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VIZLY

Vizly lets you query your database in plain English. It runs fully on-premise, with no data leaving your machine.

MONEY IS POURING INTO AI. SKEPTICS SAY IT’S A ‘GRIFT SHIFT’

The move from crypto to artificial intelligence fueled the markets this year, but some are questioning how much of it is real. A company that wasn’t doing well renamed itself to “Applied Blockchain”, but a little too late. Luckily for them, ChatGPT came out a few months later. To boost their stock price, they renamed themselves “Applied Digital” and mentioned AI a few times in their earnings call, getting a hyped 450% increase in the public markets. While dollars are flowing in quickly to all things AI, it is yet to be seen whether these companies can even last.

THE MYTH OF “OPEN SOURCE” AI

Efforts to make AI more “open” seem to have gained momentum in recent months. However, a new analysis shows that “open source” AI tools like Llama 2 are still controlled by big tech companies in a number of ways.

VISUAL STUDIO FOR MAC RETIREMENT ANNOUNCEMENT

Microsoft is sunsetting Visual Studio for Mac.

INTRODUCING IMMORTAL OBJECTS TO PYTHON

Instagram has introduced Immortal Objects to Python. It allows objects to bypass reference count checks and live throughout the entire execution of the runtime, unlocking exciting avenues for true parallelism.

L2H

Convert Lisp(-ish) S-expressions to HTML.

ANALYSIS OF OBFUSCATIONS FOUND IN APPLE FAIRPLAY

FairPlay comprises a set of algorithms created by Apple for digital rights management. This article runs daemons against FairPlay and goes through the findings.

KEEPING FIGMA FAST

UNDERSTANDING HOW REACT HANDLES INPUT STATE: A DEEP DIVE

ENGINEER

IF YOU WANT TO ADDRESS TECH DEBT, QUANTIFY IT FIRST

NODE.JS REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE

CHARTBREW

Chartbrew is an open-source web application that can connect directly to databases and APIs and use the data to create beautiful charts. It features a chart builder, editable dashboards, embeddable charts, query & requests editor, and team capabilities.

FOMOS

Fomos is an experimental operating system built with Rust.

MEASURING DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY? A RESPONSE TO MCKINSEY

IN AI

FIX REDUCE UNUSED JAVASCRIPT LIGHTHOUSE WARNING

CSS SELECTORS: A VISUAL GUIDE & REFERENCE

CSS selectors are patterns in CSS that can select and style HTML elements on the page. There are more advanced usages of selectors, such as pseudo classes and elements, which let you define style for elements based on their state or relation with other elements. This is a comprehensive visual guide of all sorts of ways you can select elements from CSS, from basic class selectors like .my-class to interesting patterns like the lobotomized owl.

10 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD DO WITH GITHUB PROJECTS

WHAT IS A FRONT END DESIGN SYSTEM, AND WHY IS IT NECESSARY?

C++ PAPERCUTS

IS LARAVEL THE HAPPIEST DEVELOPER COMMUNITY ON THE PLANET?

INTRODUCING CHATGPT ENTERPRISE

SVGR

SVGR takes a raw SVG and transforms it into a ready-to-use React component.

PRISONERS OF GOOGLE ANDROID DEVELOPMENT

A FEW INTERESTING WAYS TO USE CSS SHADOWS FOR MORE THAN DEPTH

GOOGLE AND META PAY THE BEST

5 AI TOOLS FOR DEVELOPERS TO HELP BOOST YOUR PRODUCTIVITY

MORE DEVELOPERS ARE USING THE RUST LANGUAGE

TO TEST OR NOT TO TEST, A TECHNICAL PERSPECTIVE

This article delves into the creation of test cases from a technical perspective, detailing what should be included in each test and what to avoid. It answers the age-old question of what to test vs. what not to test.

