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AND WORK FROM THE STACK OVERFLOW COMMUNITY

HOW TO BUILD AND PUBLISH YOUR FIRST REACT NPM PACKAGE

A SELF-LEARNING, MODERN COMPUTER SCIENCE CURRICULUM

This is a collection of modern resources on various undergrad level computer science topics for anyone with an interest in theory.

WHERE RESPECT IS DUE

This article contains an interview with Rich Siegel, the creator of BBEdit, a HTML and text editor that is considered one of the most beloved developer tools since its first release in 1992.

HOW GOOGLE MEASURES AND MANAGES TECH DEBT

Over the past several years, Google has made a deliberate effort to better manage technical debt. A team at Google interviewed subject matter experts at the company, asking about the underlying causes of the technical debt they encountered as well as what mitigations would be appropriate to fix the debt. They identified 10 categories of technical debt, from incomplete or poor documentation to unstable dependencies. The team then came up with metrics to measure technical debt and brought it down through solutions like better tooling and management frameworks. As a result, Google was able to have better developer productivity.

UNDERSTANDING DEEPMIND'S SORTING ALGORITHM

A few days ago, DeepMind published a blog post talking about how they discovered tinier kernels for sorting algorithms. They did this by taking their deep learning wisdom, which they gained by building AlphaGo, and applying it to the discipline of superoptimization. This article explains the optimization that was made more clearly compared to the actual blog post that was published.

ARCHITECTURE?

Software architecture is the foundation that supports the digital world. Today, there are two contrasting architectural patterns that remain at the forefront: microservices and monoliths. This article explains the ins and outs of both methodologies and discusses each method’s pros and cons.

A DEVELOPER'S VIEW OF VISION PRO

David Smith is an independent iOS developer with apps that have been downloaded millions of times. He was invited to try the Apple Vision Pro during WWDC and plans to be a “Day One” developer for it. In this article, Smith lays out reasons why he’s excited to develop for the Vision Pro and why he thinks it will be a successful product.

THE CONTINUING TRAGEDY OF CSS: THOUGHTS FROM CSS DAY 2023

A common complaint regarding CSS today is that it has become too bloated. For example, the original CSS specification included 3 relative units for defining a length: px, ex, and em. Today, there are 36 relative length units in CSS. The constraints of CSS should be embraced rather than continue to be broken down and expanded.

WHY HIGH PERFORMING DEVELOPERS THRIVE TOGETHER

Company culture and environment is a huge factor in growing and nurturing high performing developers. This article explains why it’s so important for developers to work on teams and on projects that will keep them learning and engaged. Read on to learn how you can become a high performing developer, even if your current role doesn’t offer the best culture or environment.

HOW MUCH DOES THIS MEETING COST?

Levels.fyi has released a calculator that calculates how much a meeting costs to a company based on both the number of engineers in the meeting and the compensation of each engineer. For example, a meeting with 3 Senior Software Engineers at Meta costs $531.

DEVCYCLE

DevCycle is a feature flag platform for teams of any size. It helps you reduce risk, experiment, and use data-driven insights to drive growth.

SUPPORTCSS

Live, in-browser detection of modern CSS support for selectors, features, and at-rules. Applies support-based classes, exposes a results object, and allows custom tests. Inspired by the legacy of Modernizr, this script evaluates a user's browser for cutting-edge modern CSS support beyond the capabilities of @supports.

FERN - THE FUTURE OF API DEVELOPMENT (GITHUB REPO SPONSOR)

Fern is an open source format for defining REST APIs. You can think of it like a programming language to describe your API - your endpoints, types, errors, and examples. Find out why companies like Scale AI and Flatfile already use Fern to develop their APIs and generate their SDKs, check us out on GitHub [https://github.com/fern-api/fern?utm_source=tldr].

APPLE IS REPORTEDLY WORKING ON 2 NEW AR HEADSETS

Just last week, Apple revealed its first-ever augmented reality headset, the $3,499 Apple Vision Pro. But the company is already hard at work on multiple follow-ups. Apple plans to launch a cheaper variant of the headset and is reportedly also working on a follow-up to the Vision Pro with an even faster processor. It likely won't be any cheaper than the first one.

FROM VSCODE TO VIM

Developers often make jokes about Vim, but it’s a useful tool that might be worth learning for you. This article aims to eliminate some of the initial roadblocks to using and working with Vim and teach you how to effectively use this tool. Vim has a few advantages over VSCode, including incredibly fast startup, minimal hand movement while typing, unmatched customizability, and more.

KILLING COMMUNITY

Social media that is run on a venture capital often loses the charm that made it popular over time. Community is hard to support when needs for profitability start taking over. The forces that make profitability possible and the community great can work against each other.

