Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 221 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

"Just as it is a good practice to make all fields private unless they need greater visibility, it is a good practice to make all fields final unless they need to be mutable.” - Brian Goetz

Reading List

I just crossed $1 million on GitHub Sponsors

Caleb Porzio shares his journey to earning $1 million through GitHub Sponsors, offering insights on open-source sustainability. He emphasizes the importance of selling educational content, building relationships, diversifying income streams, and maintaining project relevance while balancing community engagement and personal well-being.

Programming ZKPs: From Zero to Hero

Learn to write and modify Zero Knowledge Proofs from scratch. You'll build a digital signature scheme using hash-based commitments, gaining practical ZKP programming skills and intuition along the way. By the end, you'll have all the tools you need to implement things like group signatures.

I will f(l)ail at your tech interviews, here's why you should care

The article argues that traditional technical interviews often create false negatives, filtering out capable candidates who may struggle with interview anxiety or trivia-style questions. The author, an experienced software engineer, proposes that interviews should focus more on real-world problem-solving skills, communication, and adaptability rather than memorized solutions or high-pressure coding challenges.

Sampling with SQL

The post explains how to efficiently sample data using SQL, focusing on techniques to retrieve random subsets of large datasets. It also covers the importance of sampling in data analysis and offers practical SQL queries for implementation.

Classifying all of the pdfs on the internet

The article describes an attempt to classify a massive dataset of 8.4 million PDFs from Common Crawl using various machine learning techniques. The author experiments with different approaches, including deep learning models and traditional machine learning methods like XGBoost, ultimately achieving the best performance with an XGBoost model trained on embeddings, reaching 85.26% accuracy after hyperparameter tuning.

The Ultimate Guide to Font Performance Optimization

Font performance optimization is a set of web development techniques that make fonts load faster and render more smoothly, including thoughtful font selection, the use of performant font formats, self-hosting, optimized @font-face declarations, font display strategies, and others.

Unified Grid: How We Re-Architected Slack for Our Largest Customers

Slack re-architected its system from a workspace-centric model to an org-wide architecture called Unified Grid to better serve large enterprise customers with multiple workspaces. This ambitious project involved updating thousands of APIs, database queries, and permissions checks to improve user experience for those belonging to multiple workspaces within an organization.

Beyond Ctrl-C: The dark corners of Unix signal handling

This article explores the complexities of Unix signal handling, discussing common pitfalls and limitations of signal handlers. It then demonstrates how async Rust, particularly using Tokio's signal handling and select! macro, can provide a more robust and manageable approach to handling signals in complex programs like download managers.

Watch and Listen

What Can You Learn from the Fastest Code in the World?

Alan Elder explores the extremes one can go to in order to push the boundaries of code performance and efficiency to perform complex processing on millions of packets per second.

Building LLMs from the Ground Up

This tutorial guides coders through the fundamentals of large language models (LLMs), explaining how they work and how to build them from scratch in PyTorch. It covers coding a small GPT-like model, its data pipeline, architecture, pretraining, and fine-tuning using open-source libraries.

How to write a programming language and shell in Go with 92% test coverage and instant CI/CD

The talk introduces Elvish, a full-fledged programming language and interactive shell, and then delves into its interpreter implementation in Go. It covers topics such as tree-walking interpretation, leveraging Go's features, implementing shell semantics, testing strategies for both programming and interactive aspects, and building a CI/CD pipeline using Go and Elvish for automatic website and binary updates.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

KubeAI

Private Open AI on Kubernetes.

Firecrawl

Turn entire websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data. Scrape, crawl and extract with a single API.

Daytona

The Open Source Development Environment Manager.

lady-deirdre

Lady Deirdre is a framework for incremental programming language compilers, interpreters, and source code analyzers.

novops

Cross-platform secret & config manager for development and CI environments.

Distroless

Language focused docker images, minus the operating system.

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.

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