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HOW WE BUILT OUR CUSTOMER DATA WAREHOUSE ALL ON POSTGRES

Tembo built its customer data warehouse with only PostgreSQL using foreign data wrappers (FDWs) and other PostgreSQL extensions to simplify the process. It needed to pull data from various sources, including Postgres, Prometheus, and Clerk, into a single location to create dashboards for tracking customer usage and behavior. Instead of introducing new tools and technologies, Tembo utilized FDWs to connect PostgreSQL to these data sources, creating two new FDWs, clerk_fdw, and prometheus_fdw, for Clerk and Prometheus respectively. It also used pg_cron for scheduling updates and pg_partman for partitioning to improve performance and automate data retention.

THE WEB JUST GETS BETTER WITH INTEROP 2024

Web interoperability makes the web accessible and consistent across different browsers. The Interop Project aims to improve interoperability by encouraging browser engine teams to focus on specific areas. The focus areas for Interop 2024 include accessibility, CSS Nesting, custom properties, and Declarative Shadow DOM. Interop is also investigating projects aimed at improving accessibility testing, mobile testing, and WebAssembly testing.

MY FAVOURITE GIT COMMIT

The author’s favorite Git commit is a message from their time at the Government Digital Service while working on GOV.UK. The commit message, titled "Convert template to US-ASCII to fix error," is valued because it provides clear explanations for the change, is searchable, tells a story about the problem and its resolution, and helps spread knowledge and build trust within a team. Good commit messages are helpful in maintaining a codebase's history and improving collaboration among developers.

IT FEELS LIKE REACT IS GETTING A BIT OF A KICKING RECENTLY

React has faced criticism lately for becoming overly complicated despite its wide use across the industry. When choosing a web framework or library for a project, it’s important to consider various factors, such as project requirements, performance needs, and team capabilities. Instead of following social media trends, developers should choose the best tool for the job, which is sometimes React or sometimes something else.

STANCHION

Stanchion is an SQLite 3 extension that brings column-oriented storage to SQLite. SQLite exclusively supports row-oriented tables, but Stanchion changes that. Column-oriented storage is generally better for analytics queries over many rows and few columns and metric, log, event, and time-series data.

JOLT

Jolt is a JSON structural transformation library that is useful for transforming JSON data from databases or extracting data from large JSON documents for your own consumption.

THANKSGIVING 2023 SECURITY INCIDENT

In November 2023, Cloudflare detected a security incident where a threat actor gained access to its self-hosted Atlassian server. Despite this, Cloudflare assured its customers that no customer data or systems were affected. The incident was traced back to stolen credentials from an Okta compromise in October, with the threat actor conducting reconnaissance and accessing internal systems, mainly Atlassian products. Cloudflare responded with a "Code Red" effort to strengthen security, rotating over 5,000 production credentials, segmenting systems, and performing forensic triages. The threat actor was ultimately denied access. Cloudflare notes that it believes the attack was performed by a nation-state.

APPLE ANNOUNCES CHANGES TO IOS, SAFARI, AND THE APP STORE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Apple announced big changes for iOS, Safari, and the App Store users in the EU. For developers, the changes include new options for app distribution and payment processing. For web developers specifically, Apple is introducing a choice screen that will surface when users first open Safari in iOS 17.4 or later. That screen will prompt EU users to choose a default browser from a list of options. Apple has also introduced alternative, opt-in-optional business terms for apps in the EU, which include reduced commission on app transactions, a 3% fee when using the App Store’s payment processing, and a core technology fee of €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.

WHY RENAMING A FILE ISN’T THE SAME AS CONVERTING IT

When you convert a file, such as an M4A to MP3, it involves several steps like decoding, re-encoding, and copying metadata. On the other hand, simply renaming a file doesn't change its internal data or format - it remains encoded in the original format. Changing a file's extension by renaming it may result in losing metadata.

STARLINK'S LASER SYSTEM IS BEAMING 42 MILLION GB OF DATA PER DAY

SpaceX’s laser system for Starlink is delivering over 42 petabytes of data per day across 9,000 lasers.

GOOGLE SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCES RECAPTCHA FREE TIER, INTRODUCES NEW PRICING MODELS

Google is reducing the number of free Recaptcha assessments from 1 million to 10,000 a month and introducing new pricing models for paid tiers.

14 THINGS TO CHECK BEFORE DEPLOYING A WEBSITE

Before deploying, it’s useful to optimize images, have a 404 page and favicon, minify files, certify the SSL certificate for the site, check responsiveness and accessibility, and use fallbacks.

