Programmer Weekly (Issue 186 December 21 2023)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 186

December 21, 2023

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 186 of Programmer Weekly. This is the final issue of 2023. We will be back after the holiday break. Wish you and your family Happy Holidays!

Quote of the Week

 

"If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person." - Alan Cooper

Reading List

The article discusses the author's journey in understanding the differences between databases, inspired by reading the books "Database Internals" by Alex Petrov and "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann. It provides a summary of the fundamental problems that a database engineer considers, with a focus on the simplicity of a basic database program and the author's own database creation experience. The article aims to share insights into database fundamentals, drawing from the author's learning process and practical experimentation.

How Instacart deployed a single Deep Learning pCTR model for multiple surfaces with improved operations and performance along the way.

The article discusses the need for programmers to have private offices with doors to avoid interruptions and maintain deep focus while solving complex problems. It emphasizes the importance of an environment that allows developers to concentrate without disruptions, highlighting the challenges posed by open plan offices and the benefits of providing private workspaces for developers. The article draws on the experiences of various companies and the impact of office design on developer productivity and well-being.

The post details the author's process of reducing the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric to under 350 ms for Google-referred users on their high-traffic website, emphasizing the techniques used to optimize performance, particularly for websites with a significant portion of traffic originating from Google. The author's observations indicate that the LCP results may vary between 100-350 ms, and the post is the first part of a series focusing on this topic, with a promise of further valuable insights in subsequent parts.

A 6 Lesson course teaching everything you need to know about harnessing GitHub Copilot and an AI Paired Programing resource.

A strategic approach to prepare your interviews + Free Notion interview tracker author used to prepare his interview.

The article discusses the reasons why individuals should consider pursuing a career in engineering management, emphasizing the importance of building, tuning, and improving sociotechnical systems using people-first tools. It also highlights the long-term satisfaction expressed by many engineering managers as a compelling reason for pursuing this career path.

Six solid examples of how llamafile can help you be productive on the command line.

The programming language R is capable of creating a wide variety of geometric shapes that can be used to construct high quality graphics – including festive images. In this tutorial, Nicola Rennie walks us through the process of using R packages to create and send Christmas cards with R.

The article outlines how Meta (formerly Facebook) constructed the infrastructure for Threads, its messaging platform. It likely delves into the technical aspects of building a robust and scalable system to support the messaging service.

Watch and Listen

A YouTube playlist related to the Netflix Data Engineering Summit (NDES) 2023. Engineers from across the company came together to share best practices on everything from Data Processing Patterns to Building Reliable Data Pipelines.

Scott and Wes explain all the terminology, services, and technical pieces that make up artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The speaker discusses compiler correctness, highlighting efforts to identify and address previously unknown compiler bugs that could lead to silent miscompilations in application code. The talk covers strategies for reporting bugs effectively, detailing interactions with compiler development teams, and mentions the group's extensive track record of reporting and addressing over 750 bugs while providing open-source tools for developers.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Structuresmith is a powerful tool designed to automate the generation of project files, streamlining repository setup and more using customizable templates.

An app that allows you to AFK mine timed Twitch drops, with automatic drop claiming and channel switching.

Build terminal forms and prompts.

Cleans dependencies and build artifacts from your projects.

A fast file search utility for Unix-like systems based on GTK3. 

PageSpy is a remote debugging tool for web project.

An open-source, high-performance chatbot framework that supports speech synthesis, multimodal, and extensible Function Call plugin system. Supports one-click free deployment of your private ChatGPT/LLM web application. 

A simple, portable, high-performance, ACID, embedded key-value store.

Dokémon is a friendly GUI for managing Docker Containers. You can manage multiple servers from a single Dokemon instance.

An executable specification language with delightful tooling based on the temporal logic of actions (TLA).

Our Other Newsletters

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

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