Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 207 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

"Never put off until run time what you can do at compile time." - David Gries

Reading List

Database Design for Google Calendar: a tutorial

This database design tutorial shows how to design the database tables for a real-world project of substantial complexity. We’ll design a clone of Google Calendar.  We will model as much as possible of the functionality that is directly related to the calendar.

Writing a Unix clone in about a month

Drew DeVault describes his month-long project of developing Bunnix, a Unix-like operating system written in Hare and C for x86_64 targets. Despite its limitations, such as lack of USB support, Bunnix includes key features like ext4 filesystem support, a terminal emulator, and a variety of drivers and syscalls. The project serves as a recreational effort and a demonstration of Hare's capabilities for kernel development​.

Mediocre Engineer’s guide to HTTPS

Devon Peroutky's guide to HTTPS offers a practical and straightforward approach for engineers to implement HTTPS in their projects, covering essential concepts like SSL/TLS, certificates, and common pitfalls to avoid. It aims to demystify the process and provide actionable steps to ensure secure web communications.

Making EC2 boot time 8x faster

It's possible to cut EC2 boot time from 40 seconds to 5 seconds by combining several optimizations like root volume streaming, instance warm pools, and instance resizing. 

Don't worry about LLMs

The post argues that while large language models (LLMs) are receiving a lot of hype, the engineering systems built around them are similar to previous machine learning systems. It advises practitioners to cut through the hype and treat LLMs as regular engineering and ML problems.

Test-Driving HTML Templates

When building a server-side rendered web application, it is valuable to test the HTML that's generated through templates. While these can be tested through end-to-end tests running in the browser, such tests are slow and more work to maintain than unit tests. Unit tests, written in the server-side environment, can check for valid HTML, and extract elements with CSS selectors to test the details of generated HTML. These test cases can be defined in a simple data structure to make them easier to understand and enhance. Browser testing tools are still needed to unit test the behavior of the generated HTML, together with the associated CSS and JavaScript.

Your API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

Instead of redirecting API calls from HTTP to HTTPS, make the failure visible. Either disable the HTTP interface altogether, or return a clear HTTP error response and revoke API keys sent over the unencrypted connection. Unfortunately, many well-known API providers don't currently do so.

How we scale our microVM infrastructure using low-latency memory decompression

Moving from raw memory snapshots to compressed memory snapshots, and the optimizations for the challenges that follow.

Watch and Listen

Learn C Programming and OOP with Dr. Chuck

In this complete C programming course, Dr. Charles Severance (aka Dr. Chuck) will help you understand computer architecture and low-level programming with the help of the classic C Programming language book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. Toward the end Dr. Chuck interviews Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python.

Reimplementing Apache Kafka with Golang and S3

An interview with Ryan Worl, whose journey from DataDog to Co-Founding WarpStream—an Apache Kafka-compatible streaming system using Golang and S3—offers insights into large-scale system migrations and the innovation behind WarpStream. Ryan discusses the rationale for re-implementing Kafka, the challenges and benefits of using S3 for storage, and his reflections on choosing Golang for the project.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Indexify

A realtime and indexing and structured extraction engine for Unstructured Data to build Generative AI Applications.

sig

Interactive grep (for streaming).

Plane

Open Source JIRA, Linear and Asana Alternative. Plane helps you track your issues, epics, and product roadmaps in the simplest way possible.

Openpanel

All the goodies from both Mixpanel and Plausible combined into one tool.

RAGapp

The easiest way to use Agentic RAG in any enterprise.

Our Other Newsletters

Python Weekly

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

Founder Weekly

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