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This article discusses how to create Git commits using Python and without using the Git command-line interface. It explains the process step by step, covering the creation of blobs, trees, commits, and branches manually. Python code snippets are provided for each step along with explanations of Git's underlying data structures.
Setting clear goals provides focus, helps in decision-making, and reduces the ambiguity in one's path. This article covers different types of goals, including those partially within one's control, completely within one's control, action-based checklists, recurring patterns, and feeling-based goals. To decide on goals, it’s helpful to start with focus areas and define the "why" behind each goal.
Self-reviews, peer reviews, manager reviews, and performance discussions are all used for determining an employee's rating in big tech companies. To understand promotions and ratings well, it’s important to know that managers don't have full control over ratings and that it’s important to have higher-up engineers and managers vouching for you.
It’s important to identify common patterns in real-world applications, recognize knowledge gaps, and collect resources for study and practice when preparing for system design interviews, particularly for FAANG companies. The framework for succeeding during interviews involves asking clarifying questions, proposing high-level designs, diving into details, and addressing follow-up questions. Various resources for study, practice, and learning are provided in the article.
Hacker Startup is a list of starter kits and templates for developers to build their next project faster. It includes kits and templates for Next.js, Nuxt, Ruby on Rails, Django, and more.
Page Replica is a web scraping and caching tool created using Node.js, Express, and Puppeteer. It is designed to prerender web application pages (e.g., React, Angular, Vue) for SEO or other uses. It can scrape single web pages or entire sitemaps with an API, optionally removing JavaScript and caching the HTML. The tool also includes an Nginx configuration for efficiently handling both user and search engine bot traffic.
DBChaos allows developers to stress-test their databases with pre-defined queries. It validates slow and expensive queries that may break a database.
The author of this article received a support team message about a customer problem, leading to the accidental deletion of all orders in the production database due to a flawed SQL query. The recovery process involved downtime and efforts to restore the database to a previous state. The mistakes made include working on production during the weekend without proper testing, manual database editing, and not using transactions.
Coding itself is relatively straightforward - the real challenge lies in defining clear and accurate software requirements. This will make it difficult for AI to replace software engineers. AI cannot create software requirements well, but can assist in rewriting existing software based on well-defined specifications.
There are various principles that should guide the update of the C committee’s charter for the long-term health of C. These include the importance of providing a simple upgrade path between adjacent versions of C while allowing for incompatibilities, minimizing incompatibilities with C++, maintaining conceptual simplicity, and addressing memory safety issues that plague C.
Tail Call Optimization (TCO) in JavaScriptCore, the engine behind Bun, allows for optimized recursive functions. This allows Bun to be faster than other JavaScript runtimes.
"Subject-First Commit Messages" are easier to scan and read. The more common style of commit messages has an active voice and imperative mood style, which is harder to read.
This article suggests strategies for managing commits within feature branches, file moves, and color-coded line changes in diffs. It also advises making changes smaller and more frequent, optimizing CI processes, and reevaluating the traditional code review process.
The primary reason for caching is to improve performance. Other benefits include faster loading times (users get their pages faster), improved efficiency, and reduced loads on the server. This article dives into different types of caching, such as page, content, data, instruction, browser, and query caching. It also describes the trade-offs of caching, such as how caching reduces latency but also reduces data consistency, which can make certain applications unusable.
A look at how to improve your website’s performance with strategies, tools, and tips to help you make notable improvements. It’s a guide for everyone with topics for beginners, like why web performance is important and the core web vitals, advanced tips on performance techniques, and tools on testing that can help find performance gaps in websites.
Next.js 14 introduced Server Actions, functions that execute on the server side. Server Actions allow developers to offload responsibilities like data fetching and mutations to the server, avoiding security concerns related to client-side data manipulation. This article provides a practical example of how to use Server Actions to handle form submissions and interact with a database, demonstrating the benefits of this approach.
Ruby has been a constant in the author’s extensive career as a software developer. Although Ruby has lost popularity in recent years, she still vouches for the language’s usefulness and amazing developer experience. In this article, she explains why she loves Ruby, including points that highlight its expressiveness, ease of use, and supportive community.
Web Components have various problems, such as their lack of semantic value for search engines, suboptimal performance, and clunky APIs like customElements.define and Shadow DOM. Browser makers should focus on solving real problems faced by developers, such as improving reactivity, optimizing DOM rendering, and addressing the need for self-sizing iframes.
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SvelteKit is the official framework for creating apps with Svelte. This version release includes many highly anticipated changes. Version 2.0 adds support for Vite 5 along with many other small improvements. SvelteKit 2.0 smooths the way for Svelte 5's release in 2024.
Casibase is an open-source domain knowledge database powered by ChatGPT, Casbin, and Casdoor. It has a separate architecture for the frontend (React) and backend (Golang). Casibase supports high concurrency, integration with existing systems, and mainstream databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL. It has a web UI for managing the database.
PenX is an open-source note-taking app designed for structure and ease of use. It prioritizes local-first data and user privacy with end-to-end encryption and comes with GitHub-based version control out-of-box.