THAT

Microsoft Edge sends every picture you view online to Microsoft to perform enhancements to pictures seen. However, there is a way to turn this off.

USEHOOKS

A collection of modern, server-safe React hooks.

REDDIT API PROTEST CAUSES OUTAGE

Reddit reported a major outage across its mobile and desktop websites as thousands of Reddit communities went dark on Monday to kick off the start of a 48-hour protest over the API pricing.

DO ADS EVEN WORK ON DEVS?

The common perception is that developers dislike being sold to and are allergic to anything resembling an ad. This article explains how to work around this and use ads effectively.

CS:GO: FROM ZERO TO 0-DAY

Neodyme identified three independent remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in the popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game. Each vulnerability can be triggered when the game client connects to their malicious Python CS:GO server. This post details their journey through the CS:GO binary and conducts a technical deep dive into various identified bugs. They conclude by presenting a proof of concept (POC) exploit that leverages four different logic bugs into remote code execution in the game’s client, triggered when a client connects to the server.

WHAT IS A VECTOR DATABASE?

Many AI applications that involve large language models or generative AI rely on vector embeddings, a type of data representation that carries within it semantic information that’s critical for the AI to gain understanding and maintain a long-term memory they can draw upon when executing complex tasks. Vector databases offer optimized storage and querying capabilities for embeddings. They have the capabilities of a traditional database that are absent in standalone vector indexes and the specialization of dealing with vector embeddings, which traditional scalar-based databases lack.

Lyft's engineering blog discusses strategies for identifying and addressing performance issues in streaming pipelines. The author emphasizes the importance of an iterative process involving measurement, root cause identification, and fixing. Key performance issues they address include data skewness, large window size, interaction with low-speed services, and serialization/deserialization, with solutions ranging from avoiding unnecessary operations to optimizing network aspects.

SHOULD YOU OPTIMIZE FOR ALL-CASH COMPENSATION?

Tech companies often allow employees to choose their stock and cash ratio, especially if the company stock had a drastic fall. However, the choice of how much stock to get can be complicated - on one hand, employees have access to “insider information” such as usage statistics and business dashboards. On the other hand, even with this information, employees can’t control how the stock will perform since it depends on a number of factors, such as market expectation. This blog shows numerical experiments on what will happen depending on your stock/cash ratio if you were a Shopify employee.

THE SURPRISING POWER OF DOCUMENTATION

Documentation can be boring to write, but its long-term value cannot be understated. Each hour invested into documentation at a company can save up to a hundred productivity hours as a result across the company. Building a documentation-first culture is extremely important for a team to scale well and for developers to stay productive as a codebase gets larger and larger. However, documentation is not a silver bullet or a substitute to human interaction, which has nuances that cannot be transferred through the written word.

GROWING FROM ENGINEER TO MANAGER AND THRIVING

This interview with Nicola Ballota, the Director of Cloud at Namecheap, goes over Ballota’s career path to the role he’s in today and the advice he would give to people who want to reach his level one day. He lays out concrete steps to aspiring engineers who want to grow into a manager role and gives tips on how to keep improving your knowledge overall as a manager.

OZONE

Ozone is software to help developers build unit tests for LLMs. Ozone enables developers to ensure prompt reliability, increase security, and foster efficient collaboration. It provides intuitive prompt testing and refinement, including automated registered tests, for reliable and secure AI interactions.

FAKER.JS UI

Faker.js UI provides an easy way to generate fake, but realistic data, for testing and development.

TINYBASE

TinyBase is a reactive data store for local-first apps. It has many features, like support for both KV stores and tabular data, a powerful query engine, flexible UI reactivity to data updates, data sync between remote and local storage, and more. When compressed, TinyBase is less than 10kB and has zero dependencies.

THE MYTH OF THE AI INFRASTRUCTURE PHASE

Can LLM infrastructure be built before LLM applications? The phrase “sell shovels in a gold rush” has led to a host of infrastructure for LLMs startups in the wake of the LLM boom. However, knowing the correct APIs and use cases for LLM infrastructure before real LLM-enabled applications are deployed for a long time is difficult. It may not be the time yet for AI infrastructure companies as actual AI applications need time to grow first so that actual problems can be discovered.

MENTAL LIQUIDITY

Mental liquidity is the ability to quickly abandon previous beliefs when the world changes or when you come across new information. However, mental liquidity is rare and can be hard to change as you get older. Morgan Housel, the author of Psychology of Money, lays out some anecdotes about how Albert Einstein himself even had a problem with mental liquidity. It’s important to be careful about what beliefs you let become a part of your identity and how most fields have theories, ideas, and hunches, but not laws - things that are unimpeachable and cannot ever change.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO DEVELOP AN APP LIKE SHEIN?

