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HOW META BUILT THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THREADS

This article details how Meta's infrastructure teams successfully supported Threads' rapid growth, hitting 100 million users in 5 days. The article highlights the roles of ZippyDB, a scalable distributed key/value database, and Async, a serverless function platform, in managing the high user influx and workload demands. These components demonstrate Meta's robust infrastructure and engineering culture, enabling fast product launches.

WHAT VUE’S CREATOR LEARNED THE HARD WAY WITH VUE 3

Evan You, creator of Vue, recounts some of the challenges the release of Vue 3 unveiled and the lessons he learned with each one. One key lesson was minimizing breaking changes and adopting a deprecation cycle to ensure smoother transitions for users. Another lesson was recognizing the importance of collaborating with ecosystem library authors to address issues before releases and discouraging the use of internal APIs to prevent difficulties in upgrading. Embracing TypeScript and the composition API was crucial for a better developer experience.

WHAT IS A DISTRIBUTED DATABASE AND WHEN SHOULD YOU USE ONE?

Distributed databases are recommended when you need geographical distribution of data, scalability, high availability and data resilience, and routing traffic for lower latency. However, distributed databases also come with challenges such as efficient routing, maintaining data consistency, handling complex ACID transactions, cost considerations, and provisioning.

THE DAY I STARTED BELIEVING IN UNIT TESTS

Initially skeptical about the value of unit tests, the author was assigned to create and run them for embedded software. After a year of successful runs, the tests suddenly started failing due to a race condition in the test framework's threading abstraction. This experience led the author to recognize the importance of unit tests in uncovering hidden defects, improving code quality, and adopting new development methodologies when necessary.

BIGGEST PRODUCTIVITY KILLERS IN THE ENGINEERING INDUSTRY

The top productivity killers include external distractions such as social media, email, and meetings, as well as poor time management and a lack of clear goals or expectations. Strategies for addressing these issues include setting boundaries around technology use, prioritizing tasks, and establishing clear communication channels.

TSDOCS

TSDocs is a platform that allows you to browse type reference documentation for JavaScript packages. It even works for packages that aren’t written in TypeScript or for packages that re-export types from another package.

RE:DOM

RE:DOM is a small UI library built to create DOM elements and keep them in sync with live data. It doesn’t use the virtual DOM and therefore uses less memory than other virtual DOM-based libraries. Developers can use pure JavaScript if needed, eliminating the need for complex templating languages.

KANBAN-PYTHON

Kanban-python is a terminal Kanban board built in Python with the help of pyscaffold. It comes with features like custom column creation, automatic scanning, and a customizable config file, all created to help you be more productive.

FOUR TRENDS THAT CHANGED AI IN 2023

2023 was an exciting year for AI. We witnessed many impactful changes and unanticipated shifts including product releases, policy changes, and boardroom coups. This article summarizes 4 trends that shaped the trajectory of AI in 2023 and may continue to do so into 2024. Although we’ve discovered a lot this year, we still have so much to learn about AI.

SAYING GOODBYE TO THIRD PARTY COOKIES

Web privacy continues to improve with the latest announcement from Chrome: third-party cookies will be deprecated in 2024. Chrome joins its browser counterparts Safari and Firefox with this change. This article explains why third-party cookies pose a privacy risk, how Chrome will incrementally deprecate them in 2024, and how these changes will affect web developers and general product users.

THE “CHEAP” WEB

The “cheap” web focuses on websites that are cheap to maintain, access, leave, participate in, explore, and contribute to.

GOOGLE’S NEW AI, GEMINI, BEATS CHATGPT IN 30 OF 32 TEST CATEGORIES

Google gets a leg up in the AI race with its new AI tool, Gemini, which exceeds its competitors in 30 of the 32 academic benchmarks used to evaluate large language models.

MODERN CSS PROPERTIES YOUR WEBSITE MUST HAVE

This article highlights 3 modern CSS properties that can help make your website UI more seamless. It spotlights scroll-margin, color-scheme, and text-wrap and includes short code snippets that show you how and when to use each property.

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REACT TRICKS: FAST, FIT AND FUN

This article discusses React tricks learned from maintaining the open-source React library “Wouter”. Some tricks mentioned include using React.cloneElement for component composition, optimizing component rendering with React.memo, using useState for resource initialization, and stable callbacks with useEvent. The article also touches on managing external state changes with useSyncExternalStore and addressing tearing issues with hashchange events in React.

