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TELL HN: GOOGLE-WIDE LAYOFFS (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Google has been announcing layoffs throughout the company, including in Ads, Search, Assistant, Maps, Android, and Core.

INCIDENT REPORT FOR JANUARY 10, 2024

Resend, a programmatic email application, was recently hacked due to a leaked database key.

PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING OF SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

A free MIT course teaching software performance.

ARE NITPICKS REALLY WORTH IT?

Nitpicks are usually trivial and have no business impact. Code that doesn’t follow a style guide shouldn’t be considered a nitpick, but rather something larger.

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HOW DISCORD SERVES 15-MILLION USERS ON ONE SERVER

LOAD BALANCING ALGORITHMS EXPLAINED VISUALLY

Load balancing algorithms are necessary as applications grow in size. The Round Robin algorithm assigns requests to servers sequentially. Weighted Round Robin assigns requests based on server weights. The Least Connections algorithm directs requests to the server with the fewest current connections. Finally, the Least Response Time algorithm sends requests to the server with the shortest response time.

AVOID THESE 6 COMMON REACT USESTATE HOOK MISTAKES

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT IS BROKEN, A CHANGE IS COMING

The model of product and engineering managers sounds like a promising concept - PMs decide what to make, and EMs decide how to make it - but it doesn’t always work in practice. For one, most people cannot be good PMs of a new product/industry immediately, leading to bad decision-making. Secondly, engineers build things without ever talking to the customers and can’t make important decisions as a result. There are two ways to fix this: get PMs closer to the business domain and have engineers be more involved in the product side.

HOW TO GET 💩 DONE AS A SOFTWARE ENGINEER

The post introduces the Time Sector System, a productivity method that helped the author finish 8 tasks a day, totaling 944 tasks in 4 months, while significantly reducing stress. The system involves planning tasks monthly, weekly, and daily, categorizing them into time sectors, and adjusting as needed. Even if this specific system isn't used, the principles and lessons learned from the experience can still be valuable.

DEPENDENCY CRUISER

Dependency Cruiser is a JavaScript and TypeScript-compatible package that validates your project’s dependencies. It reports violated rules that you have set.

QUICKWIT

Quickwit is an open-source cloud-native search engine designed for observability. It has logs and distributed tracing, is optimized for speed, and operates on cloud storage.

AUTO WIKI

Documentation for any public GitHub repository.

BEWARE OF ALL GREEN DASHBOARDS

Jeff Bezos once discussed the dangers of using metrics as proxies in an interview. He observed how over time, companies would find themselves blindly managing to a metric without understanding the true underlying purpose the metric was supposed to serve as a proxy for. If all metrics on your dashboard are green, there’s probably something you’re not measuring correctly (or at all).

PERFORMANCE REVIEWS MATTER

Performance reviews help companies reward employees correctly, give them feedback regularly, and assess the effectiveness of managers. While performance reviews have taken a hit in terms of frequency among many companies over the last year, there are ways to streamline the process to reduce the time taken for them. This includes focusing only on essential information, simplifying the review process, and adjusting the timeline.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE WEBSITES GONE?

Internet browsing habits have changed over time in favor of algorithm-driven content on social media platforms. As a result, the joy of discovering interesting websites on the web has been lost. People have stopped curating and sharing websites, leading to the feeling that the web has lost its charm.

AMAZON’S TWITCH TO CUT 500 EMPLOYEES, ABOUT 35% OF STAFF

Twitch is poised to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers, in an announcement which could arrive as early as today.

AIM, FIRE, SCAN: THE 80/20 OF EXECUTING ON BIG PROJECTS

There are three key components to executing a big project: AIM (Plan), FIRE (Do), and SCAN (Learn).

SLACK AI

A project demo for a custom Slack AI chatbot to chat with about the unstructured data lying in your Slack channels.

CES 2024 REPORT

A summary of CES so far, which has shown off a Steam Deck alternative, an Apple Vision Pro alternative, new monitors, and better GPUs by Nvidia.