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HOW GITHUB’S DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE TEAM IMPROVED INNERLOOP DEVELOPMENT

Integration testing in distributed or microservice systems with multiple teams working on different services can be very challenging. GitHub addresses this with Hubber Codespace (HCS), a tool that allows developers to locally set up GitHub's entire distributed ecosystem with a few lines of config change or a query call. This post details how GitHub arrived at HCS as a solution over other possible solutions and presents a first-hand look at how GitHub's developer-first mindset helped it deliver the best tool for devs to ship code quickly and safely in a distributed environment.

A GUIDE TO ENABLING PARTIAL PRE-RENDERING IN NEXT.JS

Partial pre-rendering in Next.js 14 lets you control which parts of a page are pre-rendered. Next.js enables the pre-rendering of pages containing dynamic data during the build time with incremental static regeneration. This article explores how the partial pre-rendering feature works and how it can be used in Next.js applications.

SOME THOUGHTS ON INTERVIEWING

The current job market has increased competition and longer job search periods compared to a few years ago. Many qualified candidates have opted for alternative paths, such as travel or self-employment, to navigate the challenging job market. This post discusses the exhaustion that can come from conducting interviews, emphasizing the importance of kindness and respect in the hiring process.

BECOMING AN ENGINEERING MANAGER - IS IT FOR YOU?

Senior engineers often face the decision to go into management or continue growing as IC. This post offers a quick 5-question quiz to find out if engineering management is for you. Engineering management is not always necessary in order to progress in one’s career as many companies offer tech lead roles and similar positions as an alternative for ICs.

KEYV

Keyv is a library that abstracts the concept of key-value storage, allowing you to easily use a memory-based store (by default) or, if you need persistence, Redis, SQLite, Postgres, MySQL, Mongo, or even a tiered approach.

FABRIC

Fabric helps people integrate AI into their lives. It can help extract the most interesting parts of podcasts and YouTube videos, summarize academic papers, create AI art prompts for a piece of writing, and more.

HOW HARD IS IT TO CHEAT WITH CHATGPT IN TECHNICAL INTERVIEWS? WE RAN AN EXPERIMENT

In a study testing the use of ChatGPT in technical interviews, three groups of interviewers asked different types of questions: verbatim LeetCode questions, modified LeetCode questions, and custom questions. The results showed that candidates using ChatGPT had higher pass rates when facing verbatim questions, indicating potential cheating. However, interviewers did not suspect cheating. Custom questions were recommended as a way to improve the interview process and filter out candidates relying on memorized solutions.

RESEARCHERS SAY GENERATIVE AI ISN'T REPLACING DEVS ANY TIME SOON

A study conducted by AI researchers from Princeton and the University of Chicago suggests that LLMs are far from being capable of solving common software engineering problems. The study evaluated the performance of various LLMs on over 2,300 real GitHub issues and found that they could only solve such problems correctly in a very small percentage of cases, with the most advanced models achieving only 4.8% success. LLMs often struggle with the complexity and context of real-world software engineering tasks.

SPATIAL COMPUTING

The success of interfaces like the Macintosh GUI and iPhone's touchscreen interface is rooted in leveraging human's innate spatial and kinesthetic skills. Apple's new "spatial computer," the Vision Pro, aims to create a 3D spatial world for users, but its interaction model may not be as effective compared to touch interfaces. This could lead to issues with adoption.

MODERN JAVASCRIPT LIBRARY STARTER

A walkthrough of how to create and package a library, publish a package, add testing, and automatically publish to the NPM registry. The automatic publish uses a CI/CD pipeline from GitHub actions. The article also explains modern NPM features like Provenance and Secrets.

LINUS TORVALDS FLAMES GOOGLE KERNEL CONTRIBUTOR OVER FILESYSTEM SUGGESTION

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, sent an angry message to a kernel contributor who works at Google over a filesystem suggestion that he disagrees with.

10 GOOD CODING PRINCIPLES TO IMPROVE CODE QUALITY (X POST)

To increase code quality, one should follow code specs, add documentation and comments, increase robustness, follow design principles, make testing easy, and reduce global dependencies.

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META REVEALS THEIR SERVERLESS PLATFORM PROCESSES TRILLIONS OF FUNCTION CALLS A DAY

Meta’s internal serverless platform called XFaaS processes trillions of function calls a day thanks to unique software optimizations. This article describes how XFaaS works and the optimizations Meta has performed to make its platform efficient, such as utilizing just-in-time compilation. XFaaS solves common problems that serverless platforms face, like lengthy cold start times, high load variance, and overloading downstream services, with creative solutions. The platform offers lessons for public Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) providers, like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions. It is useful for software engineers working with cloud providers to understand how to make serverless functions more efficient.

