abstract things prematurely and not to overuse mocks when writing tests for their code.

DEBUGGING INFINITE LOOPS

In object-oriented programs, infinite loops can happen unknowingly. To understand and fix these issues, you should successively inline the methods on the stack until you have a self-referencing method. This gets to the root of the issue compared to just applying a code-level hack.

MY FIRST PROMO REJECTION, A BLESSING IN DISGUISE

This author was rejected for their first promotion at Google after two years in their role for not displaying enough impact. From that rejection, they learned the importance of taking initiative and strategically selecting projects that demonstrated impact.

THE TRAP OF OVER-ENGINEERING AND OVER-DESIGN

Developers often over-engineer and over-design software by abstracting things excessively and focusing on hypothetical future scalability. Instead, it's better to prioritize core functionality first, keep the scope reasonable, and have a “good” solution over a “perfect” one.

DROP EVERYTHING AND REVIEW

Software development has multiple feedback loops: the inner loop (immediate feedback from tools), the middle loop (code reviews), and the outer loop (deployment and system-level testing). Code review often gets delayed, unnecessarily inflating the middle loop which leads to slower deployment. This author advocates for code reviews to be the top priority for teams after any urgent production issues so that teams can keep shipping at a smooth pace.

FRANKEN/UI

Franken UI is a collection of copy-pastable components that are HTML-first and framework agnostic.

FIRECRAWL

Crawl and convert any website into LLM-ready Markdown. It can be self-hosted and comes with Python and Node SDKs.

DEVELOPING RAPIDLY WITH GENERATIVE AI

Discord builds products with generative AI quickly by identifying suitable use cases early and then prototyping with off-the-shelf LLMs. It evaluates prompts deeply before deploying at scale. Discord leans towards using off-the-shelf LLMs before thinking about using self-hosted ones because it saves engineering resources. Often, if the target problem can't be solved with GPT-4, then it probably can't be solved yet with generative AI at all.

HOW SHORT CAN GIT ABBREVIATE?

The default 7-character length of Git hashes can lead to collisions in large repos like the Linux kernel. This article analyzes the distribution of abbreviation lengths, finding that while most commits can use short abbreviations, a large number require longer ones (up to 11 currently). It recommends using at least 12 characters for large repositories and referencing full Git hashes if possible.

ON GENERATING IDEAS - LEADERSHIP & WORK

People should generate ideas independently and quietly first before bringing them to group settings.

THE DANGERS OF SINGLE LINE REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

This article describes a vulnerability within an application where a poorly constructed regular expression allowed for multiline input, allowing arbitrary Ruby code execution.

GOOD IDEAS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

A list of Computer Science victories, like arrays, hashmaps, processes, version control, GUIs, and more.

EFFICIENT ENGINEERING TEAMS (X POST)

Efficient engineering teams often have a Directly Responsible Individual for each part of their systems.

STOP GOING TO THE CLOUD AND GETTING SCAMMED. $200 INFRA TO SERVE YOUR STARTUP TILL 100K MONTHLY USERS IN 15 MINUTES

For many startups, the complexity and cost of cloud services can be replaced with a smaller, simpler setup. A self-hosted $200 infrastructure setup can easily handle up to 100k monthly users without breaking a sweat. The setup consists of PostgreSQL, a load-balanced API with automatic SSL using Caddyserver, and Docker for simple deployments and scaling.

A/B TESTING AT SCALE: HOW WE ENGINEERED A SOLUTION FOR MILLIONS OF USERS WITH AWS

To conduct large-scale A/B tests without sacrificing user experience, Unacademy engineered a solution using AWS serverless tech. Instead of determining which test variant to show after the page loads (causing a distracting flicker), its team selected a test variant before the webpage even reached the user's browser. This was done by running code at the network edge to intercept requests, determine the variant, and fetch the appropriate content from the CDN.

THE TWO-TREE PROBLEM WITH STYLING ON THE WEB

One of the root problems with web styling is the “two-tree problem,” which is the need to maintain separate, interconnected trees for document structure (HTML) and styles (CSS). TailwindCSS solves the two-tree problem with atomic CSS, but its composability is limited due to potential CSS class conflicts. Styled components offer composability, but don't solve the two-tree problem. Inline styles combined with JavaScript can handle most styling needs without running into the two-tree problem.

NEVER STRUGGLE TO GIVE FEEDBACK AGAIN (EVEN TO YOUR MANAGER)

Constructive feedback can be given in a way that builds trust and strengthens relationships - even to a manager. You should ask for permission to give feedback first before giving feedback and make sure that your feedback actually helps the other person grow. Feedback should be focused on specific observations paired with explanations and actionable advice.

