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Articles & Tutorials
How Levels.fyi Built Scalable Search with PostgreSQL (6 minute read)
Levels.fyi developed a scalable fuzzy search solution using PostgreSQL to help users quickly find relevant salary information. Its team's initial approach used simple LIKE queries, but evolved to use materialized views for optimization and full-text search with tsvector for improved results. To further improve search accuracy, they implemented a custom relevance algorithm that used factors like exact matches, popularity, and similarity.
Building a Micro HTMX SSR Framework (25 minute read)
This blog post dives into how you can use Fastify, Vite, and @fastify/vite to produce a small, low-overhead application setup that has the absolute minimal set of dependencies and moving parts. This setup achieved similar SSR performance but with a fraction of dependencies from Astro, making the overall development setup much smaller. The post first gives a crash course on Vite, then walks through how to integrate it into Fastify applications, before finally moving on to the rewrite.
How Slack Automates Deploys (11 minute read)
Slack automated deployments with a program called ReleaseBot. ReleaseBot monitors deployments, detects anomalies using z-scores and dynamic thresholds, and can pause or roll back deployments if necessary. This proved to be a big improvement compared to Slackβs previous process, which involved engineers serving as βDeployment Commandersβ that oversaw manual deploys.
The Tech Lead's Playbook (3 minute read)
A tech lead's role involves setting a strategic direction, influencing project staffing, and ensuring successful execution. They identify key problems, propose solutions, seek alignment across teams, and collaborate to secure resources for their initiatives. While tech leads still write code, their success relies heavily on strong communication and interpersonal skills to guide the team and promote the project's visibility.
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining (3 minute read)
This author had a weird internet problem where their home Wi-Fi connection would only work when it was raining. Debugging revealed that a neighbor's tree had grown tall enough to intermittently obstruct the signal. The rain would weigh down the branches, temporarily clearing the obstruction, but the connection would fail again as the tree dried. The author upgraded their Wi-Fi hardware to a newer standard that was more resistant to interference to fix the issue.
Headline driven development (3 minute read)
Headline-driven development is a method for shipping software by creating and focusing on a stream of short, clear headlines that communicate the key features of each release before writing any code. This approach helps prioritize the most important features and cuts out any unnecessary work.
Your AI Product Needs Evals (19 minute read)
For AI products to succeed and improve over time, itβs important to have an evaluation approach. This article lays out a three-level approach. First, unit tests should assert expected AI outputs. Second, tools should log AI interactions for easy analysis. Lastly, AI products should have A/B testing to better understand user behavior.