Programmer Weekly (Issue 205 May 16 2024)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 205

May 16, 2024

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 205 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"Managing senior programmers is like herding cats." - Dave Platt

Reading List

Scaling up generative AI operations can be costly. At OpenSauced, we faced this challenge while building StarSearch, until we found a low cost solution to deploy an OpenAI-compatible API using open source technology.

With a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, you can create an AI assistant that can answer questions based on the information contained within your existing, in-house knowledge bases like wikis, manuals, training and reference material. Read on to see how you can build your own RAG using PostgreSQL, pgvector, ollama and less than 200 lines of Go code.

When a single-page application needs to fetch data from a remote source, it needs to do so while remaining responsive and providing feedback to the user during an often slow query. Five patterns help with this. Asynchronous State Handler wraps these queries with meta-queries for the state of the query. Parallel Data Fetching minimizes wait time. Fallback Markup specifies fallback displays in markup. Code Splitting loads only code that's needed. Prefetching gathers data before it may needed to reduce latency when it is. 

This post is a mixture of practice and philosophy. On the practical side, we’re going to talk about what we’ve learned about making GPUs go brr -- and release an embedded DSL, ThunderKittens, that we’ve built to help us write some particularly speedy kernels (which we are also releasing). On the philosophical side, we’ll briefly talk about how what we’ve learned has changed the way we think about AI compute.

kubectl is the CLI tool used to communicate to the Kubernetes API it can seem simple at first but can quickly get complicated. So this post aims to write the guide the author wish he had when I started.

Garbage collectors are expected to be invisible: if programmers (or even users) notice them, something is wrong. Usually, such problems are are performance problems, but there could be correctness issues as well. This makes implementing them a bit scary.

Learn how we discovered what was slowing down large database queries, and what we did to make Postgres queries 1000x faster.

Watch and Listen

This quantum computing course provides a solid foundation in quantum computing, from the basics to an understanding of how popular quantum algorithms work. Quantum computing leverages the principles of quantum mechanics to process information at incredible speeds. 

The actor model is a popular approach to building scalable software systems. And isn’t hard to understand when you’re just reading about the beginner’s examples. But how do you architect a complex design using the actor model? Which patterns work well? How do you think through it?

This video explores what passkeys are, what is attractive about them for organizations and users, and then how to enable their use along with the user experience.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Effortless, instant screen sharing. Open-source and cross-platform. 

A lightweight message queue. Like AWS SQS and RSMQ but on Postgres. 

The smartest way to work on your computer.

Immutable infrastructure for the desktop!

The Kaytu CLI helps you save on cloud costs by finding the perfect server sizes. Kaytu analyzes historical usage and provides tailored recommendations, ensuring you only pay for the resources you need.

PostgreSQL database anonymization tool.

The React library for LLMs.

mactop is a terminal-based monitoring tool "top" designed to display real-time metrics for Apple Silicon chips. 

A self-hosted dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place.

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