AnuRock - Bookmarks

EP214: Claude Code vs. OpenClaw: 5 Design Dimensions

Mon, 11 May 2026 05:13:39 GMT

Reading about OpenClaw’s architecture is like getting familiar with a system design problem. Also, the section about AI evals is unmissable.

How will AI change operating systems? Part 1: Ubuntu and Linux

Thu, 07 May 2026 03:30:15 GMT

Focusing on supporting specialized hardware to run AI smoothly is a wise choice than clobbering the OS experience with dysfunctional AI parts, haha.

How Instacart Built a Search for Billions of Products

Wed, 06 May 2026 06:30:16 GMT

Unification of relational data and vector storage sounds undeniably compelling for semantic search usecases, but it’s important to look at the tradeoffs before going all-in on such an approach. The article’s ‘The Limits of This Approach’ section explains it quite elegantly.

The Pulse: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ as a weird new trend

Wed, 06 May 2026 06:01:53 GMT

Parts of this article on tokenmaxxing read like plots out of outlandish worlds of Cyberpunk and Mad Max. I mean, didn’t we already learn our lessons from ‘lines of code as a performance metric’?

The 3 Candidates I Always Rejected as a Bar Raiser at Amazon

Tue, 05 May 2026 07:35:18 GMT

I can see a bit of myself in all 3 rejected candidate types. What helped me crack interviews was doing more of them (in ‘production’, of course) and learning from failed ones. It was 10x more effective than any mock interview I ever did.

The Security Architecture of GitHub Agentic Workflow

Mon, 04 May 2026 06:02:55 GMT

Glad to know GH approached agent security from a position of distrust rather than trust. Remember what happened to Sonny and VIKI in iRobot despite the strict enforcement of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. You remember it, right?

The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends

Sat, 02 May 2026 07:47:39 GMT

Our AI tooling survey finds concerns about mounting AI costs, more engineers hitting usage limits, and AI tools having uneven effects upon different types of engineers

How Spotify Ships to 675 Million Users Every Week Without Breaking Things

Sat, 02 May 2026 07:27:37 GMT

Nothing earth-shaking, TBH. Spotify’s release process is mature and grounded but resembles how releases are contemporarily done in most large product orgs. At Deel, we had a strikingly similar GTM process for new features.

3 Stories Every Professional Should Have Ready

Sat, 02 May 2026 07:19:12 GMT

On a good day, I nail my introduction and come out impressively. Sadly, good days are far and few. Steve’s advice to write down your introduction to be always prepared sounds pragmatic. This is going in my urgent TODO!

How Amazon Uses LLMs to Recommend Products

Fri, 01 May 2026 10:43:24 GMT

Searching by intent (aka semantic search) is the antithesis of searching by keywords. Amazon’s semantic search solution is pretty amazing at how it leverages mega LLMs to (a) build knowledge graph to serve known queries, and (b) create smaller LLMs for generative responses to serve never-before-seen queries.

Are AI agents actually slowing us down?

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 06:04:30 GMT

As more software engineers use AI agents daily, there’s also more sloppy software, outages, quality issues, and even a slowdown in shipping velocity. What’s happening, and how do we solve it?

Nobody Is Coming to Save Your Career

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:25:03 GMT

Career growth in 2 sentences - ‘Your company will never tell you that you’ve gotten too comfortable because they benefit from your comfort. You have to be the one who notices it and breaks out of it.’

How Agentic RAG Works?

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:15:55 GMT

Introducing AI agents in a classic RAG search pipeline lends it the ability to think, reason, and decide whether the one-shot vector-search results are any good or require refinement. Agentic RAG might also be a good application to learn about agentic systems in general.

How LinkedIn Feed Uses LLMs to Serve 1.3 Billion Users

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:29:53 GMT

Intriguing use of LLM embeddings to link member data and post together for super-fast retrieval in social feeds. And, of course, the use of LLM as semantic search layer is 🆒

Does GitHub still merit “top git platform for AI-native development” status?

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:46:37 GMT

Availability has dropped to one nine (~90% – !!), partly due to not being able to handle increased traffic from AI coding agents. There’s also no CEO and an apparent lack of direction.

