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Staff Engineers in big-tech companies like Meta are highly experienced technical leaders who play various roles like Tech Lead, Coding Machine, or Fixer. They differ from Senior Engineers in their focus on team rather than individual impact and have a broader organizational influence. Their duties include building domain strategies, clarifying project plans, de-risking projects, and ensuring team health.
The author shares their experience of creating a font for the first time. Previously relying on digital text drawing, which sometimes led to inconsistent text size and readability, they decided to design a font based on their own handwriting. This endeavor involved learning about font anatomy, such as ascenders, baselines, and x-heights, and experimenting with two iterations of the font. The final design was derived from writing sentences naturally on paper, scanning them, and cleaning them up digitally. They used software to successfully create a TrueType font (TTF).
A collection of links and resources to help people reach senior engineer and beyond.
A free online book with interactive code examples that dives into understanding deep learning.
A guide to IP addresses, networks, and more.
Backend practices in software engineering have seen significant changes over the years. In the early days of the internet, backend development involved rudimentary tools like shell scripting, Perl, and hand-rolled C-code, with version control systems like CVS. Amazon, then a startup, ran its entire operation on a single DEC AlphaServer, using basic methods like symlink flipping for code updates. Eventually, as tech companies started growing faster and getting larger, it was necessary to start implementing distributed systems to handle increasing demand.
This is a story of how a critical microservice that depends on a 3rd-party API failed and caused a disruption for over two weeks. The API suddenly failed one day, and because the handling of API events was not done in real time, the failed events piled up, reaching the API limit and causing many events to be dropped. The post dives into the lessons learned from the incident, such as automating re-runs of failed jobs, involving other teams more, and establishing an on-call rotation earlier.
Databricks recently announced an AI-generated documentation feature, using large language models (LLMs) to automate documentation for tables and columns, with over 80% of the company’s table metadata updates now AI-assisted. A bespoke LLM was developed by two Databricks engineers in one month for under $1,000 in compute costs, resulting in high quality, fast throughput, and low costs. This new model, MPT-7B, fine-tuned on around 3,600 examples, addresses issues of documentation in data platforms and demonstrates the feasibility and efficiency of creating custom LLMs for specific tasks.
Complex codebases lead to change amplification, where simple changes require modifications in multiple places, slowing down the process. Research on 1.5 million pull requests showed that the number of files changed in a pull request (PR) correlates with the time taken to merge it. To minimize complexity and enhance efficiency, it's recommended to keep PRs small, limit them to three or fewer file changes, and use strategies like stacking if possible.
It’s important to take time to make consequential decisions, rather than responding under pressure or panic. While quick action has its place, big decisions rarely require instant responses. Instead, be prepared, consider the best alternatives, and make decisions with a substantial amount of information rather than wait for perfect information.
Trace allows developers to create SwiftUI components and screens for mobile apps with natural language. The application allows for the iterative development of iOS apps in the browser, along with the ability to export files to Xcode for further development.
A new generation of AWS Amplify, an AWS backend platform, has been released. It transitions Amplify to a code-first DX, allowing developers to succinctly express app requirements like data models, business logic, and authorization rules in TypeScript. Core new features include Typescript and monorepo support, per-developer cloud sandbox environments, a unified Amplify console, and the ability to use AWS CDK code inline.
StabilityAI has released Stable Video Diffusion as open-source. Stable Video Diffusion can create videos using generative AI. This post shows various demos of the model in action.
Sam Altman is returning as CEO of OpenAI five days after an attempted coup by the company’s board. The OpenAI board is being overhauled and now seats Bret Taylor (former CEO of Salesforce), Larry Summers (Former United States Secretary of the Treasury), and Adam D'Angelo (CEO of Quora and already a current member of the OpenAI board).
Firefox is transitioning from Mercurial to Git for version control. The Mozilla source code, initially stored in a CVS repository since 1998, moved to Mercurial in 2007, a time when distributed version control systems (DVCS) like Git and Mercurial were just emerging. The choice of Mercurial was largely influenced by Git's subpar performance on Windows at the time. Over the years, as Git gained popularity and GitHub became a major platform for open-source projects, more Mozilla developers began using Git. As a result, Mozilla decided to finally move over to Git to keep up with current developer trends.