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COMMON MISTAKES WITH THE NEXT.JS APP ROUTER AND HOW TO FIX THEM

Common mistakes devs make when using the Next.js App Router include using Route Handlers with Server Components, handling Route Handlers incorrectly, using Suspense with Server Components, and integrating Server and Client Components incorrectly. This article covers topics like using context providers with App Router and revalidating data after mutations.

REACT SERVER COMPONENTS: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

React Server Components allow developers to perform server-side data fetching and UI rendering in the same place. Some advantages of server components include the ability to pass them as props to client components and revalidate server HTML without losing client state. However, there are some drawbacks, such as the complexity introduced when handling advanced cases and the limitations in the depth of async components.

THE TRUE PURPOSE OF TESTING

The usefulness of a test is determined by whether it fulfills its intended purpose. Tests should validate the intention behind the system, focusing on what the code is supposed to do (the intention) rather than how it does it (the implementation).

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR MAKING THE BEST CAREER CHOICES IN TECH

The "Hierarchy of Career Priorities" framework includes layers like employability, compensation, growth, well-being, and meaning. It’s important to stay up-to-date with technology stacks, avoid highly specialized domain projects, and be cautious about chasing trends. Professionals should continuously evaluate their career progression against this hierarchy of priorities to make informed decisions.

THE BEST WAY TO GET UNSTUCK

The key to becoming unstuck is to take action, even if it's something small, as movement and momentum are crucial. One way to do this is by temporarily shifting focus to other projects to regain confidence and clarity. Not every situation of stuckness requires a drastic action plan and experience is a valuable teacher in learning how to respond appropriately.

3 PREDICTIONS FOR THE TECH HIRING LANDSCAPE IN 2024

Despite the rough year, there will be a strong need for software developers, with US labor statistics predicting a 26% increase in devs (compared to 3% for other jobs). There will be an increased demand for both generalists and specialists, like AI developers, cybersecurity analysts, and cloud engineers. However, the search process and hiring will become even more selective.

COPILOT KIT

CopilotKit offers two main features: CopilotPortal and CopilotTextarea. CopilotPortal enables the creation of in-app AI chatbots that can interact with your app's frontend, backend, and third-party services via plugins. CopilotTextarea is an AI-assisted text generation tool that can be used as a replacement for a regular textarea element, providing autocompletions, AI editing, and content generation from scratch.

VUE-CONCURRENCY

Vue-concurrency provides an abstraction for performing async operations in Vue. It helps reduce boilerplate code and allows new approaches to techniques like throttling, debouncing, and polling.

NITRO

Nitro is an open-source engine that enables the creation of web servers that can run anywhere. It offers features like rapid development with Hot Module Replacement (HMR), provider-agnostic deployments with over 15 built-in presets, code-splitting, TypeScript support, universal storage, route caching, and more.

NEW YEAR, NEW BUG – RIVALRY BETWEEN DEVS LED TO A DEEP-CODE DISASTER

Two programmers named Jack and Irving worked at a small company that developed productivity software. Jack wanted his name to come first in the About box. In a petty move, Jack hid code in the program that would move his name to come first in the About box on the first day of the new year. However, this code caused a critical bug that crashed older Amiga machines, leading to customer complaints. The scenario reinforces the lesson of always testing code on the lowest-spec machine your users have.

MONGODB VS. SCYLLADB: PERFORMANCE, SCALABILITY, AND COST

In a recent benchmark comparing MongoDB and ScyllaDB, ScyllaDB outperformed MongoDB in 132 out of 133 measurements. ScyllaDB is particularly well-suited for applications dealing with terabyte-sized datasets that require high throughput and low latency for read and write operations.

WHAT PWA CAN DO TODAY

A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a website that can be installed on your device to provide an app-like experience. Today, PWAs support media capture, background fetching, Bluetooth, and more.

POLARS

Polars is a replacement for Pandas for Python which is written in Rust to be very fast.

AN OVERVIEW OF DISTRIBUTED POSTGRESQL ARCHITECTURES

The architectures covered in this article include single-machine PostgreSQL, network-attached block storage, read replicas, DBMS-optimized cloud storage, active-active, transparent sharding, and distributed key-value storage with SQL.

