Programmer Weekly (Issue 170 August 31 2023)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 170

August 31, 2023

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 170 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There’s no getting around it. You either make your accommodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable." – Ellen Ullman

News

The new chip is 14 times as energy efficient at speech recognition as conventional chips

HashiCorp recently shifted the license of core products, like Terraform, to Business Source License (BSL), prompting the OpenTF manifesto's creation. The initiative, with 100+ companies, 10 projects, and 400 individuals, aims to keep Terraform open source, gaining strong support with thousands of stars on its GitHub repository.

Reading List

The post delves into WhatsApp's engineering practices, exploring insights into its technical architecture and strategies, offering valuable information for engineers.

This article discusses the complexities and considerations involved in building a package manager, exploring aspects such as dependency resolution, versioning, and user experience, providing valuable insights for those interested in creating effective software package management systems.

Meta has released Code Llama, a large language model (LLM) that can use text prompts to generate code. Code Llama is state-of-the-art for publicly available LLMs on code tasks, and has the potential to make workflows faster and more efficient for current developers and lower the barrier to entry for people who are learning to code. Code Llama has the potential to be used as a productivity and educational tool to help programmers write more robust, well-documented software.

The developers have an endless amount of ways to make mistakes while writing code. However, sometimes we can find obvious and interesting patterns in how and where developers make mistakes. Let's talk about the code as a "magnet" for typos.

pg_extism is a PostgreSQL extension that allows users to run WebAssembly plugins. This can be used to extend PostgreSQL with new functionality, such as machine learning or natural language processing.

In my previous post, I introduced the concept of parser combinators. In this post, we’ll use parser combinators to parse and evaluate algebraic expressions, for example of the form -x + (2 * y^3). We’ll see how parser combinators can handle recursion, operator precedence, and operator associativity.

The Workflows engine at HubSpot has to handle traffic from millions of workflows every day. Huge traffic spikes and slow response times from our dependencies are a fact of life. In this post, we’ll take a look at how we use Kafka swimlanes to keep Workflows fast and reliable.

Marco Otte-Witte explains why Mainmatter believes Rust has a bright future for web backend development.

The article outlines the crucial role of engineering executives in the hiring process, emphasizing their influence on team dynamics, technical assessments, and aligning hiring strategies with the company's goals. It offers insights for engineering leaders seeking to optimize their hiring practices.

In this article, we want to share our journey migrating a business-critical large-scale invoice generation service to its successor, some of the challenges we faced, and lessons learned.

Learn how to optimize your usage of GitHub Projects to plan and track your work from idea to production.

Watch and Listen

Kelsey Hightower joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his reflections on how the tech industry is progressing. Kelsey describes what he’s been getting out of retirement so far, and reflects on what he learned throughout his high-profile career - including why feature sprawl is such a driving force behind the complexity of the cloud environment and the tactics he used to create demos that are engaging for the audience. Corey and Kelsey also discuss the importance of remaining authentic throughout your career, and what it means to truly have an authentic voice in tech.

In this crash course, you will learn about each security risk and learn techniques to fortify your APIs against potential threats. The course also covers key concepts that didn’t make it into the Top 10.

After nearly a decade of being a software engineer at Amazon, this video contains advice on how I would approach learning AWS in 2023. First, we cover some basic pre-requisite knowledge and fundamental concepts / AWS services you need to learn in order to be successful in the cloud. From there, I discuss my framework for accelerating the speed in which you can learn and apply AWS to real life problems. Finally, I wrap things up with some important resources/tips that every aspiring AWS student should know about. 

Through an optimization effort with Scott Redding, Senior Solutions Architect at Snowflake, Instacart optimized its Snowflake spend, resulting in a cost savings of more than 50%. In this video, Rajpal Paryani, Engineering Manager of Machine Learning at Instacart, shares key insights and best practices on optimizing costs in Snowflake.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

AI Copilot for your own SaaS product. Open source AI sidekick for everyone. 

Experimental OS, built with rust.

A SQL like query language called GQL (Git Query Language) to perform queries on your local .git files with functions, conditions and statements.

A single API for product integrations.

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

Bicycle is a framework for defining database schemas whose access patterns are generated as code and compiled into each server binary. 

Config files for my GitHub profile. 

An open-source web application that can connect directly to databases and APIs and use the data to create beautiful charts. 

A Collection of CDK Constructs to Deploy Cost-Aware Self-Limiting Resources.

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