Programmer Weekly (Issue 179 November 2 2023)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 179

November 02, 2023

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 179 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"Rarely is anyone thanked for the work they did to prevent the disaster that didn’t happen." – Mikko Hypponen

Reading List

Or, Eleven things we have learned as Site Reliability Engineers at Google.

When your boss loves you, you have options. Here's how to help your manager get what they need, so you get what you want.

In his blog post, Yuliy Pisetskiy, a staff engineer at Discord, explains how they scaled individual Discord servers from tens of thousands of concurrent users to approaching two million concurrent users in the past few years. They use a single Elixir process per guild as a central routing point for everything happening on that server, and another process (a “session”) for each connected user’s client.

This post discusses the techniques used by RevenueCat to manage their cache system. The article highlights the importance of low latency, consistency, and uptime in a cache system and explains how RevenueCat uses a pool of servers with good amounts of RAM and high network capacity to store data in memory or flash for fast retrieval

Lessons from a Meta tech lead and Staff Engineer.

Discover how we made our browser extension faster. Find out about the technologies and strategies we used to improve performance and provide a smooth browsing experience.

A mindset shift that changed the way I approach software development.

This post shows how to connect the dots from the worst case scenario (a kernel panic) through to Kubernetes (k8s) and eventually up to us operators so that we can track how and why our k8s nodes are going away.

Learn how CPUs work, and discover Apple’s underrated competitive advantage.

The author created "Paintf**k," a drawing language inspired by CRF[], offering an artistic interface within the Brainf**k programming paradigm. Paintf**k uses a straightforward approach to cycling through base colors to generate visually engaging patterns, providing an intriguing blend of art and computation.

Watch and Listen

Context window management has become a critical part of every LLM application — from the basics (embeddings models, vector DBs) to more advanced techniques (query rewriting, HyDE, summarization). MemGPT is a new tool from UC Berkeley built by Charles Packer that automates "memory" management for LLMs and creates a functionally infinite context window. Charles joins us this week to talk about MemGPT, the techniques behind it, and where the conversational AI space is headed.

Learn how to create and deploy websites and Infrastructure as Code by chatting with AI.

Ever wonder how top tech companies like Amazon Develop and Deploy their applications using CI / CD pipelines? In this video, I walk you through the development process that Amazon/AWS engineers use create software systems and deploy them quickly using safe deployment practices. Learn about the Git approach, deployment waves, deployment methods, auto-rollback, alarms, and more. 

Books

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to probability as it is used in computer science. It covers fundamental probability concepts, prerequisite mathematics, and a wide range of computer science applications. The material is presented in a “question and answer” style designed to encourage student engagement and understanding. The book also includes almost 400 exercises, real-world computer science examples, and covers a wide range of topics from simulation with computer science workloads to statistical inference, randomized algorithms, Markov models, and queues.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Radius is an open-source, cloud-native, application platform that enables developers and the operators that support them to define, deploy, and collaborate on cloud-native applications across public clouds and private infrastructure

A code generation tool to help you build cloud backend services.

A free and open source map of the world.

Scratch is an open-source alternative to BigQuery, Redshift, and Snowflake. Runs on Clickhouse. 

WireHole is a combination of WireGuard, Pi-hole, and Unbound in a docker-compose project with the intent of enabling users to quickly and easily create a personally managed full or split-tunnel WireGuard VPN with ad blocking capabilities thanks to Pi-hole, and DNS caching, additional privacy options, and upstream providers via Unbound. 

LearnHouse is an open source platform that makes it easy for anyone to provide world-class educational content and it offers a variety of content types : Dynamic Pages, Videos, Documents & more.

An Autonomous LLM Agent for Complex Task Solving.

Terminal JSON viewer & processor.

A minimal TCP/IP stack.

Our Other Newsletters

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