Amazon CodeWhisperer for the command line includes IDE-style completions for 500+ CLIs and natural language-to-bash translation.
Chrome Extensions using Manifest V2 will start being disabled as early as June 2024.
A deep dive into advanced techniques and best practices for securing Docker containers against cyber attacks.
This article discusses the introduction of native CSS nesting in major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, a feature previously available only in CSS preprocessors (like Sass). It emphasizes the ease and benefits of using CSS nesting, providing various examples to illustrate its utility. Examples include nesting elements without a class or ID, using CSS combinators, and employing the ampersand symbol for more complex nesting scenarios. The article also showcases practical applications of CSS nesting in different contexts, such as styling post content and card components.
Databases store tables and indexes in files, writing to data pages in memory, which are then written to disk. A challenge arises when there's a power loss or crash during writing, leading to corrupted files. To address this, databases use a Write-Ahead Log (WAL). This article describes how the WAL is used as a source of truth to help the database regain its bearings after a crash.
A CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment) pipeline automates various stages of the software development life cycle. It typically includes stages like coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, monitoring, and planning. This article dives into best practices for an effective CI/CD pipeline, including making small, frequent changes, using feature flags, having rollback strategies, secure deployment strategies, prioritizing security, and fostering collaboration among all teams.
Although clever code feels impressive to write, it’s often unmaintainable and unreasonable to write in production. Code that is easy to understand and readable is arguably harder to write than clever code. This article provides tips and resources, such as an email about coding style from John Carmack, for getting better at writing clear code, along with an anecdote about the difficulties of writing clear code.
Data-driven development (DDD) is where logic is expressed through data structures rather than code. This article describes a typical DDD scenario in Clojure involving maps and rules for decision-making, highlighting how initially simple data-driven solutions can become complex and unwieldy as requirements evolve. The author criticizes the overselling of DDD in the community and advocates for a more balanced approach, suggesting that complex checks are often better implemented directly in Clojure rather than through a data-driven framework.
Make Real is built with tldraw, a React library for creating whiteboards and drawings on an infinite canvas. It allows users to draw a UI mockup and use GPT-4 to turn the image into an HTML file.
River is a robust high-performance job processing system for Go and Postgres. It enqueues jobs transactionally with other database changes, resulting in whole classes of distributed systems problems being avoided. Jobs that are enqueued will be guaranteed only if their corresponding transaction successfully commits. Conversely, if a job’s transaction is rolled back, then that job will be removed. These jobs remain invisible and unavailable for work until the transaction is fully committed.
React Joyride is a tool that lets you create guided tours of your React applications. It uses react-floater for styling and positioning and it gives you the capability to use your own components.
This report was created with the feedback and insights of 26,348 developers from around the world. It covers topics like programming languages, tools, and AI, touching a wide variety of disciplines including web development. For example, Rust is becoming more popular, while Scala is one of the highest-paid languages.
Sam Altman was removed as CEO of OpenAI on Friday, with exact reasons unknown. OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a non-profit by Altman and others, made significant strides in AI research, particularly in deep learning and reinforcement learning. In 2019, OpenAI transitioned to a capped-profit model to combine the aspects of for-profit and non-profit entities, leading to a complex corporate structure. The recent years saw the release of influential AI models like GPT-3 and DALL-E and the successful launch of ChatGPT.
A free course by Google on web performance. It covers key web performance concepts and techniques for improving performance, like code splitting, lazy loading, and optimizing images, videos, and fonts.
CSS nesting, where one style rule can be nested inside another, is now native to CSS.
This article provides thoughts on what bad strategy looks like, AI tools for meetings, and how tech debt impacts companies at different stages. Bad strategies are often fluffy, mistaken as goals, and not focused on specific problems. Tech debt happens at every stage but can be leveraged better the earlier you are and becomes a drift as you scale.
Functional programming is a declarative programming style that uses functions and expressions to create computer programs with the goal of clear code. Principles of Functional Programming is a free course by Carnegie Mellon that was taught to computer science students in the summer of 2023.
A company transitioned from using Preact to React as its front-end framework during a team hackathon. This strategic change was aimed at addressing developmental challenges and boosting performance. The process required meticulous planning, thorough testing, and extensive modifications to the existing codebase. By making this switch, the platform gained enhanced compatibility with Next.js, enriched the overall development experience, and positioned itself for embracing upcoming technological innovations.