PROGRAMMING IS MOSTLY THINKING

Developers spend most of their time thinking rather than typing code. They read existing code, understand requirements, and thoroughly document possible changes before making them. The actual concrete output of devs isn't always present in the number of actual code changes, meaning developers do a lot of “invisible work.”

DO YOU ATTACH YOURSELF TO WORK AND SUCCESS? (REDDIT THREAD)

Most developers feel that in order to be good at their job, they have to believe in the company's product and find their work meaningful. Just clocking in and clocking out is difficult when work takes up over half of someone's waking hours. As a result, they find that they increasingly attach themselves to the work they do and the resulting success.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THEIR 90-DAY PILOT.

QUILL 2.0

Quill is a rich text editor that has official TypeScript support, support for multiple editors on the same page with different configurations, auto-scrolling container detection, a smoother editing experience, and more.

SHADCN TABLE

A copyable table component with server-side sorting, filtering, and pagination. It supports key features that are seen in popular applications like Notion and Linear.

HOW DOES CHATGPT WORK? AS EXPLAINED BY THE CHATGPT TEAM

ChatGPT works by predicting the next most likely word. After ChatGPT receives text, it breaks down the text into tokens. These tokens are converted into numerical vectors that represent their meaning and relationships to other words. The vectors, called embeddings, are multiplied by a massive matrix of weights (parameters) that have been learned during the training process. The result of the multiplication is a probability distribution over possible next words. ChatGPT samples a word from this distribution to continue the text.

I WROTE MY OWN EDITOR

This author was frustrated with bugs, slowness, and limited debugging features in VSCode. Specifically, slow debugging, a limited watch panel, and a lack of GDB integration led them to create their own text editor. Their new editor prioritizes debugger speed, flexible watch variables, and smooth performance with large files. It already includes core features like syntax highlighting, find functionality, and support for GDB and other debugging protocols.

LESSONS FROM STARTUP FOUNDERS ON NAVIGATING THEIR CHALLENGES

First-time startup founders often fail due to mistakes caused by a lack of experience. Successful founders' first startups often failed because they tried to scale before reaching product-market fit, hired too early, validated with the wrong people, and didn't create a 10x better solution. Successful startups have good founder-market fit and balance user feedback with their own product vision.

ARE WE OVERCOMPLICATING WEB DEV IN 2024? (REDDIT THREAD)

Before starting a project, it's important to evaluate what the project really needs in terms of tech.

TIME IN ROLE GATEKEEPING

Companies like Meta enable much faster promotions than companies like Google and Amazon, so it's important to pick the company you work for wisely if your goal is to get promoted fast.

AIRBNB JAVASCRIPT STYLE GUIDE

Airbnb's JavaScript style guidelines for writing clean, maintainable, and efficient JavaScript code.

PUTTING THE “P” IN PNPM

Pnpm just released v9.0, improving the lockfile format and providing better resolution of peer dependencies.

→ Download the DevOps Kit here

WHY SQLITE PERFORMANCE TUNING MADE BENCHER 1200X FASTER

A developer found that a webpage that was used for performance tracking was really slow. They discovered that inefficient SQL queries were causing long delays. By understanding the SQLite query planner, the developer added indexes and a materialized view to improve the database query performance and thereby speed up the page load time.

THE ART OF SVG FILTERS AND WHY IT IS AWESOME

SVG filters are a way to apply image-like effects (blur, color shifts, distortion, etc.) to web vector graphics and even HTML elements. They can be used to add effects to text on the web, including borders, bevels, textures, and more. This article shows how through code examples.

WHAT WAS THE MOST GENIUS HACK YOU DID IN WEBDEV? (REDDIT THREAD)

Developers share their web dev “hacks” and stories. One developer improved a slow SQL scheduling algorithm by refactoring the code and converting sub-selects to joins. Others found creative ways to work around limitations in older web tech, like using system commands for a school prank or inventing a precursor to AJAX for a chat application.

WHY YOU NEED A "WTF NOTEBOOK"

A “WTF Notebook” is used to write down observed issues you may encounter while working. After a few weeks, you'll have a list of problems that will resonate with teammates and now you can present solutions to the team for those problems. This lets you take ownership and initiative within the team, allowing you to make changes and show impact effectively.

MOST MICROMANAGERS ARE BLIND TO BEING SEEN AS ONE

LLAMA 3

Meta has released Llama 3, an open-source LLM. It performs better on many benchmarks - its various-sized models have similar or better performance compared to Google's, Anthropic's, and Mistral's models.

RIPL

Ripl is a library that simplifies 2D graphics rendering in web browsers by providing a unified API for both canvas and SVG elements. It focuses on high performance and interactive data visualization.