Programmer Weekly (Issue 224 September 26 2024)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 224

September 26, 2024

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 224 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"Programmers regard themselves as artists. As such, they consider keeping accurate records of their handiwork on par with washing ashtray." - Otis Port

News

After 20 years of development, the PREEMPT_RT real-time patch has been officially merged into the Linux kernel with version 6.12. This integration allows Linux to handle time-sensitive tasks more efficiently, making it suitable for use in industrial control systems, robotics, and other applications requiring precise timing and low latency.

Reading List

Discord reduced its websocket traffic by 40% by implementing zstandard compression with dictionaries, replacing the previously used zlib compression. This optimization improved bandwidth usage and responsiveness, particularly benefiting iOS and Android users, by leveraging zstandard's higher compression ratios, faster compression times, and support for dictionaries to preemptively exchange information about compressed content.

The article discusses the challenges and best practices of indexing in PostgreSQL, highlighting a critical incident where concurrent indexing failed silently, leading to performance issues. It provides detailed advice on creating, monitoring, and validating indexes, emphasizing the importance of using the CONCURRENTLY flag, checking for invalid indexes, and properly managing indexes on partitioned tables.

Netflix has developed a Key-Value Data Abstraction Layer to simplify data access and enhance infrastructure reliability across its global operations. This abstraction provides a consistent interface for developers, supports diverse use cases, and offers features like idempotency, efficient handling of large data through chunking, and smart pagination to ensure predictable performance and scalability.

A deep dive on the system I use to manage time and productivity, inspired by many experts in the field.

Slack has evolved its Chef infrastructure from a single stack to a sharded system to improve reliability and scalability for managing tens of thousands of EC2 instances. The transition involved developing new tools like Shearch and Gnife, updating existing processes, and implementing a more gradual cookbook deployment approach across environments.

Watch and Listen

The video features an interview with DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), discussing his choice of Ruby as a programming language and its impact on his career. DHH emphasizes the importance of finding joy in programming, the value of competence, and the need for a balance between making programming accessible to beginners while encouraging continuous learning and growth throughout one's career.

Bernd Ruecker discusses process orchestration and how tools like microservice orchestrators or workflow engines are built to implement long-running capabilities.

Lean how to program with Nvidia CUDA and leverage GPUs for high-performance computing and deep learning. 

Faust is a programming language specifically designed for audio processing, capable of creating various sound effects and digital instruments. The language is unique in its ability to compile to multiple targets, including C, Rust, and even FPGAs, allowing for high-level audio program descriptions to be translated into low-level chip instructions.

Books

This book will teach you enough compiler theory and assembly programming to get going. It uses a subset of TypeScript that reads like pseudocode and targets ARM 32-bit instruction set.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

The Grammar Checker for Developers. 

Bare metal to production ready in mins; your own fly server on your VPS. 

A database management tui for postgres.

Podman desktop companion. 

Typed superset of R. 

An experiment in hermetic, reproducible build systems. 

Recruiting OS for forward thinking companies.

Open source ngrok alternative designed for teams. Tunnel http, tcp or websocket connections.

Our Other Newsletters

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