Why You Should Prepare for a Layoff, Even If You Think You're Safe

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 04:23:45 GMT

Certainty in uncertain times goes a long way in approaching touch situations with calm and clarity.

Dropbox Multimedia Search: Making File Search More Useful

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 03:37:55 GMT

What not to prematurely optimize is one of the most important engineering decisions in system design. Like how Dropbox avoided generating preview thumbnails for all uploaded video/images based on their data-backed insight that most such files will never be viewed in a search result. Saved them both storage and compute costs.

How Reddit Migrated Comments Functionality from Python to Go

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 03:25:45 GMT

Tap compare, what a clever way to migrate from one tech stack to another in production. Sounds like a beginner interviewer shadowing an experienced one in real interviews.

Stop using MySQL in 2026, it is not true open source

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 04:24:07 GMT

Development has ground to a halt. The thing is plagued by security issues. As fondly as I remember MySQL from my formative years, the sad reality is it stopped being a viable option soon after its Oracle acquisition. Why Sun, why did you sell yourself?

How DoorDash Moved to a Service Mesh to Handle 80M Requests/Second

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 04:30:34 GMT

A good case study in picking just part of an off-the-shelf platform solution and building out the rest based on your org’s unique architecture and constraints. ‘Most important is to stay grounded in real problems rather than chasing architectural trends.’

Your Job Is Not Your Career

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 04:02:36 GMT

Add intentional ‘thinking time’ to your workdays. Use it for reflecting on hurdles encountered, measuring the impact of a completed task, and planning for future value creation. Otherwise, all you are doing is keeping the lights on rather than investing in your growth: good for your company, bad for your career.

A pragmatic guide to LLM evals for devs

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 03:43:49 GMT

TIL about Evals, the automated testing analogue to traditional unit/integration tests. Since running LLMs (for evaluation) in CI pipelines isn’t cheap, it’s good to prioritize test scenarios based on top buckets of real-world user issues.

The Trillion-Dollar “Why”

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 03:11:54 GMT

Dr. Gandhi’s piece confirms my prophecy about the AI dust settling by late 2025 or start of 2026. 100% automation shouldn’t be the goal. Human knowledge is priceless (goal mine as per Dr. Gandhi). Rather than replace humans with AI, augment agents with humans for the best outcomes. Good for business, good for humanity.

How LLMs Learn from the Internet: The Training Process

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 05:45:09 GMT

In my 2017 book Artificial Intelligence for .NET (co-authored with Nishith), I described how language models of that era worked. A combination of gradient descent and supervised fine-tuning gave them predictive and classification superpowers for the given domain/context. Those models were next token predictors in the truest sense.

The attention/transformers architecture together with data-science-optimized GPUs revolutionized language models and made today’s LLMs possible. The fundamentals of pre-training and teaching models have stayed the same.

It’s incredible how a single breakthrough in software architecture can lead to generational advancements.

Beautifully written article by Alex Xu, so easy to digest. Highly recommended even if you aren’t familiar with the technical details.

Saga Pattern Demystified: Orchestration vs Choreography

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 04:27:46 GMT

TIL that there’s a name for the inter-service communication pattern that I implemented in our microservices solution five years ago.

It’s called Choreography-based Saga. This is where each service listens for interesting events from other services to trigger actions.

The alternative is Orchestration-based Saga where a central orchestrator listens to events from and issues commands to services.

High-Agency Engineering: Why You Want To Be Blocked

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 03:27:12 GMT

It works! This is how I approached my first Jira ticket at my new job. Rather than waiting to digest the entire codebase or for code walkthroughs to happen, I simply dove into unfamiliar waters and created a pull request on day one. I suddenly had specific, pointed questions to the team to inform my approach rather than generic questions that might not have been helpful in solving the problem.

The Prison Of Financial Mediocrity

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 03:26:27 GMT

The double-whammy of insecure job market and social media’s constant feed of ‘a better life’ is creating a massive FOMO and driving people to invest in modern day gambling. But who’s profiting? The Dream11s and Coinbases of the world. The house wins. Most players lose.