Shein is a fashion shopping app that contains basic features like authentication, payment, and more. This article contains numerous business aspects of developing an app like Shein. It starts by explaining how much it costs to develop the app, which depends on factors like app size, platform and location of app developers. A basic small-scale app can cost between $25,000-$35,000 and take 4-6 months to develop. The article then focuses on the business model of Fashion apps like Shein, what makes it popular and key features to include in a fashion app. On the technical side, it covers the process of developing such an app, from market analysis to development and to testing.

10 UNIX FILE MANAGEMENT COMMANDS THAT EVERY DEVELOPER SHOULD KNOW

Knowing some handy Unix-based commands to communicate with the system via terminal can save you time as a developer.

AWESOME CODEBASES

A collection of awesome open-source codebases worth exploring.

REDDIT’S USERS AND MODERATORS ARE REVOLTING AGAINST ITS CEO

In protest to Reddit’s new proposed API changes, many popular subreddits are shutting down their communities temporarily, on June 12th.

EP63: LINUX FILE SYSTEM EXPLAINED

This system design refresher goes over how the Linux file system is designed and provides a handy cheat sheet for SQL vs NoSQL databases.

THE EVOLUTION OF REACT APIS AND CODE REUSE

React changed how we think about building UIs. As it continues evolving, it’s changing how we think about building applications. This article explores the evolution of React and the various code reuse patterns that have emerged. It digs into the underlying mental models that shaped them and the tradeoffs that came with them. Finally, it looks into where React is going in the future and what it might entail for web development moving forward.

MEMORY

In 2021, Adobe, together with Chrome engineering, brought a version of Photoshop to the web. However, the files edited in Photoshop often require more memory than a user has available on their device, due to the many features offered by the software, the types of digital design and editing it is used for, and the capabilities of user devices. This article looks at how Adobe Photoshop engineering solved working with files larger than can fit into memory and how Photoshop works with files larger than the 32-bit address space of wasm32.

RUNNING PROMISES IN PARALLEL: A VISUAL GUIDE

Promises are everywhere in modern JavaScript. They’re essential for keeping interactions fluid, making UIs snappy, and creating readable code. This article takes a deep dive into promises and how they work through visual illustrations.

BEING BLOCKED SUCKS. HERE'S WHAT TO DO WHEN IT HAPPENS

Knowing how to handle being blocked by another person or team effectively can potentially 2-5x your output. This article looks into what being blocked looks like, how to unblock yourself, and what to do if you can’t unblock yourself. There are various ways to get unblocked, such as finding an intermediary solution.

ON SOFTWARE DEPENDENCY ENGINEERING

Most software has dependencies that are not created by the writers of that piece of software. While open source dependencies that your software relies on is code that you did not write, it is code that you have a localized responsibility for. This article dives into what dependency management is, dependency responsibility, and the need for software dependency engineers who are responsible for managing a project’s dependency graph.

CAREER SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR THOSE WHO HATE NETWORKING

Networking can be both stressful and time-consuming. However, networking can be a useful boost to one’s career and having a well-connected network can lead to better career opportunities. This article provides some tips to network better, such as seeking quality over quantity and leveraging existing relationships to meet more people.

ELECTRON 25.0.0

Electron v25 has been released. It includes upgrades to Chromium 114, V8 11.4, and Node.js 18.15.0. Electron is a framework to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies like React, Next.js, and Angular. Many world-class apps are built with Electron, like Figma, Microsoft Teams, 1Password, VSCode, Postman, Slack, Notion, and more.

CHAINLIT

Chainlit lets you create ChatGPT-like UIs on top of any Python code in minutes. Some of the key features include intermediary steps visualization, element management & display (images, text, carousel, etc.) as well as cloud deployment. It also has a plug-and-play integration with LangChain.

OVERLAYSCROLLBARS

OverlayScrollbars is a JavaScript scrollbar plugin that hides native scrollbars and provides custom styleable overlay scrollbars while keeping native functionality and feeling. It features a simple API, high browser compatibility, high device and input compatibility, TypeScript support, and more.

FERN - THE FUTURE OF API DEVELOPMENT (GITHUB REPO SPONSOR)

Fern is an open source format for defining REST APIs. You can think of it like a programming language to describe your API - your endpoints, types, errors, and examples. Find out why companies like Scale AI and Flatfile already use Fern to develop their APIs and generate their SDKs, check us out on GitHub [https://github.com/fern-api/fern?utm_source=tldr].