NEXT.JS APP ROUTER MIGRATION: THE GOOD, BAD, AND UGLY

The Next.js App Router allows for better flexibility of layouts, loading states, and initial data loading on the server. However, it has drawbacks such as the need to add client-side fetching for live UI updates, server-side errors being easily hidden, the inability to implement route exit animations, and issues with routing type safety. The Next.js App Router may not be fully production-ready yet as it still has memory leaks and lower dev server performance.

HOW TO DESIGN RESILIENT AND LARGE SCALE DATA SYSTEMS

Building a data system is incredibly complex, as each team, product, and company has vastly different needs and requirements. Architecting an efficient data system calls for considering three things: latency, correctness, and scalability. This article thoroughly examines these pillars of data systems while also exploring push vs pull architectures, the CAP theorem, and choosing the right data store.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE: PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AT BIG TECH

The primary reason for performance management in Big Tech is to address employees' concerns about fairness and equity in compensation. Many companies, including Google, have shifted to a peer-based evaluation system to improve transparency and fairness. However, this approach often leads to overly positive and vague feedback, making it challenging to differentiate between employees. Ultimately, managers still play a significant role in making decisions about promotions and layoffs, leading to perceptions of favoritism or opaque committee decisions.

HOW DO I NEGOTIATE SALARY WHEN I GET A JOB OFFER?

results. Read the blog

FALCO

Falco is a Django toolkit made to improve the development experience. It offers a CLI with commands for initiating new projects, generating CRUD views for speedy prototyping, and much more. It also provides a collection of guides that aim to solve common issues with web development in Django.

OPEN SAAS

Open SaaS is a SaaS template that features Wasp, a React, NodeJS, and Prisma framework. It comes with Stripe for payments, OpenAI API integrations, Plausible for Google Analytics, various providers for email sending, TailwindCSS for styling, and more.

ONE OF THE INTERNET’S BIGGEST SOFTWARE ARCHIVES IS SHUTTING DOWN

New Mexico State University (NMSU) has announced that it will be closing its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15. Hobbes, one of the oldest software archives on the internet, contains thousands of OS/2 games, applications, utilities, and software dating back to the launch of OS/2 in 1987.

THE OPENAI PRODUCT ECOSYSTEM - MODELS, INTEGRATIONS, AND OPPORTUNITIES

OpenAI has been improving GPT-4 and introducing new development-focused models, such as embeddings and moderation models. OpenAI has also launched various products for consumers, including the GPT store where users can discover custom instances of ChatGPT, and ChatGPT for Teams for small and medium businesses. OpenAI still faces challenges in 2024 - it needs to improve the accuracy of its GenAI models and ensure the alignment and diversity of AI applications in its ecosystem.

ALPHABET BANKED $3.0 BILLION BY STRETCHING SERVERS LIFESPAN

Alphabet stretched the life of its servers and networking kits to six years before replacing them.

ADDING TYPE SAFETY TO OBJECT IDS IN TYPESCRIPT

You can use template literal types and create a specific type for IDs to add type safety to object IDs in TypeScript. This approach allows for type checking and auto-suggestions for IDs while maintaining type safety, preventing the mixing of different entity types at both compile and runtime.

HTTPAREACODES

A funny website that matches HTTP status codes with the corresponding area code on a US map.

AN INTRODUCTION TO TEXT TO SPEECH AND SCREENREADERS FOR DEVELOPERS

This article explains what exactly screen readers are and what they can do alongside text-to-speech. It shows how developers can use both tools to create accessible websites.

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THE SCARY THING ABOUT AUTOMATING DEPLOYS

Deploying changes at a large scale is not easy within Slack's monolithic service. Continuous deployment helps its team quickly respond to customer feedback, but also creates risks associated with releasing a large number of changes simultaneously. To address these challenges, Slack has implemented an automated deployment system called ReleaseBot, which uses anomaly detection and monitoring, specifically focusing on z-scores, to ensure safe and efficient deployments.

HOW TO START A REACT PROJECT IN 2024

This article evaluates a few common approaches to starting a new React project with Vite, Astro, and Next.js. It explains the pros and cons, the skill level needed, and the features that each starter project offers. If you’re starting out with learning React, use Vite, as it stays the closest to React fundamentals. If you’re looking for a full-fledged framework with support for different rendering techniques, use Next.js or Remix. If you want a content-focused website, use Astro.

IS API DESIGN A LOST ART?

Often, issues with API functionality come down to not following core API design principles. Scalability, modularity, statelessness, and efficient data handling are all essential concepts to understand. This article covers these concepts and also discusses monitoring and testing APIs to ensure they hold up against different use cases and environments.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PERSONAL BRANDING IN THE ENGINEERING INDUSTRY

Having a personal brand can be a huge help in your career as an engineer, especially when it comes to job searching. You can develop your own personal brand by focusing on your beliefs and sharing your work and opinions with others.