This is a technical look at how the JavaScript V8 engine handles strings, including the optimizations used that allow it to go toe to toe with languages like C++. It goes through various string types and implementations, comparing their purposes and describing how they perform in various scenarios. The author uses an example script that fetches and processes web page data to show some of the drawbacks of V8’s optimizations.
While microservices architecture serves certain use cases very well, application architecture is not a one-size-fits-all thing. This article explores a new paradigm, the pool architecture, explaining how it functions through an aquarium illustration. It also highlights the many benefits of using this architecture while also pointing out some of the drawbacks.
It’s challenging to manage constant distractions and information overload in today’s world. The brain is not great at multitasking - productivity is higher when software engineers focus on one thing at a time. Adopting a low-information diet and focusing on content that requires sustained attention, like books or podcasts, trains the brain for better focus. It is important to manage communication effectively. Process-centric communication reduces the need for constant back-and-forth messaging.
The author of this post shares their personal journey and struggles with learning to code over a decade. Initially inspired by tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, they began self-teaching at 15 using various online resources. Despite early enthusiasm, they faced significant challenges in moving from theory to practice, often feeling overwhelmed and doubting their abilities. The post reflects on the ongoing struggle and the realization that coding is inherently challenging but achievable with persistence.
The Plasmo Framework is a browser extension SDK. It has first-class TypeScript and React support, comes with various storage and messaging APIs, and handles various pain points of building browser extensions.
Uneebee is an open-source platform for creating interactive courses similar to those in Duolingo. It’s built in Elixir and Erlang.
gsplat.js is an easy-to-use, general-purpose, open-source 3D Gaussian Splatting library that provides functionality similar to three.js but for Gaussian Splatting.
Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI on Friday and was hired by Microsoft late Sunday night. Satya Nadella announced that Altman, along with Greg Brockman and other OpenAI team members, will be leading an advanced AI research group within Microsoft.
This is an opinionated essay about good and bad data visualization practices. The essay covers various types of graphs, such as pie charts, bar plots, heat maps, and more. One of the rules is that bar plots should not be used for mean separation.
Posthog, a fully remote company, works completely asynchronously. This post shares various tips on how Posthog does it successfully, such as valuing transparency, always sharing context, writing in public, reducing work in progress, and more. The post shares concise specifics and examples for each point.
7 categories of books valuable for software engineers, such as Smart Brevity for writing and A Philosophy of Software Design for software development.
A comprehensive list of tech company engineering blog posts, grouped by topics including tech stack upgrades, backend scaling, and debugging stories.
Content negotiation is a feature of HTTP that allows a client to negotiate the content type of the response from a server. It is typically not the right approach to returning both JSON and HTML for most applications.
Vercel uses a monorepo architecture to organize and reuse code efficiently across teams. Its team suggests using Turborepo for monorepo management and emphasizes the importance of feature flags for safe code release, incremental builds for quick iteration, and skew protection to handle version discrepancies. Thanks to their monorepo and these tools, they are able to have frequent and confident code releases, easy adoption of new technologies, independent work on UI parts, and efficient sharing and reuse of code.
Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage's overall user experience. The interaction responsiveness metric Google uses in its Core Web Vitals assessment is changing in 2024 to INP (integration to next paint). This post outlines how this metric is uncovering issues that have been flying under the radar. Many websites today are bound to fail this metric and the post looks at what developers can do to mitigate such issues.
This post looks at five common mistakes in system design interviews and how to avoid them. These mistakes include not prioritizing scenarios properly, talking too abstractly, having a shallow design implementation, speaking about superficial tradeoffs, and having irrelevant failure discussions. Overall, it’s important to focus on core questions asked during a system design interview and understand what the interviewer is looking for that gives them a “hire” signal.
CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types) are commonly used for collaborative experiences, but are not necessary for them. They are essential in specific scenarios like offline-first applications and text editing, where they prevent overwriting and ensure accurate character placement. However, CRDTs have downsides, such as ever-growing state, complex implementations, and opaque data storage. Instead of CRDTs, collaborative applications, like spreadsheets, presentation tools, form builders, and more, can benefit from contextual information, locking mechanisms for safety, small-scale updates, and real-time updates distribution. This approach allows for effective real-time collaboration without the complexities of CRDTs.