Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 120 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

"Inside every large program, there is a small program trying to get out." - C.A.R. Hoare

News

Heroku Ending Free Tier

Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans. In order to focus our resources on delivering mission-critical capabilities for customers, we will be phasing out our free plan for Heroku Dynos, free plan for Heroku Postgres, and free plan for Heroku Data for Redis, as well as deleting inactive accounts.

Alexa Teacher Models Outperform GPT-3

With an encoder-decoder architecture — rather than decoder only — the Alexa Teacher Model excels other large language models on few-shot tasks such as summarization and machine translation.

Reading List

Git’s database internals I: packed object store

This series will examine Git’s internals to help make your engineering system more efficient. Part I discusses how Git stores its data in packfiles using custom compression techniques.

Why your website should be under 14kb in size

Having a smaller website makes it load faster — that's not surprising. What is surprising is that a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial. This is because of the TCP slow start algorithm. This article will cover what that is, how it works, and why you should care.

Building a backend from scratch using only OpenAI Codex

Developing with Codex is a bit special, and it sometimes takes a few attempts to get it to write exactly what you want it to. But in broad strokes, getting from nothing to something in just 10 prompts is really impressive and encouraging.

Startup time investing: Operational processes

How I orient around operational processes, when to invest time in them, and when to not.

BuildRock: A Build Platform at Slack

In this article we will explore how the Build team at Slack is investing in developing a build platform to solve some existing issues and to handle scale for future.

DoorDash’s Lessons on Improving Performance on High-Traffic Web Pages

As e-commerce platforms grow, their web applications begin to slow and performance-boosting techniques are required to maintain their speed and functionality. At DoorDash, we have faced similar problems as our web application has expanded, with users sometimes having to wait up to 10 seconds for the UI to load — potentially longer if the network is bad. We've been working to improve the web performance of our product to elevate the user experience. Here we share some of the challenges we’ve encountered and lessons that we have learned along the way.

End-to-end tracing with OpenTelemetry

This post focuses on traces and describe how you can start your journey into observability.

Watch and Listen

Swyx on Remote Development Environments and the End of Localhost

Shawn Wang (swyx), head of developer experience at Airbyte, and Daniel Bryant discusses the rise of remote development environments. Topics covered included, whether remote development experiences are good enough to see the death of local(host) development, what a wishlist might look like for the ultimate developer experience, and how cloud native organizations are currently developing software.

Rage Against the Machine. A discussion of large language models and diffusion models.

Artificial Intelligence has reached a tipping point. This video reviews the latest developments in large language models and diffusion models.

React JavaScript Framework for Beginners – Project-Based Course

Learn React in this full course for beginners. React is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks and this course is the perfect place to start your learning journey. You will learn everything you need to know to get started with React by building three different projects.

The New Cloud War

Should companies build their own cloud infrastructure or go with the Big Three? This is the new cloud war Martin Casado explores in “The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox,” a report he wrote with his colleague Sarah Wang at Andreessen Horowitz. Martin joins Corey to elaborate on their findings, the public reactions, and what’s next in cloud infrastructure.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

JSON Visio

Seamlessly visualize your JSON data instantly into graphs; paste, import or fetch!

Wren

A small, fast, class-based concurrent scripting language.

Devbox

Instant, easy, predictable shells and containers.

DivKit

DivKit is an open source Server-Driven UI (SDUI) framework. SDUI is a an emerging technique that leverage the server to build the user interfaces of their mobile app.

googerteller

Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into google.

fRPC

fRPC is a proto3-compatible RPC Framework that's designed from the ground up to belightweight, extensible, and extremely performant. On average fRPC outperforms other RPC frameworks by 2-4x in an apples-to-apples comparison, and is easily able to handle more than 2 million RPCs/second on a single server.

Upscayl

Free and Open Source AI Image Upscaler for Linux, MacOS and Windows built with Linux-First philosophy.

direnv

direnv is an extension for your shell. It augments existing shells with a new feature that can load and unload environment variables depending on the current directory.

Cram

A new dotfile manager.

Our Other Newsletters

Python Weekly

- A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

Founder Weekly

- A free weekly newsletter for entrepreneurs featuring best curated content, must read articles, how to guides, tips and tricks, resources, events and more.