Computer scientists made significant progress in various areas of the field this year. AI demonstrated remarkable advancements in generating text and art, with large language models like ChatGPT gaining attention. Computer scientists also made improvements to Shor's algorithm for factoring large numbers, delved into the behaviors emerging from large language models, and explored a vector-driven approach to AI. Scientists researched questions related to computational complexity, error correction in quantum computing, and the intersection of cryptography and AI, revealing backdoors in machine learning models.
A Google OAuth vulnerability allows former employees of organizations to retain indefinite access to applications like Slack and Zoom even after they have been off-boarded and removed from the company's Google organization. The vulnerability arises from the ability to create non-Gmail Google accounts using corporate Google organization email aliases and email plus sign forwarding.
There are various ways enduring companies become successful. For example, GitHub’s success was based on giving away its core product for free, which created easy developer adoption and made it easy for enterprises to pay for it. HubSpot had product diversification and great inbound marketing. Zapier is an expert in programmatic SEO and is a self-serve application. The article also mentions lessons from GitLab, Atlassian, and Y Combinator.
The structured clone function, which is built into the JavaScript runtime, can be used to make deep copies of objects in JavaScript.
A complete guide to writing a technical specification. This article covers who should write it, what the tech spec should cover, and when/why you might or might not need one.
A thank you to the developers charged with keeping systems available and safe so everyone else can enjoy the holidays with ease.
The new Wasmer JavaScript SDK makes the execution of various WebAssembly-related programs, like UNIX programs, easier in the browser.
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Developer productivity is meant to measure ability to produce and deliver adept code directly related to a company’s business outcomes. In practice, most companies fixate on surface definitions, incentivize the wrong behaviors [6], or fall into measurement paralysis. This blog post by Pluralsight [6] introduces the Developer Thriving framework [6] — a new way to measure productivity that’s focused on agency, learning, motivation and efficiency, support and belonging.
A “fetch waterfall” is a common data fetching issue in React. It happens when you create a hierarchy of components that fetch their own data and show “loading” states before child components are rendered. There are a couple of ways to resolve this: by fetching data from the server (it’s not always as simple as using a server component), hoisting the data fetching to a higher level component, or through Suspense, which triggers the whole component tree’s fetches in parallel.
This article introduces a specialized hash table called FastMap used for hash joins and aggregate handling. FastMap takes an unconventional approach to speeding up SQL execution by using various hash functions (shown through code examples). Benchmarks show how FastMap is faster than standard Java Hashmaps.
Testability refers to how easily software can be tested. It plays a crucial role in identifying and fixing errors, ensuring software reliability. This article discusses automated testing basics, including unit tests, integration tests, and system tests, with examples in Go. It also highlights design principles for enhancing testability, such as modular design, the use of interfaces, and dependency injection.
Technical debt is the idea that rushing software development for short-term gains can lead to future slowdowns. Features add to this debt, so their value must outweigh the debt they introduce. Once added, features are challenging to remove, making it crucial to work within existing assumptions to minimize debt.
It’s important to critically evaluate advice, considering that software development is not an extensively researched field. It’s better to try out different approaches and learn from experience. A good way to get better at software engineering is to understand the context and origins of best practices and conventions, take walks to refresh the mind, and explore the hidden depths of the tools used in programming.
The author of this article went from being a junior data engineer to a staff engineer at big tech companies like Facebook, Netflix, and Airbnb. He outlines seven rules for successful job hopping in data engineering, including rapid onboarding, focusing on high-priority work, measurable impact, and not forcing promotions when your manager doesn't support it. He also shares experiences from job interviews, promotions, and the skills he acquired along the way.
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Stay in the loop with the latest innovations as we unravel the cloud transformation journeys of companies across various industries 🚀 From Generative AI Applications, to Mapping 3D Spaces via AWS Digital Twin, Low-Latency Infrared Video Streaming, and many more 💡 Dive into the _craft of the possible _ [14]🎧🎙️
Qnm is a CLI utility for querying the node_modules directory. You can use fuzzy search to find specific things and also see which modules are using the most space.
Gemini Pro Chat is a minimal web UI to use Gemini Pro, Google’s new LLM.
An open-source inpainting and image-upscaling tool powered by WebGPU and Wasm on the browser.
Vector database startups have proliferated in the last 12 months. However, vector databases should not be solely seen as a way to expand a language model's memory, but rather should be thought of as a specialized search engine. While embeddings and vector search can enhance search results, building a robust search engine with a combination of high-quality embeddings and traditional search methods is a better approach to utilizing AI well.
Strongly typed languages enforce strict type rules, ensuring that variables adhere to their defined types, while statically typed languages require explicit type declarations for variables during compilation. Statically typed languages catch type errors early in development, enhancing code reliability. TypeScript is a language that combines strong and static typing, providing a balance between type safety and flexibility.
This post walks through how Zoom’s architecture solves challenges in video streaming, processing, and routing to achieve scale and low latency. Zoom breaks down its video stream into hierarchical layers, where each layer holds a different resolution. This technique reduces bandwidth usage and server CPU load.
chDB is an embeddable, in-process SQL OLAP engine powered by ClickHouse. This article goes through various examples of how to use chDB with Python.
Wireflow is an open source tool for creating beautiful user flow prototypes. It has similar features to a photo editor and supports real-time collaboration.
Quack Companion is a VSCode IDE extension that guides users through their code contributions within open source GitHub projects.