WEB DEVELOPMENT IN 2023: JAVASCRIPT STILL RULES, AI EMERGES

This article covers web development trends in 2023. The year showed the continued dominance of React, the rise of Astro as a popular framework, Vercel's success with its AI SDK, the growth of Cloud Development Environments (CDEs), steady progress in WebAssembly, and a renaissance in the open web. Generative AI is bound to help speed up web development even more in 2024.

4 SIMPLE PROGRAMMING HABITS THAT TRANSFORMED MY PRODUCTIVITY

Leave work slightly unfinished in order to reach a productive “flow state” easier the next day. Learn keyboard and mouse shortcuts, maintain a list of common commands and references, and learn to say “no” more often. This includes saying “no” both in terms of choosing technology and tasks that align with your goals and priorities

MENTORING SOFTWARE ENGINEERS OR ENGINEERING LEADERS

Mentoring is valuable for professional growth. A few different approaches to finding mentors include seeking internal mentors at large companies, considering paid coaches for engineering leaders at smaller companies, and connecting with experienced individuals both in-person and online. Mentoring doesn't have to be formal and structured, as even informal mentorship can be valuable and initiated by simply asking someone you admire for their time and advice.

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BYTEBASE

Bytebase provides advanced database DevOps and CI/CD for engineering teams. It provides a unified process to manage, query, secure, and govern all of a team’s databases from one place.

BASELINE 2023

Baseline is a new feature introduced this year that tells you when a specific web platform feature (such as CSS or JS) can be considered safe to use in a web browser. This post highlights various features that became part of Baseline in 2023, including size container queries, new color spaces and functions, compression streams, offscreen canvas, and module preload.

SWIFT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE PART OF THE OS

Swift's inclusion in Apple's operating systems has benefits such as not requiring apps to embed Swift libraries. However, it also creates challenges such as the inability to remove or change APIs without affecting existing apps. Alternatives to Apple’s approach, such as library deduplication, explicit "polyfill" support, and explicit backwards-deployment support, improve the developer experience and help manage the evolution of Swift in the OS.

THE LARGEST MONEY-PRINTING UI ELEMENT EVER MADE

A browser’s URL/search bar is an expensive piece of real estate. Google pays Firefox approximately $400 million and Safari receives between $15-20 billion for Google to be the default search engine. This article floats the idea that creating a popular browser and selling the default search preference could be a viable business strategy given the lucrative nature of the browser's URL/search bar.

KITEMAKER BLOG - MORE PRODUCT, FEWER PMS

Teams need to become more product-oriented. This means aligning non-product managers to think like product managers.

2023, YEAR OF OPEN LLMS

A detailed retrospective of open-source LLMs this year. This year has been fast-paced for AI and there are new architectures that have appeared that may replace the Transformer.

WHY DO PROGRAMMERS NEED PRIVATE OFFICES WITH DOORS?

There are two types of work: harmlessly-interruptible work and Do Not Disturb work, and interruptions can significantly impact the latter. This means that private offices are useful for programmers to be productive.

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DATABASE FUNDAMENTALS

This article teaches database fundamentals by guiding the reader in building a simple database. It starts with the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) that most databases aim to guarantee and discusses the challenges in achieving these properties. It then delves into the concept of storage engines in databases, comparing mutable B-Trees and immutable Log Structured Merge (LSM) Trees. It explains how LSM Trees are designed to minimize disk I/O and seeks, making them suitable for write-heavy workloads. The article touches on topics like bloom filters and Write-Ahead Logs (WALs) as part of database design to achieve ACID properties and isolation.

THE AWAIT EVENT HORIZON IN JAVASCRIPT

An async function, upon awaiting a Promise, cannot proceed until that Promise resolves, which could potentially lead to resource leaks if the Promise never settles. There are many remediations to the problem, like Explicit Resource Management and AbortSignal. However, in practice, they are limited and don't solve the fundamental problem. Instead, generator functions in JavaScript can offer more structured concurrency as they are not constrained by the await event horizon.

THE BEST WEBASSEMBLY RUNTIME MAY BE NO RUNTIME AT ALL

An alternative approach to WebAssembly (WASM) runtimes is no runtime at all. Traditional WASM runtimes like V8, Wasmer, WasmEdge, and Wasmtime are complex and platform-dependent. Instead, transpile Wasm code to C source code using tools like wasm2c or w2c2, which results in human-readable C code that can be compiled and run without the need for a dedicated runtime.

