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In 2015, the author prevented a repeat of a previous system failure caused by a leap second by implementing "leap smearing." This involved subtly slowing down the company's internal time for 20 hours before the leap second, making it effectively one second behind the rest of the world. The author tested this method extensively using custom-built clocks and various systems.

Canva experienced a major outage triggered by a seemingly innocuous deployment of a new editor page. A stale Cloudflare traffic rule misrouted user traffic over the public internet, causing latency and a backlog of 270,000+ requests for JavaScript files. This led to a "thundering herd" effect, overwhelming Canva's API gateway with 1.5 million requests per second. Canva engineers mitigated the outage by manually increasing capacity and using Cloudflare's firewall to temporarily block traffic.

The author re-created a Bad Apple music video within Vim using only search queries. The process involved converting the video frames into binary data, representing each pixel as a character in a Vim-compatible grid using a square font. They then developed algorithms to decompose each frame into a minimal set of rectangles, which are expressed as complex Vim search patterns. Finally, a Vim macro iterates through these patterns.

Daishi Kato, the creator of the popular React state management libraries Zustand, Jotai, and Valtio, discusses the future of them in light of the React Compiler and Server Components (RSCs). The React Compiler's optimization capabilities may diminish the core need for these libraries by removing unnecessary re-renders, a problem they currently solve. RSCs also lessen the reliance on these libraries for server-side state caching. However, these libraries still offer valuable features like state organization and composability.

Widespread serverless adoption hasn't occurred due to lingering challenges from the previous microservices transition and concerns about making complexity worse, and organizational readiness lags too. The shift to serverless requires investment in new infrastructure and tooling to support the fragmented architecture.

Trying out new software services is often frustrating due to the relentless sales tactics of companies. This often involves a series of unwanted calls and demos showcasing irrelevant features. This has led the author to switch to open-source alternatives often, freeing them from the cycle of unwanted sales interactions.

RAG is table stakes for modern AI applications. Learn how you can make it more effective and impactful by using human-labeled datasets, appropriate metric choices (recall vs. precision), and employing advanced techniques such as parallel queries and agentic RAG. Read more on the Elastic blog

Dockview is a zero-dependency layout manager supporting React, Vue, and TypeScript. It has features like tabbed views, grids, and split-views with an API.

Tabby is a self-hosted, open-source AI coding assistant. Recent updates include Llamafile deployment integration and improved Answer Engine functionality.

Txtlog is an open-source text log service that handles various data formats, including JSON and raw text. It offers features like automatic GeoIP checks and a functional dashboard. Users can log application data via POST requests or use provided scripts for monitoring server logins on Linux and Windows systems.

v0, Bolt, and Lovable each offer distinct strengths for building web applications. v0 is great at rapid UI prototyping, especially within the React ecosystem, while Bolt prioritizes full-stack development speed in a browser-based environment. Lovable focuses on guided full-stack development and collaborative features.

As VP of Engineering, James Shore addressed his CEO's request to measure software engineering productivity by defining the "best product engineering organization" through six key areas: People, Internal Quality, Lovability, Visibility, Agility, and Profitability. He detailed strategies for improvement in each area, including fostering an “Extreme Programming” culture, improving code quality through iterative refinement rather than large-scale rewrites, and using a "product bets" system for strategic prioritization. For reference, “Extreme Programming” practices include evolutionary design, merciless refactoring, and test-driven development.

Researchers have discovered that some developers are exploiting a loophole in Google's Chrome Web Store to promote shady extensions through keyword manipulation. They achieve this by hiding thousands of irrelevant keywords in lesser-used language translations within extension descriptions, manipulating search results to prioritize their extensions over legitimate ones.

UV, a drop-in replacement for the Python package manager `pip`, stands out in its ability to easily manage Python dependencies and virtual environments with a single command, removing much of the need for ad-hoc scripting.

A software engineer shows how they improved their coding efficiency using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Model Context Protocol servers, which allowed an LLM to automate various tasks like managing GitHub Issues and deployments.

While nostalgia for a seemingly friendlier pre-2000s internet is prevalent, experts argue that many of the current online issues already existed then, but are just filtered out through the rose-colored lens of nostalgia.

The C language should be updated to allow compile-time function evaluation, compile-time unit testing, forward referencing of declarations, and direct importing of declarations.