AURORA SERVERLESS – A MIGRATION STORY

A team that swapped databases almost every other month finally settled on AWS Aurora Serverless V2. This article breaks down their application architecture and use cases for their database and explains why they would continuously switch. The team eventually landed on Aurora Serverless, which was nice because scaling was taken care of. However, Aurora was still in development at the time and therefore a bit unstable.

WRITING A PACKAGE MANAGER

Writing a package manager is not easy, but it’s a great exercise in building something that’s not usually built. This tutorial goes through design decisions made, tradeoffs considered, and implementation details when writing a package manager with many visual examples.

DESIGNER

Collaboration is a hard but necessary aspect of working in teams. This article provides actionable advice on how to overcome the two most common challenges when working with your designer or product manager: adding scope and slow responses. It also provides a guide to building a working relationship that will make you one of their favorite engineers to work with.

SOME TACTICS FOR WRITING IN PUBLIC

Many people shy away from writing in public for fear of receiving negative comments. This article explains some tactics that can help make the comments on blog posts more informative and useful.

HOW TO MAKE TIME FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In today’s fast-paced business world, continuous learning is not just a buzzword, it is a necessity. However, balancing its undeniable value with the pressing demands of the average workday is tricky. This article offers tips that make it easier to prioritize professional development.

GRAPHWEAVER

Graphweaver allows you to turn multiple data sources into a single GraphQL API. It’s built for Node in TypeScript and supports all major sources, like Postgres, MySQL, and more.

CRUMB

Crumb is a high level, functional, interpreted, dynamically typed, general-purpose programming language with a terse syntax and a verbose standard library.

BICYCLE

Bicycle is a framework for defining database schemas whose access patterns are generated as code and compiled into each server binary. This reduces dynamic query parsing at run time. The framework uses gRPC, RocksDB, and Rust.

WASHING YOUR CODE: NAMING IS HARD

Naming is one of the hardest problems in programming. Bad naming can make debugging difficult and codebases harder to understand. This article takes a look at naming anti-patterns and how to fix them. It lays out some rules for clear naming. For example, the shorter the scope of a variable, the shorter its name should be.

WE SHOULD ALL BE ROOTING FOR BORING AI

Applying Generative AI in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible or even why the problem occurred. Everyone agrees that humans should make the final call, but that is made harder by technology that acts unpredictably, especially in fast-moving conflict situations. Until we are able to reliably make Generative AI hallucinate less and be more predictable, it should be applied first to more “boring” applications, like AI in Google Docs. This is already happening - for example, Google has started rolling out the “Write with AI” feature for Google Docs and Slides.

WITH ONLY 32 ENGINEERS

This article outlines the engineering techniques employed to scale WhatsApp quickly.

AN EXCRUCIATINGLY DETAILED GUIDE TO SSH

A complete and opinionated SSH guide for those interested in learning the ins and outs of SSH commands.

WHY NOTE-TAKING APPS DON’T MAKE YOU SMARTER

For decades now, software tools have promised to make working life easier, but are they really effective?

CREATE A CI/CD PIPELINE FOR FRONTEND PROJECTS

Automating the testing and deployment of your apps is mandatory to avoid wasting time or making mistakes. This article will show you how to go about achieving this goal.

PATTERNS FOR REACTIVITY IN MODERN VANILLA JAVASCRIPT

Patterns can be combined to solve your app’s exact requirements, often leading to more performant and maintainable code. This article teaches new patterns for reactivity to add to your toolbox, no matter what frameworks and libraries you use.

COMMON FAILURE CAUSES

Designing distributed systems is hard. Without careful planning, numerous issues can arise quickly. This article uses excerpts from "Understanding Distributed Systems", a book written by a Principal Engineer at Microsoft and Amazon, to provide an overview of 8 common causes of distributed systems failure and how to address them. Some common failures include physical machine breakdowns, flawed error handling, unexpected configuration changes, and critical single points of failure. Strategies like rigorous error-handling mechanisms, configuration testing, and identifying potential system vulnerabilities can be used to combat these issues. Building awareness of these pitfalls is essential for enhancing system resilience.