Programmer Weekly (Issue 194 February 22 2024)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 194

February 22, 2024

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 194 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

“The cleaner and nicer the program, the faster it’s going to run. And if it doesn’t, it’ll be easy to make it fast.” — Joshua Bloch

Reading List

Just one year after its launch, ChatGPT had more than 100M weekly users. In order to meet this explosive demand, the team at OpenAI had to overcome several scaling challenges. An exclusive deepdive.

The article discusses Uber's development of an integrated caching solution, CacheFront, to improve request latencies, scalability, and cost efficiency. The article details the challenges faced, the design and implementation of CacheFront, and its impact on Uber's infrastructure, highlighting the significant improvements in request latencies and cache invalidation using Flux and Compare cache mode. 

So zero-cost abstractions exist?

The article discusses the challenge of processing a large volume of digitally signed PDF reports, known as contract notes, for millions of users following stock and derivative transactions. It details the innovative approach taken by Zerodha to optimize the processing time for generating these reports, highlighting the impact of this technological advancement on their operations.

The article discusses the author's exploration of popular Git configuration options based on a survey conducted on Mastodon. The author shares a list of Git config options, highlighting some of the most popular ones and their potential impact. The article also reflects on the challenges of summarizing Git options due to changes in default settings over the years and the removal of experimental options.

This post provides an overview of the Google Zanzibar architecture, which serves as the foundation for several authorization implementations. It discusses the key features and tradeoffs of Zanzibar, highlighting its scalability, availability, and centralization, and raises the question of whether it is a practical solution for companies outside of Google. The article offers insights into the technical aspects and implications of adopting a Zanzibar-like model for authorization systems.

The article discusses the development of a statistical procedure for identifying differences in the distribution of play-delay data streams, a type of A/B test that Netflix runs. The article emphasizes the switch from a "fixed time horizon" to an "any-time valid" framing of the problem, and the impact of these developments at Netflix. 

The article discusses McDonald’s adoption of reusable workflows and GitHub Actions to enhance its continuous integration process, enabling fast and reliable CI for its diverse technology landscape. The article highlights the company's commitment to creating state-of-the-art CI processes to support its global engineering teams in building, testing, and integrating ongoing changes across various applications.

This post provides a detailed explanation of serving a website from a Git repository without cloning it, offering insights into Git's internals and its potential for innovative use cases. 

The article explores the author's reflections on the romanticized perceptions of senior developers held by junior developers, highlighting the common misconception that climbing the ranks will instantly bestow comprehensive knowledge and expertise. The author shares personal experiences and insights to debunk these falsehoods, providing a candid perspective on the journey from junior to senior developer.

Watch and Listen

The Tokenizer, essential for Large Language Models (LLMs), translates between strings and tokens, operating as a distinct stage with separate training sets and algorithms. This lecture builds the GPT series Tokenizer from scratch, uncovering peculiar behaviors in LLMs linked to tokenization. We explore these issues, attributing them to tokenization, and consider the ideal scenario of eliminating this stage altogether."

The network is reliable, has zero latency, with infinite, free bandwidth... And then you wake up. The plan was to go to microservices to build those reliable, super-scalable systems you saw in the ad. But your systems only communicate over synchronous protocols and the team never had a serious discussion about timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and bulkhead patterns. If that’s your crude reality, watch this talk!

This talk provides insights into advanced Git usage and best practices, presented by an industry expert. The presentation delves into various aspects of Git, offering valuable knowledge for individuals seeking to enhance their proficiency in using the version control system.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

The easiest way to code with any LLM—Continue is an open-source autopilot for VS Code and JetBrains.

A personal wearable AI that runs locally.

A tool that allow you to run SQL-like query on local files instead of database files using the GitQL SDK.

Non-blocking Concurrent Computation for JavaScript RTEs (Web Browsers, Node.js & Deno & Bun).

A single-file PHP library to easily build APIs.

htmz is a minimalist HTML microframework that gives you the power to create modular web user interfaces with the familiar simplicity of plain HTML.

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