all things engineering

Training a collaborative filtering based recommendation system on a toy dataset is a sophomore year project in colleges these days. But where the rubber meets the road is building such a system at scale, deploying in production, and serving live requests within a few hundred milliseconds while the user is waiting for the page to load. To build a system like this, engineers have to make decisions spanning multiple moving layers like:

It’s tempting to air your grievances at your exit interview. Don’t. There’s almost no upside to speaking up, and tremendous potential downside. Avoid exit interviews if you can. If you must go, be totally bland; say nothing negative.

Braintree Payments uses PostgreSQL as its primary datastore. We rely heavily on the data safety and consistency guarantees a traditional…

Throughout my career, the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others.   I’ve experienced this mistake as both an IC and a manager. A…

Important, Read This First You’re about to read a blog post with a lot of advice. Learning from those who came before us is instrumental to success, but we often forget an important caveat. Almost all advice is contextual, yet it is rarely delivered with any context. “You just need to charge more!” says the company […]

Several years ago I actually cared about the differences between AWS CloudFormation and Terraform. Namely, that Terraform did not provide…

31 reflections from 10,000 hours of deliberate programming practice.

With Postgres, you don't need to immediately look farther than your own database management system for a full-text search solution. If you haven't yet given Postgres' built-in full-text search a try, read on for a simple intro.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told managers to help employees stay focused but "poor performance and divisiveness cannot be tolerated."

Webhooks come with some challenges. We prefer polling an /events endpoint instead when possible.

Write copy that delights visitors, persuades prospects, and wins customers.

I think the folks building Tailwind are talented and nice people. But at a pure technical level, I simply don't like Tailwind. Whoever it was built for, it was not built for me.

Performance clearly matters to users. For example, the most common software update on the AppStore is "Bug fixes and performance enhancements." Now that Moore's Law has ended, programmers have to work hard to get high performance for their applications. But why is performance hard to deliver? I will first explain why current approaches to evaluating and optimizing performance don't work, especially on modern hardware and for modern applications. I then present two systems that address these challenges. Stabilizer is a tool that enables statistically sound performance evaluation, making it p...

Blog post: https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/shapes-ics JavaScript has definitely been among the most influential technologies for almost a decade now. A lot of this is due to the sophisticated JavaScript VMs in modern browsers, Node.js and Electron. In this talk we’re going to explore important ingredients of these modern JavaScript VMs, specifically how ChakraCore, the engine that powers Microsoft Edge, and V8, the engine that powers Google Chrome, compare to each other for certain key features. OMG JSConf EU is coming back in 2019 https://2019.jsconf.eu/

Thanks to Streamacon for filming! Source code from the presentation can be found here: https://github.com/adamwathan/laracon2017

Lexical Scanning in Go, a talk by Rob Pike at Google Technology User Group given on Tuesday, 30 August 2011. The slides: http://rspace.googlecode.com/hg/slid...

Hackers pumping a crypto giveaway scam appear to have compromised the Twitter accounts of leading exchanges, individuals and at least one news org.

It might seem a reasonable question, but it makes some terrible assumptions: lines of code = effort lines of code = value all lines of c...

Redis open source project leaders Yossi Gottlieb and Oran Arga share the new community-driven governance structure for how Redis will be managed going forward.

UCSF IT staff detected a security incident that occurred in a limited part of the UCSF School of Medicine’s IT environment on June 1.