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2023 JAVASCRIPT RISING STARS

The JavaScript Rising Stars is an annual report that highlights popular projects and trends in the JavaScript ecosystem. In 2023, projects like shadcn/ui, Bun, Excalidraw, and Next.js were very prominent. React continues to be the most-used front-end framework, while HTMX and Svelte are growing as popular alternatives. The report also covers developments in build tools, mobile development, styling/CSS in JS, testing, desktop applications, static sites, state management, and GraphQL.

NEXT.JS 14 INTERCEPTING ROUTES

Next.js 14’s App Router introduced intercepting routes, which allows users to intercept or stop the default routing behavior and present an alternate view or component when navigating through the UI while still preserving the intended route for scenarios like page reloads. This can be useful if you want to show a route while keeping the context of the current page. This post provides practical examples of when intercepting routes can be used to improve your website’s UX.

MAKING SENSE OF “SENSELESS” JAVASCRIPT FEATURES

This article discusses "senseless" JavaScript features, such as the floating-point format and why 0.1 + 0.2 doesn't equal 0.3, type coercion and why using === is preferred over ==, automatic semicolon insertion and its limitations, the presence of two bottom values (null and undefined), and the use of increment (++) and decrement (--) operators. These quirks are important to understand as they can lead to hard-to-debug issues. By avoiding certain constructs as shown by examples in the article, developers can make their code more readable.

9 YEARS OF APPLE TEXT EDITOR SOLO DEV

This solo developer has been working on a text editor for nine years, building the application using AppKit and Objective-C. In this post, they describe various implementation details and challenges experienced while developing the application, such as the application’s architecture, the decision to avoid third-party dependencies, and how storyboards were used to create a well-structured codebase. They also show how they read framework code and analyze stack traces to understand how Apple frameworks work.

WEIRD THINGS ENGINEERS BELIEVE ABOUT WEB DEVELOPMENT

The web development community has common assumptions that are not always true. For example, the engineers that create web browsers do not necessarily know how to develop web applications well. Another common belief is that all sites should work without JavaScript. While this is an admirable goal, some sites should actually use more JavaScript. Generally, using JavaScript well leads to better user experiences on the web.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF REFACTORING

It’s helpful to have a comprehensive suite of tests to make refactoring easier. Take small steps when making changes, run tests frequently, adopt continuous integration, refrain from adding extra functionality during refactoring, and make refactoring an integral part of the development process. Automate refactoring when possible and avoid excessively long functions or classes.

QUICK-LINT-JS

Quick-lint-js finds bugs in JavaScript programs, such as syntax errors, using await in a non-async function, and assigning to a const variable.

BETTER COMMITS

Better Commits is a CLI tool that lets developers generate conventional commits through a series of prompts. This allows for better commit messages while inferring ticket and commit type from the branch for consistency.

ANGULAR DEVELOPER SURVEY 2023

The Angular developer survey for 2023 found that 96% of developers use the latest standalone APIs, with 26% already using Signals. Developers appreciate Angular for its integration between core modules, runtime performance, and dependency injection, but identified areas for improvement in its documentation, component authoring format, and initial load performance. The roadmap for 2024 includes continued work on documentation, improving initial load times, and enhancing the component authoring experience.

ESCAPING THE COST/VISIBILITY TRADEOFF IN OBSERVABILITY PLATFORMS

It’s difficult to keep costs low as system complexity grows in traditional Application Performance Monitoring systems. This leads to a cost/visibility tradeoff, where to cut costs, teams have to cut down on visibility into their application’s performance. There are several options to address this, such as focusing on efficient event handling, embedding custom attribute tracking in code, and using open-source observability tools.

REACT NATIVE'S 2023 HIGHLIGHTS AND 2024 OUTLOOK INTRO

React Native saw significant improvements in 2023, including first-class TypeScript support, better styling and layout using Flexbox, and new features like Bridgeless mode. React Native receives updates often, has active community support, and has a growing presence in the top 100 apps on mobile app stores.

HTMX PLAYGROUND

A simple in-browser code sandbox for experimenting with HTMX.

THE ENGINEERING MINDSET

Developing a better engineering mindset involves writing often, fostering productive relationships with product managers, and developing proper company values.

HOW TO WRITE

Writing as a software engineer is important as it allows you to leverage yourself to make a greater impact.