How Zalando Delivers Real-Time Insights to Its Partners Brands

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 04:42:23 GMT

My favorite takeaways are - design for diversity and documentation is a product feature. We often aim at design a one-size-fits-all solution, we should first start by categorizing users into buckets and then accommodating all buckets. Excellent onboarding and usage guides are non-negotiable to ensure efficiencies.

The Pulse: Cloudflare takes down half the internet – but shares a great postmortem

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 04:19:27 GMT

So often when third-party services go down we are quick to blame their developers. Gergely’s easy-to-digest analysis of the November Cloudflare outage shows how incidents can sometimes genuinely be hard to predict. Also a good reminder that incidence response in software systems is no less than a Sherlock-style crime investigation.

If You Don't Have Haters, You're Not Trying

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 04:08:05 GMT

The key message is about doing what you think is right at the cost of dissenting voices. Critique is friction and friction means you’re doing something that has the potential to challenge the status quo. As to why we are wired to seek approval, wait for consensus, or crave uneventfulness — that’s our cave-man brain optimized for dangerous environments (similar to Harari’s theory in Sapiens).

Career paths for software engineers at large tech companies

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 04:12:58 GMT

Are promotions all politics? Does being a consistent rockstar developer give you that coveted hike?

Turns out managers are humans too. During promotion decisions, there are visible and subtle traits that make someone stand out. Do you just like working on new features or also enjoy diving head on into on-call issues and fixing them yourself? On seeing ugly code, do you feel the ownership of getting your hands dirty for a refactor nobody wants to do? Do you own each aspect of your career growth or leave it to your manager (aka chance)?

Often, we all know these cues deep within but are hesitant to admit our shortcomings when we don’t get the promotion we ‘clearly’ deserved.

A great read from an experienced ‘manager’.

How Disney Hotstar (now JioHotstar) Scaled Its Infra for 60 Million Concurrent Users

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:38:41 GMT

A lot of the details in this infra-heavy article went over my head, but one thing stood out — separating APIs into cacheable and non-cacheable and creating different API gateways for both. The ‘cacheable’ gateway could then be shaved off a bit in terms of unnecessary security and routing checks. That alone made things a lot faster without additional infra.

its hard out there... are software devs cooked??

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 03:46:36 GMT

I respectfully disagree with Wes and Scott’s thoughts about the state of frontend engineer role. I DO think pure FE roles are disappearing.

I have personally witnessed leaders in both large and small orgs expecting FE folks to upskill themselves across the full stack (servers, DBs, caches, and whatnot), because LLMs can generate frontends pretty damn well. As for backend engineers, I think it’s fair to say they are now expected to pick up stuff that was earlier the dominion of SRE and DevOps folks. Mergers and acquisitions in engineering roles, haha.

How to Build Career Equity

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 03:43:42 GMT

Are you investing your time exclusively in safe bets with additive returns—eg. technical skills or in additive bets AND multiplier bets—eg. speaking, questioning, systems thinking? What’s driving you — auto-pilot calendar or intentional toil for career equity?

The Pulse: Amazon layoffs – AI or economy to blame?

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 03:49:50 GMT

Based on declining restaurant sales and reduced parcel deliveries, Gergley predicts signs of weakening consumer spending in the US. That’s what he’s attributing for Amazon’s latest mass layoffs - not AI or over-hiring. While it does make sense for e-commerce companies to prepare for impending economic headwinds, it still baffles me how one of the most profitable companies on planet treats its employees as commodities. I’m sure they have enough cash reserves to survive the next ten years without layoffs, no?

From Swift to Mojo and high-performance AI Engineering with Chris Lattner

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 05:06:36 GMT

Fascinating story of LLVM (C/C++ compiler tools), the first real contender to the generations-old GCC. Nothing better than a nice origin story of a dev tool - inspirations, struggles, politics, and success. I didn’t get to the part about Swift, but really curious now.

