Hi all,
This week, I’ve already started to feel the first signs of autumn in the air where I live. I hope everyone can savor these last few days of summer and gear up for the fall season.
As engineers, we’re often advised not to reinvent the wheel—use Redis for caching, ElasticSearch for searching, and so on. But let’s challenge that mindset. If you’re curious, dive in and experiment. Build your own search engine, write your own database. That’s the spirit behind this week’s curated links. I hope you find them inspiring.
Now, let’s dive into the newsletter. If you enjoy BetterDev, please spread the word by sharing it with your friends. And if you’d like to support my work, buying me a coffee would be much appreciated.
In collabortion app you will usually see the cursor of all the user moving around. How would we implement that? At scale. Canvas engineering share with us here. Some good find such as using a Binary serialization instead of JSON to reduce CPU load on backend
Build a retrieval system with semantic, full-text, and fuzzy search in Postgres to be used as a backbone in RAG pipelines. We will do all: full text search, semantic search, fuzzy search with Postgres
It’s surprising how little is known about the foundations of machine learning. Yes, from an engineering point of view, an immense amount has been figured out about how to build neural nets that do all kinds of impressive and sometimes almost magical things. But at a fundamental level we still don’t really know why neural nets “work”—and we don’t have any kind of “scientific big picture” of what’s going on inside them.
Some programs use a particular system call “vmsplice” to move data faster through a pipe. When not using vmsplice, Linux pipes are slower than what I would have expected. Since we cannot always use it, lets see exactly why that was, and whether it could be improved.
Marc Olson has been part of the team shaping Elastic Block Store (EBS) for over a decade. In this post, Marc provides a fascinating insider’s perspective on the journey of EBS. He shares hard-won lessons in areas such as queueing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. Most importantly, he emphasizes how constraints can often breed creative solutions. It’s an insightful look at how one of AWS’s foundational services has evolved to meet the needs of our customers (and the pace at which they’re innovating).
Take us into the history of Ethernet to see why things happened the way they did. It will also significantly enhance your network knowledge.
As developers, we use databases all the time. But how do they work? In this series, we’ll try to answer that question by building our own SQLite-compatible database from scratch.Source code examples will be provided in Rust, but you are encouraged to follow along using your language of choice, as we won’t be relying on many language-specific features or libraries.
Detect memory by just looking at growth rate of memory is simple. What if we train a model of leak pattern, and apply it to detect it sooner and more efficent?
databases are basically magic, and SQL is the arcane tongue that allows you to channel that magic. In fact, it’s easy to think of databases like a black box where you make sure your tables are indexed sensibly and your queries aren’t doing anything silly, and the rest just happens. But at the end of day, they are just software, that works with hardware, and use some great tricks or abstraction. So we will dive into that
Enjoy a slice! A utility library for dealing with slices and maps that focuses on type safety and performance.
Goa tool that lets you execute commands on a server by sending UDP packets. The commands are configured on the server side, so the client does not define what is going to be executed, it only picks from existing commands.
RustJavaScript library for all kinds of color manipulations. Working with color is really fun because it invole a lot of matrix manipulation and some cool tip.
JavaScriptRecord and replay your HTTP interactions for fast, deterministic and accurate tests
a visualization grammar, a declarative language for creating, saving, and sharing interactive visualization designs. With Vega, you can describe the visual appearance and interactive behavior of a visualization in a JSON format, and generate web-based views using Canvas or SVG.
A plugin driven framework to build WYSIWYG Markdown editor
Query anything (JSON, CSV, GitHub, Notion, Airtable, etc.) with SQL
Real-time logging and monitoring for Docker in the browser
DuckDB-powered Postgres for high performance apps & analytics. Check out the introduction post
A Modern Go Kernel for Jupyter Notebooks
Pull Request-like Review/Approval flow for database queries. For compliant but smooth Engineering access to production.
Self-hostable clone of lazydocker for the web. Manage your Docker fleet with ease
Instant is a client-side database that makes it easy to build real-time and collaborative apps like Notion or Figma.
allows you to build private and resilient communications platforms that are in complete control and ownership of the people that use them. No signups, no agreements, no handover of any data, no permissions and gatekeepers.
BetterDev Link
Every Monday