This article introduces readers to the world of game development and compares it to the software engineering approaches at tech companies. The game development world is very different from the software development world. Video games are very complex pieces of software and are built in different conditions under different constraints than business applications. The article covers typical roles within game development, how games typically get built, and the game development lifecycle. While game development is different from web development, there are similarities that can help one become a better developer overall.
2023.08.24·
blog.pragmaticengineer.com·16 min read·TLDR Web Dev
There are two things that you must avoid when negotiating your salary: revealing information too early in the process and negotiating before you’re ready. This article goes through multiple useful anecdotes for both of these situations that apply to anyone reading. Generally, the goal is to withhold information from the recruiter that can give up leverage until you actually have leverage. For example, if you’re in the process of interviewing for various companies, it’s not a good idea to share this immediately, but rather share it later on in the process when you have offers from multiple companies.
Web components should not be used everywhere. Instead, they should be used for what they excel in. They can be used as glue code to prevent rewrites when moving to new frameworks (Yes, two frameworks can live on the same page). The downsides of web components include accessibility issues and various issues with server-side rendering.
Strong identity management is non-negotiable in modern software. Whether you're just starting out and selling to individuals or planning to expand to large enterprise clients, Logto
Dataherald is a natural language-to-SQL engine built for enterprise-level question answering over structured data. It allows you to set up an API from your database that can answer questions in plain English.
A Qualcomm expert breaks down some of the tools and techniques they use to fit Generative AI models on a smartphone. Quantization techniques like LoRA are the industry standard way to reduce model size. This article explains how this technique works in layman’s terms. It also explains how Qualcomm's open-source AI Model Efficiency Toolkit aids in this process.
A cellular architecture increases redundancy and reduces the blast radius of failures. Slack migrated from a monolithic architecture to a cellular architecture to take advantage of these benefits. This started because of an incident where Slack had trouble detecting an issue in its distributed system.
You should not test all your classes and components in integration tests. Instead, only test high-level components that will initialize the child components so the tests can be run quicker.
Meta's Threads has started rolling out on the web. The web version will be improved to look more like the mobile app over the coming weeks. Meta is currently working on a search feature to improve functionality on Threads and make it more of a competitor to X. The company has no plans to monetize the service until it is more established.
Netflix is shutting down its DVD rental service on September 29. Customers can keep any remaining DVDs they have after the service shuts down. Subscribers can potentially receive up to 10 discs for free as Netflix clears out its inventory. Netflix will allow people to sign up to its DVD plan until midnight on August 28 for a chance to win the DVDs.
Embryonic stem cells are difficult to obtain and they can be rejected following transplants if they don't match the recipient's DNA. Australian researchers have developed a technique to reprogram adult cells to be more like embryonic stem cells. These cells can then be reprogrammed to become any kind of cell. The technique potentially unlocks an endless supply of stem cells for research or treatment.
SeamlessM4T is a multimodal AI model for speech and text translations. It can perform text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for up to 100 languages. Meta developed the model to help people who speak different languages communicate with each other more effectively. SeamlessM4T has been released under a research license. Its code and weights are available on Hugging Face.
Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel. A public preview of the feature is now available. Excel users can now manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries in combination with Excel's formulas, charts, and PivotTables. No additional software is required to access the functionality. Microsoft plans to add a feature that will expose Python data within the grid of an Excel spreadsheet.
Flakes are libraries for deployment, packaging, secrets management, system compatibility, and more. FlakeHub is a collection of ready-to-use flakes designed to help developers get to production faster. It brings modern development practices to Nix. FlakeHub allows developers to improve their APIs without disturbing user stability.
This article introduces readers to the world of game development and compares it to the software engineering approaches at tech companies. The game development world is very different from the software development world. Video games are very complex pieces of software and are built in different conditions under different constraints than business applications. The article covers typical roles within game development, how games typically get built, and the game development lifecycle.
Hackers have obtained personal information from credit bureaus and are advertising access to the data in group chats used by violent criminals. The information includes names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, data contained within driver's licenses, and social security numbers. It only costs around $15-$20 in Bitcoin to access the information. The data includes information on high-profile targets, such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and President Joe Biden.
Netflix's new series of story games puts players in the center of their favorite shows and movies, allowing them to interact with characters and immerse themselves into different worlds.
In the first offering of its kind, IaaS provider NexGen Cloud is giving investors the opportunity to purchase its GPU cloud servers. The company is projecting 30-50% annualised returns.
While current methods are great at detecting objects, they often have problems spotting small items. CFINet is designed specifically for these small object challenges. It uses a step-by-step approach to first find good areas of interest and then focuses on mimicking features to better recognize the small items.
HuggingFace has released IDEFICS, which is quite the acronym (Image-aware Decoder Enhanced à la Flamingo with Interleaved Cross-attentionS). IDEFICS is essentially a replication of Flamingo, which is a text and image model that interleaves the two and allows for visual question answering and reasoning. It is built on Llama v1 and has 8B and 70B variants.
While Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are a hot topic in computer vision, combining multiple NeRFs together is still a challenge. To tackle this, this team developed DReg-NeRF, a new method that pulls out features from NeRF. It uses advanced techniques to understand how different 3D scenes relate to each other without needing any human input or special markers.
SynJax has tools for probability over objects like trees, sequences, segmentations, alignments, and more! Very cool tool from DeepMind with a number of useful utilities.
The rush to AI is palpable and the inherent security challenges are of a complexity never seen before. As with every new technology we need to think about how it's going to be weaponized WHILE it is hockey-sticking.
By analyzing your code, docstring, and comments, and by interacting with you, TestGPT suggests tests as you code. All you have to do is accept and commit them. Get CodiumAI for JetBrains or VS Code
Binance is being investigated by the DOJ over potential US sanctions violations concerning Russia. Despite scaling back operations in Russia following the Ukraine invasion and implementing Western sanctions requirements, substantial ruble trading has continued on Binance's platform. The exchange is suspected of helping clients convert funds from sanctioned Russian banks into Binance balances and enabling trades involving blacklisted banks. This is just another of many accusations that US regulators have made and are investigating Binance over.
Risc Zero will open-source its "Type 0" zkEVM, Zeth, to bring zero-knowledge infrastructure to developers. Written in Rust, the software not only mirrors the functionality of Ethereum, it can also be adopted by other networks, thus broadening application possibilities. It offers faster and more efficient transaction verification and application simultaneously thanks to its ability to divide computation tasks concurrently.