The Smartest Person in the Room Asks the 'Dumbest' Questions

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 04:17:52 GMT

As an engineering manager, fishing for clarity through ‘dumb’ questions is such an important skill in fleshing out complex projects. Ironically, de-risking projects leads to de-risking career, not the other way around. So, if you’ve been nodding along and playing it safe on encountering ambiguous terms/requirements, remember the instances when that project was delayed or caused panic. What’s riskier - blowing projects or appearing ‘dumb’?

Tech jobs market 2025, part 3: job seekers’ stories

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 03:23:40 GMT

Confirms all my instincts about the current job market 😓 Higher demand for backend engineers. Pure frontend roles no longer a thing. Zero tolerance attitude by employers who are no longer willing to bet on potential. Infra & SRE roles high in demand. Staff-level expectations from engineering managers. Pedigree (stamp of big tech or top university) matters disproportionately more than real experience. AI-native skills are an unstated expectation. Can’t get grimmer than this, can it?

How Perplexity Built an AI Google

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 03:40:03 GMT

First, I’m blown by how RAG - often perceived as inaccurate and clunky - can be the backbone of something as sophisticated as Perplexity. Second, it’s amazing to know what it takes to build a hyper-accurate RAG pipeline. KNOWLEDGE BASE: A massive dataset built from crawling 200 billion web pages. RETRIEVAL ENGINE: Vespa, a low-latency search engine, designed to operate at web-scale, that combines vector and lexical search with ML-powered ranking. LLM: An intelligent router to run user’s query + retrieved context on the best-suited model among in-house and leading ones (GPT/Claude), balancing cost and quality.

EP187: Why is DeepSeek-OCR such a BIG DEAL?

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 04:50:36 GMT

Let me guess: companies like OpenAI, Claude, and Google won’t be keen on implementing this approach as they make their millions ($$) from token costs. Anyhow, converting text into compressed visual tokens seems like a clever way to significantly reduce number of tokens that reach LLM’s decoder layer. I hope DeepSeek’s OCR is incredibly accurate, unlike traditional OCR models.

New trend: programming by kicking off parallel AI agents

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 04:04:54 GMT

As Gergley said, parallel agentic coding is new territory. We’ll have to wait and see if there will be actual gains or will it be shitloads of more code to review.

Why I Spent $10,000 Learning How to Talk

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 03:44:07 GMT

When preparing to speak (for a talk or presentation) or when put on spot, we tend to focus on delivering the entire thing correctly. Instead, work on your first sentence (message and tone), then nail its delivery and let the rest flow. Similar to Steve’s cultivating confidence advice from last month but more specific to speaking skills.

The Evolution of LinkedIn’s Generative AI Tech Stack

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 04:52:26 GMT

Other than illustrating LinkedIn’s GenAI adoption journey, the article reinforces my belief in the notion that we should stop regarding AI as a massive job terminator. It’s a tool, just like any other, to supercharge one’s abilities and help move faster. A good case study on cleverly aligning new bolder initiatives with tech debt management, refactoring systems incrementally, and upskilling via pair programming. Personal take (🌶️): Despite the fancy system design, LinkedIn’s AI features for candidates feel average at best.

Under Pressure: Benchmarking Node.js on a Single-Core EC2

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:03:12 GMT

~2500 reqs/sec. That’s what a lowly 1-core 1-GiB server (Node.js & Postgres) can handle on its own. Let that sink in. Horizontally scaling is not always the answer and comes with its own complexity/tradeoffs. See if increasing the machine size will be enough before throwing in more servers and load balancers.

What caused the large AWS outage?

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 06:48:03 GMT

A stark reminder about over-dependence on one vendor for all infra needs. Amazon uses DNS tricks to load-balance its DynamoDB services. Due to a race condition, DNS records were emptied causing an outage of this massively popular distributed NoSQL database. That didn’t just impact applications using DynamoDB but also EC2 which depends on it for droplet provisioning configuration. Double whammy!

The 3 Levels of Influence (And Why You're Stuck on Level 1)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:49:16 GMT

My key takeaway comes from the last part. Start small to build influence. Identify a small pain point and create content to fix it (RFC, code, presentation). Then use your earned trust to propose another small, related change. Once you have sufficient influence built from small wins, use it to propose more ambitious changes you always wanted to push.