HOW TO PREPARE THE TECHNICAL INTERVIEW

This post shares an experience of preparing for internal interviews to switch teams at Amazon. It emphasizes the importance of making a positive impression on interviewers, both emotionally and rationally, by engaging in meaningful conversations and explaining thought processes clearly. It goes on to outline a strategic approach to interview preparation involving mindset, learning modes, a structured plan, struggle time, and the interview week, highlighting the importance of consistent effort and focus.

SVGL

A library of free-to-use SVG logos.

ANNOUNCING REACT HYDRATION OVERLAY - EASILY SQUASH HYDRATION ERRORS

Overlay for debugging hydration mismatches, providing an explicit diff between the server-side and client-side renders.

HOW MANY LINES OF C IT TAKES TO EXECUTE A + B IN PYTHON?

This article delves into the implementation details of how Python handles operations like "a + b" at the CPython runtime level. It discusses the use of the PyObject structure and PyTypeObject structure to enable polymorphism and inheritance in Python objects. The article explores how dynamic dispatch works in Python, including the compilation of Python code to bytecode and its execution by the CPython virtual machine.

WHY MULTI-CLOUD: THE 5 BEST REASONS, ACCORDING TO EXPERTS

A multi-cloud architecture is an approach that involves using multiple cloud providers for an application or company. There are several reasons to adopt a multi-cloud approach, including regulatory compliance, avoiding vendor lock-in, meeting customer requirements, gaining leverage in price negotiations with cloud providers, and empowering engineering teams. However, the primary motivation for adopting multi-cloud should be to address business problems rather than technical ones.

PROGRAMS ARE GAMES, PROGRAMMING IS A GAME

Programming can be considered a unique and fun game where individuals can create programs to map inputs to outputs, making it more enjoyable than many other activities.

MEASURING THE SIZE OF THE CACHE LINE EMPIRICALLY

OXLINT GENERAL AVAILABILITY

Oxlint is a JavaScript linter designed to catch erroneous or useless code without requiring any configurations by default. It’s 50-100 times faster than ESlint and defaults to identifying erroneous, redundant, or confusing code over unnecessary nitpicking rules.

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HOW I BROUGHT LCP DOWN TO UNDER 350 MS FOR GOOGLE-REFERRED USERS ON MY WEBSITE

This article demonstrates techniques for optimizing LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) on high-traffic websites to under 350ms, even with a lot of images and slow connection. This is done by making Google prefetch HTML and critical resources on the Google Search results page. Google does this for websites that have a high position within Google Search results for a given phrase and have properly implemented Signed Exchanges (SXG). The article focuses on how to add SXG to your web application.

IMPROVING NODE.JS LOADER PERFORMANCE

Node.js supports two types of modules: EcmaScript (ES) modules and CommonJS modules. ES modules are the official standard and are supported by modern browsers, while CommonJS modules are used by Node.js by default, but are not supported by browsers. Node.js determines which module loader to use based on the file extension: .mjs for ES modules, .cjs for CommonJS modules, and .js with package.json settings. This article discusses optimizations made to improve the performance of package.json reading and parsing in Node.js, ultimately resulting in faster applications.

CALL SITE ATTRIBUTION: HOW TO PINPOINT ROGUE SQL QUERIES THROTTLING DATABASE PERFORMANCE

This author explains how they added call site attribution to their Node.js web app to prepare for a potential 10x growth in database traffic. The attribution helped identify the specific location in the source code from which SQL queries were executed, allowing for quick identification and optimization of performance bottlenecks. Initially, they explored solutions like Datadog tracing and monkey patching, but eventually settled on requiring SQL queries to be tagged with a user-defined string indicating the call site.

MAYBE GETTING RID OF YOUR QA TEAM WAS BAD, ACTUALLY.

DevOps initially focused on optimizing delivery pipelines and processes, but the bottleneck in software delivery shifted to testing. This led to a series of actions that devalued and eventually dismantled the role of QA engineers, resulting in low-quality software. However, quality assurance work which includes defect tracking, bug triage, defect investigation, and end-to-end testing, which all end up being long-term obstacles to sustainable software development.