Programmer Weekly (Issue 197 March 14 2024)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 197

March 14, 2024

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 197 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." - Alan Kay

Reading List

The article discusses the complexities of the HEAD concept in Git, highlighting that it encompasses various meanings such as the file .git/HEAD, git show HEAD, and different output formats used by Git commands like git status. The author was surprised by the lack of confidence people had in understanding HEAD, as revealed by a poll she conducted on Mastodon. The article delves into the nuances of HEAD, shedding light on its multifaceted nature and the challenges it poses to beginners in Git.

Linear programming is an algorithm that solves the general problem of maximizing a linear outcome given linear constraints. This includes the very broad category of problems "Given a limited of resources, objectives using those resources, and a value for each objective, how can I output objectives to maximize value?". What exactly does this mean though, and how can we solve these kinds of problems? Let's go over it, using skating downhill as an analogy to help us understand both what these problems look like and what solving them looks like.

An exploration into The New York Times Growth Data team’s process of designing and building a new subscription reporting model.

The article discusses the release of the experimental MediaPipe LLM Inference API, enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to run fully on-device across platforms. This transformative capability addresses the significant memory and compute demands of LLMs, which are over a hundred times larger than traditional on-device models, achieved through optimizations like new ops, quantization, caching, and weight sharing.

This post explores the importance of visual testing in ensuring the graphical user interface (GUI) of web applications remains intact across various browsers, devices, and component states. It emphasizes how visual testing, facilitated by Playwright, automates the comparison of snapshots of an app's appearance to detect visual anomalies, layout issues, and platform compatibility problems, providing a comprehensive guide from beginner to advanced levels for mastering visual testing techniques.

The "2038 Problem" stems from how Unix-based systems store dates and timestamps using a 32-bit signed integer, which can only represent seconds up to 2147483647 since January 1st, 1970. Once this limit is reached on January 19, 2038, at 03:14:07 UTC, an integer overflow occurs, potentially causing disruptions in various systems that rely on accurate date and time recording.

Fast, beautiful, and fun to build. What we learned, and an open source template you can use to bootstrap your own site.

The article explores the potential risks and consequences of losing control of your command shell, emphasizing security vulnerabilities and the importance of implementing proper safeguards. It provides insights into common pitfalls and offers strategies to mitigate the risks associated with unauthorized access to command shells.

The post discusses event interception as a strategy for gradually replacing legacy systems with modern architectures, emphasizing the use of events to bridge old and new systems. It explores techniques for intercepting and processing events to enable seamless integration and migration while maintaining system reliability.

The article highlights Yelp's approach to tracking engineering-wide goals and migrations, emphasizing the importance of transparency, collaboration, and effective communication within the engineering team. It discusses strategies for setting and prioritizing goals, tracking progress, and facilitating smooth migrations to enhance overall engineering efficiency and productivity.

The post outlines Lyft's reinforcement learning platform, focusing on its design and implementation to facilitate machine learning experimentation and deployment at scale. It discusses the platform's key components, such as infrastructure, tools, and workflows, highlighting its role in enabling efficient and effective reinforcement learning research and development.

This article discusses using an incident management approach to handle a chronic medical condition. The author details a system he created to monitor blood sugar levels and trigger automated responses.

Understand better how HTTP works in each version.

Watch and Listen

Learn how to use Three.js to build an interactive 3D art gallery from scratch. The course covers essential concepts including scene creation, camera setup, renderer development, geometry, material and texture creation, meshing, animation, controls, and real-time UI configuration using a GUI debugger. 

Infrastructure as Code is a powerful paradigm that allows you to define your AWS resources using familiar programming concepts. But, if you started your AWS journey in the AWS console and are looking to migrate, this can be a painful ordeal. AWS is making it easier than ever for folks with manually created resources to get started using CDK. Learn all about the new feature and how to get started using IaC Generator in this video. 

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Compile docker images to standalone portable binaries.

pmesh is an all-in-one service manager, reverse proxy, and enterprise service bus. It is designed to be a simple and powerful all-in-one replacement for a wide variety of tools commonly deployed in web services.

Open-source, visual programming for developers. Includes a VS Code extension, integrates with existing TypeScript code, browser and Node.js.

bpftop provides a dynamic real-time view of running eBPF programs. It displays the average runtime, events per second, and estimated total CPU % for each program. 

A compiler for automatic optimization of React apps.

Loglines can be messy, read it better on a browser, `command | npx logscreen` 

Luminal is a deep learning library that uses composable compilers to achieve high performance.

Bebop is an insanely fast data interchange format. 

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