The Problem with this Humanoid Robot - YouTube

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 05:43:18 GMT

Another problem with humanoid robots is that they take creativity and fun out of chores. Remember all the times you found ways to make your chores bearable or even enjoyable. Washing dishes? It’s the perfect time to catch up with a friend over phone. Ironing clothes? The perfect time to reflect on a difficult problem. Cleaning your house? The perfect time to rearrange things and get rid of stuff so there’s less to clean.

What is good software architecture?

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 03:27:40 GMT

A bold yet practical stance against formal architect roles. Every engineer should be skilled and empowered to influence system design. This cumulative engineering sense, combined with experience in the trenches, should shape the overall architecture rather than a full time thinker proposing imaginary ideas.

How Pinterest Transfers Hundreds of Terabytes of Data With CDC

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 03:45:27 GMT

Reading about how massive platforms use certain technologies is a great way to learn about them (and retain that learning!). This Pinterest case studies highlights change data capture (CDC) in all its glory - and the inefficient methods it replaces like DB triggers and batch jobs to detect inserts, updates, and deletions. Yet another instance of control plane-data plane design. Cool to know Debezium exists and is free.

What Actually Happens When You Press ‘Send’ to ChatGPT

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 02:51:56 GMT

Easy to digest, although nothing earth-shatteringly new. My biggest insight is how self-attention works, a mechanism an LLM model uses to decide while parts of the input are most relevant to predict the next token.

- YouTube

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 02:57:20 GMT

Zed seems like an interesting new code editor, but… umm… I’m not sure if I’m convinced enough to switch over. VS Code still rules for me!

I Broke Up with JSON (And My APIs Are 5× Happier Now)

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 03:49:11 GMT

A good run down of API data exchange formats that are faster to serialize/parse than JSON.

Nobody Cares How Hard You Work

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 04:22:05 GMT

Treating your career in terms of product-market fit is an intriguing way of improving your indispensability at work. You match your skills to a pain point, not a role. Only then hard work starts to matter. A good reinterpretation of the Japanese concept of ikigai, IMO.

How Salesforce Used AI To Reduce Test Failure Resolution Time By 30%

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 04:20:26 GMT

Not sure how the described Test Failure Triage Agent is different from RAG search. It’d be more interesting to learn how Salesforce used RAG at scale. Nonetheless, using vector-based similarity search is definitely an interesting solution for automating triaging and suggesting solutions for a massive amount of test failures in CI/CD pipelines.

The Productive Discomfort Zone: Why Real Career Growth Feels Awful

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 04:10:32 GMT

What a brutally honest advice to owning your career growth. Interesting overview about “the Dip” and its nuances. The tip about high vs. low agency at the end is just 🫡

How Flipkart Built a Highly Available MySQL Cluster for 150+ Million Users

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 02:58:12 GMT

A practical look at how primary database election works (in a replication setup) during failovers. What a simple and clever design! Love how monitor and orchestrator components are kept separate to reduce false positives.

State of the software engineering jobs market, 2025: what hiring managers see

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 03:43:41 GMT

Observations by 30+ hiring managers and tech recruiters about what’s happening: a flood of inbound applications means more selective hiring, there’s increased demand for product engineers, and more

How Airbnb Runs Distributed Databases on Kubernetes at Scale

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 04:18:52 GMT

Distributed SQL databases are not magic boxes that will handle availability and reliability challenges without thoughtful engineering. Airbnb’s case study is a great example of such engineering: don’t let more than one node replacement run at a time (serialized replacement controlled by custom k8s controller logic), spread a database across data centers (AWS availability zones), and don’t store data on the same node as DB server (detachable AWS EBS volumes).

- YouTube

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 08:23:03 GMT

As a long-time developer, I can completely related to CJ’s rants against AI coding tools. Are they really making us 10x productive when we have to spend a non-trivial amount of time understanding, reviewing, re-prompting, and fixing AI generated code?

