Programmer Weekly (Issue 235 December 12 2024)

Programmer Weekly - Issue 235

December 12, 2024

Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 235 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

 

"Testing proves a programmer’s failure. Debugging is the programmer’s vindication." - Boris Beizer

Reading List

A systematic approach to technical documentation authoring.

The article discusses the integration of Apache Iceberg with Amazon S3. It highlights that AWS introduced a new type of bucket called table buckets that come with new APIs but have slightly higher storage costs. However, this is offset by the significantly reduced effort required for data tools to write Iceberg tables.

The article critiques traditional explanations of Fourth Normal Form (4NF) in database design, arguing they are unnecessarily complex and confusing. It suggests that 4NF can be simply understood as using two-column tables for many-to-many relationships, without the need for complicated decomposition explanations.

Chad McElligott, a Senior Staff Engineer at Smartrr, shares insights on applying DevOps, Platform Engineering, and Staff Engineering principles in a startup environment, emphasizing adaptability, efficiency, and impact in a fast-paced, resource-constrained setting. The article explores how these engineering concepts can be tailored to startup culture, focusing on reducing waste, wearing multiple hats, and driving meaningful technical improvements with limited resources.

This post is about semantic search at Dropbox. It discusses the challenges of keyword-based search and the benefits of semantic search. Dropbox used the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark to evaluate different models and selected multilingual-e5-large as the top performer.

The article compares Django and Ruby on Rails frameworks from a Rails developer's perspective, focusing on database interactions with PostgreSQL. It highlights similarities and differences in language runtime management, library management, migrations, models, and command-line tools, providing insights for developers familiar with Rails who are exploring Django.

Watch and Listen

This presentation talks about what it takes from the product and infrastructure perspective to deliver relevant content to the user regularly. In this talk, we will talk about video generally in the industry and at Meta, the key pieces of mobile delivery, video unification and how it has impacted our delivery systems and some new technologies we are able to innovate on due to our new unified product and infra.

Learn about Elasticsearch with this comprehensive course designed for beginners, featuring both theoretical concepts and hands-on applications using Python (though applicable to any programming language). The course is structured in two parts: first covering essential Elasticsearch fundamentals including index management, document storage, text analysis, pipeline creation, search functionality, and advanced features like semantic search and embeddings; followed by a practical section where you'll build a real-world website using Elasticsearch as a search engine, working with the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) dataset to implement features such as data cleaning pipelines, tokenization, pagination, and aggregations.

Sonic Pi is a unique live-coding platform for creating music. Its creator, Sam Aaron, has used it to perform live sets. This podcast episode explores Sam's journey and the design principles behind Sonic Pi, which prioritizes expressivity and productivity for real-time music creation.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

An invisible desktop application that will help you pass your technical interviews.

How to reduce complexity and move faster? Just Postgres for everything. 

Cerbos is the open core, language-agnostic, scalable authorization solution that makes user permissions and authorization simple to implement and manage by writing context-aware access control policies for your application resources.

Framework for creating, routing, and delivering user notifications based on events from external systems.

Portable, SQS-compatible message queue backed by SQLite.

Postgres change data capture to streams and queues like Kafka, SQS, HTTP endpoints, and more.

A blazingly fast, open-source application server with type-safe APIs, built-in JS/ES6/TS Runtime, Auth, and Admin UI built on Rust, SQLite & V8. 

Scalable, fast, and disk-friendlyvector search in Postgres, the successor of pgvecto.rs. 

Autonomous agents for everyone.

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