Engineering
- FOQS: Scaling a distributed priority queue | Engineering at Meta.
- A breakdown of meta’s experience on scaling their internal queue service.
- One detail that surprised me is that this service is backed by MySQL.
- Storing Data in Control Flow | research!rsc
- This makes the case for storing state in the control flow.
- It argues against explicit state tracking and gives nice examples for it.
- I will have to take an existing codebase, apply this principle and report on the changes.
- From where I left | antirez.
- Redis’s founder is returning to Redis as an evangelist.
- This is his post detailing his reasoning and his view on the development while he was away.
- His views on the licensing changes are unexpectedly pragmatic.
- Linux TCP SO_REUSEPORT: Usage and Implementation
- As mentioned in the last weeknotes, I found an article which has an in-depth exploration of
SO_RESUEPORT’s implementation. - Really detailed with great pesudocode. I recommend it to all system/network nerds.
- As mentioned in the last weeknotes, I found an article which has an in-depth exploration of
- How We Improved the Performance of a Userspace TCP Stack in Go by 5X | Coder
- Gives a perspective on how much is usually abstracted away from us by the kernel.
- I found a cool tool in this post. See below
- You’ll regret using natural keys | Mark Seemann.
- This post makes a case for using only synthetic keys in your databases.
- Synthetic keys are IDs which have no relation to your business logic. Ex: UUID, auto incrementing integers.
- This resonates with me as issues due to natural keys have driven me crazy two times.
- My experience is that if your application grows big enough or runs long enough, whatever you thought was impossible will happen, so it is better to decouple database keys from the real world.
- How We Hacked Multi-Billion Dollar Companies in 30 Minutes Using a Fake VSCode Extension | Amit Assaraf
- They impersonated the Dracula theme in VS Code marketplace and pwned a bunch of people.
- They also built ExtensionTotal, a VirusTotal for VS Code extensions.
- How a single ChatGPT mistake cost us $10,000+ | Blog
- Good to read to realise the problems with using LLMs in startups.
- Hallucinations in code will have a higher impact on start-ups, due to their non-existent/brittle testing infrastructure and overworked employees.
- GitHub Spark | GitHub Next
- A managed runtime by GitHub that lets you build and host apps using natural language.
- Looks really cool from the demos. If it delivers on the claims, it will democratise software engineering.
- I have signed up for the technical preview. Fingers crossed.
- Refactoring Invariants | Computer Things
- This proposes an approach for validating refactored functions in TLA+.
- This also attempts to give a similar method for code, but it is not as elegant as the TLA+ approach.
- Robotcop: enforcing your robots.txt policies and stopping bots before they reach your website | Cloudflare.
- A new feature in Cloudflare which gives you stats on AI companies’ bot are not compliance with your
robots.txtand then allows you to block them. - Enforcing
robots.txtis something I have always wondered about, this is a seamless experience as Cloudflare controls both the monitoring and blocking components.
- A new feature in Cloudflare which gives you stats on AI companies’ bot are not compliance with your
Tools
- Vehicle Motion Cues | iPhone.
- A lifesaver for people with motion sickness.
- I tested it out in cars, buses, and trains, and it made my nausea go away. I usually cannot even look at a notification without feeling queasy.
- The Container Security Platform — gVisor.
- A container runtime which implements kernel interfaces in Go.
- Useful for running untrusted code.
- Coder embeds gVisor’s network stack in their application to avoid asking for elevated permissions to ensure encryption in transit. This ensures that they don’t need to worry about regulatory problems while running in secure clusters.
- S2 Geometry.
- A library that lets you map the earth into cells with minimal distortion.
- Helpful if you are building anything that requires geographical clustering.
- Tinder uses it to power their recommendations.