An Engineer's Guide To Cultivating Confidence

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 05:42:47 GMT

If there’s only one thing I am taking away from this article, it is to reverse the feeling-action order. Instead of waiting to feel confident before taking action, I’m going to take action to feel confident. Also love the 10% technique—overprepare for the critical 10% part for a confidence boost early on.

Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript and AI with Armin Ronacher

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 03:56:23 GMT

Choice of a language doesn’t always have to be based on performance or familiarity. Often it’s influenced by problem space (aka the core task) - suitability and ecosystem. Also, it’s always intriguing to hear a pragmatic take on AI coding from a once hater of the paradigm. AI agents are great at bootstrapping and doing the legwork, but we’ll always need humans to be fully in control (and for the emotions).

Why Anthropic’s MCP is a Big Deal

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 03:00:42 GMT

The deep dive into how a request travels across the MCP stack and how a response is transported back is the best damn example I’ve ever read about how MCPs work.

How Grab’s Migration from Go to Rust Cut Costs by 70%

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 03:02:02 GMT

The correlation (or the lack of) between speed/latency and efficiency in the conclusion is confusing. Ideally, more efficient systems should offer better speeds with similar resources. Is the mentioned efficiency expressed purely in terms of scalability? Can someone enlighten me?

The RAG Obituary: Killed by Agents, Buried by Context Windows

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 02:54:58 GMT

Great historical context about a key problem RAG was designed to solve and why there is a better solution now in agentic search - thanks to huge context windows in today’s LLMs. It’s also fascinating to learn how Claude Code cleverly uses decades-old filesystem tools to perform lightning fast navigation and regex searches without needing some sort of indexing.

Your Ambition Is Not Enough

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 02:30:29 GMT

Validates my long-held belief about the dangers of hero culture our society idealizes. Behind every successful individual is a team - family, friends, mentors. Not only is it unfair to attribute all success to one person, it sets a false expectation about how you can replicate that success.

How Claude Code is built

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 07:59:57 GMT

TIL React is no longer limited to UIs for the web and mobile. Claude Code (and several other agentic CLI tools) use React for command-line UIs, whatever UI means in that context. See https://term.ink/.

The Pulse #146: How AI is changing tech interviews

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 13:47:26 GMT

Big Tech interviewers using tougher interview questions, while startups drop algorithmic questions and takehomes. Also: new trend of devs vibe coding internal tools, and more

How Naval Ravikant’s Vision of the One-Person Business Became Reality Sooner…

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 10:38:05 GMT

How Naval’s blueprint — centered on identifying pressing problems, leveraging knowledge, crafting visionary solutions, and cultivating…

Are You Accumulating Career Debt?

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 07:50:47 GMT

“Comfort” and “yes” debts are the most dangerous of the three career debts. They prevent you from doing focus work, learning new marketable skills, and strengthening resume. Despite immensely growing as an engineering leader, I sadly accumulated career debt on the technical hands-on front in the last couple of years. Thankfully, I’ve been making up for it and paying back my debt in the last few months through deliberate learning and practice. If that resonates with you, do it before it’s too late.

Updated and Ongoing Supply Chain Attack Targets CrowdStrike ...

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 09:25:13 GMT

Socket detected multiple compromised CrowdStrike npm packages, continuing the "Shai-Hulud" supply chain attack that has now impacted nearly 500 packag...

Untitled

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 02:56:43 GMT

Measuring developer productivity was hard enough. Now engineering managers have to contend with measuring the impact of AI on dev productivity. Laura provides a list of key metrics (based on trends across big tech) that should be a good starting point for most orgs. Essentially, establish a baseline and later measure the same metrics again after introducing AI in dev workflows.

Making Sense of React Server Components • Josh W. Comeau

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 12:16:09 GMT

This year, the React team unveiled something they've been quietly researching for years: an official way to run React components exclusively on the server. This is a significant paradigm shift, and it's caused a whole lot of confusion in the React community. In this tutorial, we'll explore this new world, and build an intuition for how it works, and how we can take advantage of it.

How Linear Implemented Multi-Region Support For Customers

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:00:12 GMT

In this article, we look at how Linear implemented multi-region support for its customers. We will explore the architecture they built, along with the technical implementation details.

