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GENERATING SVG AVATARS FROM IDENTIFIERS

This blog post describes how to build a system that automatically generates unique SVG avatars based on an input identifier, like a hash.

ARCHITECTURE.MD

Large open-source projects should have an “ARCHITECTURE” document that provides a high-level codemap and highlights significant project aspects.

CHARTWELL

Chartwell is a font used to make charts. It is supported in most design apps, like Adobe apps and Figma.

APPLE IS KILLING PWAS ON IOS FOR EU USERS

iOS 17.4 will bring a few changes to EU users: Apple will delete user data without notice, web push will not work, and many apps will stop working unless users update.

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GPT IN 500 LINES OF SQL

This article explains how GPT is built and then proceeds to implement it in SQL. Yes, SQL. ChatGPT itself couldn’t figure out how to implement GPT in SQL, but the author builds it step-by-step in about 500 lines. Each part of the implementation is explained, including the tokenizer, embeddings, and the attention mechanism.

JAVASCRIPT BLOAT IN 2024

In 2024, JavaScript bundles on modern websites are much bigger than they need to be, even for simple functionalities. Popular websites, like ChatGPT and YouTube, have a high amount of client-side JavaScript bloat that doesn’t always match the functionality the page offers. However, certain websites, like adult websites, prioritize fast loading speeds and have small JavaScript bundles.

HOW I BUILD AND RUN BEHAVIORAL INTERVIEWS

Well-structured behavioral interviews can be highly effective in evaluating candidates. They should have a clear rubric to evaluate specific skills and target up to three core skills to understand deeply. The most important part of a behavioral interview is getting the candidate to explain situations in detail. The more details, the harder it is to fabricate a compelling answer. The criteria for success for an interview should be determined in advance so the subjectivity of a gut feeling is removed later.

IT'S OK TO ABANDON YOUR SIDE-PROJECT

Many developers feel pressured to constantly ship side projects. Abandoned projects are common and that’s okay. The process of building a side project, even without ultimately shipping a finished product, still provides a valuable learning experience.

SCALING YOURSELF

Scaling yourself is crucial to multiplying your impact across your team. The best ways to scale yourself are increasing your influence through helping others, building tooling that improves the efficiency of your team, and sharing your knowledge through tech talks, writing, and code reviews.

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FUNCTIONAL UI KIT

Functional UI Kit is a design system that provides the core components needed in every project, focusing on accessibility, development experience, and a unified designer-developer experience. It makes sure that Figma variables and CSS variables work together effortlessly by sharing the same names, usage, and inheritance structure. Each Figma variable has a direct counterpart in CSS.

PERSPECTIVE

Perspective is an interactive analytics and data visualization component that is well-suited for large and/or streaming datasets. It can be used to create user-configurable reports, dashboards, notebooks, and applications. Perspective is deployable stand-alone in the browser or in concert with Python/Jupyter Notebooks.

JUSTPATH

A simple utility for exploring the PATH environment variable in both Windows and Linux.

TROY HUNT: THANKS FEDEX, THIS IS WHY WE KEEP GETTING PHISHED

FedEx’s legitimate SMS and email messages contain numerous red flags typical of scams: typos, strange capitalization, no currency info, and suspicious domain names for payments. Its payment site allows users to change tracking numbers and amounts via simple URL manipulation, making it feel like a phishing site.

HOW GOOGLE HELPED DESTROY ADOPTION OF RSS FEEDS

Google, despite initially championing and benefiting from the open RSS protocol, has systematically undermined it. It has removed RSS features and has displayed inconsistent support for RSS. The company has strategically used RSS to gain market share, just to limit it later.

HOW TO NOT DIE BY A THOUSAND CUTS. OR, HOW TO THINK ABOUT SOFTWARE QUALITY

Traditional approaches to software quality assurance often fail, leading to a "death by a thousand cuts". Instead, quality should be everyone’s job, so each person involved in a product’s lifecycle needs to care about a product’s quality. Understanding the broader system (company, market, and customers) is essential to building a high-quality product. Strictly linear design-to-production processes lead to compounding risk as errors and delays accumulate. Feedback loops are important to have.