EP180: Python vs Java

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 07:06:28 GMT

More than the main topic, loved the distinction between Load Balancers vs API Gateways vs Reverse Proxy.

How DoorDash uses AI Models to Understand Restaurant Menus

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 02:54:43 GMT

What strikes me is the simplicity of the architecture. Interesting use of OCR + LLM to extract + structurize highly inconsistent restaurant menu data. Until multimodal LLMs came along that could do both tasks at once. Human-in-the-loop using their guardrails model is also intriguing.

Help Us Raise $200k to Free JavaScript from Oracle | Deno

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 03:01:25 GMT

Our legal battle over Oracle's claim on the word "JavaScript" is entering the discovery phase. Here's how you can help.

How Grab Built An Authentication System for 180+ Million Users

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 02:43:54 GMT

Other than Grab’s specific context, the article provides a good primer on modern authentication and authorization. tl;dr Dex is a cool & open source OIDC-based authentication platform.

EP179: Kubernetes Explained

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 01:03:45 GMT

Well, I was expecting a bit more detailed explanation for the titular topic.

How Dropbox Built an AI Product Dash with RAG and AI Agents

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 01:08:45 GMT

While RAG is amazing with high-quality and contextual Q&A type queries, AI agents help with breaking down complex tasks and orchestrating them using plan-validate-execute approach.

Untitled

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:51:03 GMT

A simple, low-stakes method to practice influencing by leveraging multiple-stakeholder meetings to listen/summarize, build a well-reasoned opinion, and share it with others.

Untitled

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:44:39 GMT

A simple 3-step framework for getting shit done while giving you some breathing space. Nothing groundbreaking, but a good reminder.

EP177: The Modern Software Stack

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 06:47:28 GMT

While there’s nothing groundbreaking about the titular infographic, the ones for concurrency vs. parallelism and JWT vs PASETO are intriguing!

Untitled

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 05:12:01 GMT

Takeaway mantra: be impatient with inputs (what you control) and patient with outputs (what you don’t control).

Ep. 368: I Want Work-Life Balance. Am I Doomed to Mediocrity?

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 03:46:26 GMT

I agree with Cal here that whether one must make big work-life balance sacrifices depends on their definition of success (money, startup exit, impact, remarkability, American dream lifestyle, etc.). Certain goals do require one to substantially cut down on personal time.

How Reddit Delivers Notifications to Tens of Millions of Users

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 05:54:09 GMT

It’s amazing how much work, refinements, and algos go into balancing something as simple as push notifications to keep them relevant and not pushy for users.

How LLMs See Images, Audio, and More

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 05:23:43 GMT

A video is tokenised by first splitting it into individual image frames and audio sequences and then tokenising images and audios. Not surprising but interesting.

Learning to learn | K/L

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 07:03:44 GMT

The fastest way to get better at something is to start slow.

WorkLife: How you can do more for others with Rutger Bregman

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 06:52:30 GMT

Conventional wisdom holds that if you are a good person, you will do good for others. The school of moral ambition says, you become a good person by doing good. A powerful reminder about how much we are in control of doing good deeds.

What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand?

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 07:41:28 GMT

Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025

Untitled

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 07:07:53 GMT

Learning from others’ failures is the optimal way to learn - the 3D ringside seat method.

EP175: What is the SOLID Principle?

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 11:15:43 GMT

SOLID offers guidelines to create software that is easy to understand, modify, and extend.

How Uber Eats Deduplicates Hundreds of Millions of Product Images

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 11:13:16 GMT

At the scale of Uber Eats, image handling is an operational necessity. The platform manages hundreds of millions of product images, with millions of updates flowing through the system every hour.

How LLMs See the World

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 11:07:40 GMT

Tokens are what rule the world of LLMs. You send tokens to models, you pay by the token, and models read, understand, and breathe tokens.

Untitled

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:57:19 GMT

A great collection of examples of applying second order thinking in software development.

The State of React and the Community in 2025

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:12:15 GMT

Detailed thoughts on how React has been developed over time, and explanations for common community confusion and concerns

How Cursor Serves Billions of AI Code Completions Every Day

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:12:38 GMT

An insightful look at how Cursor IDE uses GenAI tech stack and techniques (eg. RAG and vector similarity search) for its AI-powered features.

EP173: 12 MCP Servers You Can Use in 2025

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 03:13:05 GMT

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that simplifies how AI models, particularly LLMs, interact with external data sources, tools, and services.

Cursor makes developers less effective?

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 11:32:27 GMT

Whether it’s learning curve, time spent reviewing generated code, or context switching, using AI for coding tasks does come at a non-negligible cost.

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Tue, 05 Aug 2025 04:54:28 GMT

Always love philosophy intermingled with software engineering examples :)

924: Sync Engines and Local Data

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 03:38:51 GMT

A fantastic rundown of tech that developers can leverage to create ultra snappy user experiences using local-first data design.

ReThinking: The truth about the attention crisis with historian Daniel Immerwahr

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 03:35:11 GMT

A compelling counter to the argument about how modern day technologies such as smartphones and social media have shortened attention spans in humans. Apparently, we are as attentive as we were before, but for things other than traditional stuff like reading, writing, and working. Case in point: video games and deliberate web surfing.

Untitled

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 10:13:03 GMT

If you like this, also check out the book Escaping

The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What’s in your tech stack?

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:38:54 GMT

Which tools do software engineers use for backend development, frontend, infrastructure, AI tooling, and more, today? Reader survey, with feedback and analysis, based on 3,000+ responses

How Tinder’s API Gateway Handles A Billion Swipes Per Day

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:51:46 GMT

Tinder operates globally. Real user traffic pours in from over 190 countries. So does bad traffic that includes bots, scrapers, and abuse attempts.

Your Career Needs a Vision, Not More Goals

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 10:46:54 GMT

Deep, deep thoughts about vision, goals, and how people commonly confuse them. What beauty of an article! The central concept is similar to Cal Newport’s lifestyle-centric planning, but it’s nice to revisit it in the context of a software engineer.

The Reality of Tech Interviews in 2025

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:59:07 GMT

A detailed look at the grim reality of tech job market and a stark reminder about preparing oneself for investing heavily in interview prep. The world is not fair, so you gotta play the game!

The 10x “overemployed” engineer

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 06:37:38 GMT

A software engineer worked at several AI startups at the same time, without his employers knowing anything about it. Then one frustrated founder who hired him went public…

EP171: The Generative AI Tech Stack

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 07:31:29 GMT

GenAI refers to systems capable of creating new content, such as text, images, code, or music, by learning patterns from existing data.

The Heart of Software Engineering Still Beats - Annie Vella

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 06:56:35 GMT

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation that’s stayed with me. A colleague from another department said: “I’ve always been able to read and understand code, even debug it, but I could never write it.” Something about this revelation stayed with me. Most people I’ve met outside the software engineering world tend to describe code as unintelligible - like hieroglyphics. I guess that’s why I’ve always assumed: if someone couldn’t write code, they probably couldn’t read it either.

The Silent Killer Of Motivation And What To Do About It

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 12:29:09 GMT

A reminder about the hazards of becoming a bottleneck in your org/work/life because you are too good at something. I was a “human search engine” for applied artificial intelligence back in 2017 and that led me to nowhere.

How Spotify Uses GenAI and ML to Annotate a Hundred Million Tracks

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 12:25:42 GMT

An interesting take on a balanced approach between the two extremes of 100% manual and 100% automated work. Also an interesting case study in breaking the silos by creating a central team with shared processes.

Software engineering with LLMs in 2025: reality check

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 03:07:40 GMT

I’m surprised to see veteran software engineers recommending LLMs for coding. I was expecting some critique from these folks or mixed opinions at best. Perhaps more veterans could be interviewed with differing opinions. I’d also love to see more startups with limited success with LLMs.

The Power of Principled Thinking

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 11:45:15 GMT

A case study on how the team behind Linear, the project management app, prioritize quality through their zero-bug principle.