WHAT APPS HAVE YOU MADE FOR YOUR OWN USE ONLY, THAT YOU USE DAILY? (REDDIT THREAD)

Reddit users have built Discord bots to tell stories to their kids, scripts to find movie subtitles automatically, simple todo apps, and more.

ASK HN: WHAT DO I DO WITH MY SIDE PROJECTS? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

THE PAST AND PRESENT OF THE SKELETON SCREEN — AND HOW TO USE THEM

Skeleton screens provide a preview of the page layout instead of a blank page or simple animation, creating a sense of progress and making wait times feel shorter. Good skeleton screens maintain layout consistency, use subtle motion effects, and focus on loading larger structural components rather than small details.

PLEASE MAKE YOUR TABLE HEADINGS STICKY

Making table headings sticky to remain visible when scrolling improves the user experience of navigating large tables.

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META'S NEW LLM-BASED TEST GENERATOR IS A SNEAK PEEK TO THE FUTURE OF DEVELOPMENT

Meta has created a system called TestGen-LLM that automatically generates test cases. These test cases are filtered down until there are only cases that are verified to both work and improve test coverage of the code base. The system shows how LLMs can be used to create more reliable software by helping find and catch non-obvious edge cases in code. It also shows how LLMs can be effectively used within large codebases and what the future of software testing may look like.

USING LOCALSTORAGE IN MODERN APPLICATIONS

localStorage has been supported in most browsers for over fifteen years, so it’s a reliable way to persist key-value pairs on the client side. This article explores the various aspects of the localStorage API, its advantages and limitations, and alternative storage options available for modern applications. localStorage is best used for user preferences, simple settings, or temporary data. It should not be used for large datasets, querying data, or frequent read/writes as there’s JSON overhead and it’s not asynchronous.

TELL HN: TO BE HONEST... GPT COPILOTS AREN'T THAT GREAT FOR PROGRAMMING (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Some programmers are finding GPT-based copilot tools useful for generating simple code, like boilerplate or unit tests. However, many others say they're not good tools due to inaccuracies or irrelevant code. Programmers may have mixed opinions on GPT-based programming tools, but they all agree that the accuracy of suggestions needs to be better.

INTERVIEWING ENGINEERS FOR DIAGNOSTIC SKILLS

SREs and backend engineers need strong troubleshooting skills, but these are rarely assessed during traditional interviews. To effectively test for these skills, create an interactive role-playing exercise where candidates work through a complex bug. This approach focuses on evaluating the candidate's diagnostic process rather than simply finding a solution. It tests key skills like their ability to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information, the specificity of their questions, how they handle dead-ends, and their overall problem-solving strategy.

HOW CHATGPT IS MAKING ME LAZY

ChatGPT can streamline development tasks, making developers potentially over-reliant on it. The chatbot helped this author remove local download functionality in the Cloudflare D1 beta. Despite initial setbacks, they used ChatGPT to iteratively develop a script solution, starting with JSON to CSV, then TSV, and finally a direct import to a local SQLite database.

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PHIND-70B

Phind-70B is a free LLM model that beats the latest GPT-4 Turbo on certain benchmarks. It is specifically made for fast code generation and is meant to be used by developers.

INTRODUCING SUPERMAVEN, THE FIRST CODE COMPLETION TOOL WITH A 300,000-TOKEN CONTEXT WINDOW

Supermaven has introduced a new code completion tool that boasts an unprecedented 300,000-token context window for a deeper understanding of any codebase. The tool provides AI suggestions tailored to a codebase's specific APIs and coding conventions, even with large or unique projects. The model was trained on edit sequences rather than just files, making it well-suited for refactoring tasks.

FROM TO DB

Create forms directly from your Postgres, MySQL, or MSSQL database.

LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS ARE DRUNK AT THE WHEEL

The current hype around LLMs like ChatGPT risks obscuring the actual limitations of the technology and could potentially foster a counterproductive boom-and-bust cycle within the tech industry. While LLMs excel at producing human-like text, they cannot reason, understand truth, or autonomously solve problems. They are also prone to hallucinations (i.e., they lie) and unpredictable behavior. Despite this, businesses are rushing to integrate LLMs in often unproductive ways.

IT’S OFFICIAL, APPLE KILLS WEB APPS IN THE EU

Apple has confirmed that it is intentionally removing Home Screen web app installation in the EU, claiming that it is necessary for compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). However, the decision directly circumvents the DMA. Apple's actions are probably prompted by its fear of losing control over app distribution and the associated revenue.

GO RUN

Go's 'go run' command allows developers to compile and run code without external build tools or complex setups. This is unlike JavaScript, where project structure and build tools can vary wildly, introducing dependencies and potential complexity. Standardized build systems have made the Go developer experience a positive one.

CANVAS SIZE

Canvas Size is a JavaScript library that helps determine the maximum area, height, width, and custom dimensions of an HTML canvas element.

EXPANDING OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH GOOGLE

Reddit has partnered with Google to make its archive of conversations and communities more discoverable, improving content accessibility for Reddit users while expanding Google's training data for product and service improvements.

INCIDENT REPORT FOR FEBRUARY 21ST, 2024

Resend experienced a 12-hour-long outage because a developer accidentally dropped the entire production database.

TOP 20 SQL QUERY OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

A list of SQL query optimization techniques, such as creating indexes on huge tables and selecting certain fields instead of all of them using *.

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REACT TRENDS IN 2024

React has multiple trends in 2024 in various categories. On the UI side, headless libraries with barebones components are gaining popularity along with utility-first CSS like Tailwind CSS. There are multiple emerging frameworks and tools, like Astro for static websites, authentication solutions like Supabase, tRPC for maintaining type safety, and TanStack Router for routing in single-page React apps. Some paradigm shifts that will continue in 2024 are the usage increase of React Server Components, better compilers and bundlers, and a push towards the edge of better performance.

REACT LABS: WHAT WE'VE BEEN WORKING ON – FEBRUARY 2024

The React Compiler is now in production on Instagram. It automatically re-renders only the necessary parts of a UI upon state changes. The React team has been adding features to React Canary, which allows early adoption of stable features before official release, like Server Components and Actions. Actions in React can handle data submissions in both client-only and client-server apps and it offers features like optimistic updates and form state management.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF AIRBNB'S ARCHITECTURE

Airbnb started as a monolithic Ruby-on-Rails application and eventually moved to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The SOA approach aimed for loosely coupled services with focusing on clear data ownership, specific concerns for each service, and avoiding functionality duplication. Airbnb's migration journey involved multiple iterations, with the final version completely eliminating its monolithic architecture. Pros of SOA include increased reliability and scalability, while cons include increased development time and complexity. Airbnb also uses an in-house API framework, automated canary analysis with Spinnaker, and Powergrid for parallel task execution to support its SOA.

FALSEHOODS JUNIOR DEVELOPERS BELIEVE ABOUT BECOMING SENIOR

Senior developers don’t have all the answers and seniority doesn’t always guarantee job security. Seniors often have a harder time juggling work-life balance and leading projects can be an anxious endeavor. Boring tasks, like meetings, documentation, and code reviews, are part of the deal, as is dealing with legacy code.

THE KILLER APP OF GEMINI PRO 1.5 IS VIDEO

Google's new language model, Gemini Pro 1.5, has impressive vision capabilities - it can process video and extract structured content. This author tested the model with videos of bookshelves and was able to get a JSON array of the titles and authors of the books in the videos. While there are limitations, such as safety filters and the model sometimes hallucinating incorrect details, Gemini Pro 1.5’s large context window makes analyzing video much easier compared to other LLMs.