🍔🧠 Booking Just Made Java Sexy Again: 77% Smaller Payloads With 1 Migration
PLUS: System Design Interview Database Tips 📚, Apple vs Ring 👀, SQLite's Speed Boost with Bloom Filters ⚡
Welcome to the 683 new hungry minds who have joined us since last Monday!
If you aren’t subscribed yet, join smart, curious, and hungry folks by subscribing below.
Happy last Monday of the year! ☀️
Welcome to the 683 new hungry minds who have joined us since last Monday!
If you aren’t subscribed yet, join smart, curious, and hungry folks by subscribing here.
This is the last issue of 2024! 🥹
We’ve grown from ~1K readers to nearly 45 in a year, and I couldn’t be more happy and proud of the things that are to come!
If we’re here today it’s without a doubt because all of you show up and read my content every single week, and I can’t be more grateful for the time you choose to spend with me each Monday morning ❤️
Wishing everyone happy holidays and a successful and healthy new year in 2025 ✨
🍔 THIS WEEK’S MENU 🥗
📚 Software Engineering Articles
Modernizing legacy endpoints at Booking.com: practical guide for refactoring
Essential system design primer for coding interviews and architecture
How bloom filters supercharged SQLite performance by 10x
Offline-first apps explained: build resilient applications
Why Fastmail chose custom hardware over cloud solutions
🗞️ Tech and AI Trends
Google partners with Anthropic to enhance Gemini
Apple developing Face ID doorbell for smart homes
Meta's Ray-Ban glasses getting display upgrade in 2025
👨🏻💻 Coding Tip
Optimize React useCallback with refs for better performance and state management
Food for Thought 🧠
A mindset, an example, and an action item to start the week
"Believe you can and you're halfway there."
Theodore Roosevelt
Mindset: Belief is the first step to any achievement. Adopt a mindset of possibility.
Example: Apple's early days, when Steve Jobs believed they could build a computer for the masses, despite naysayers.
Action: Write down one thing you believe you can achieve, and read it aloud each morning.
The Rabbit Hole 🐰
Deep dives, trends, and resources curated to stay ahead
Modernizing a Legacy Endpoint and Why It’s Worth It: a Step-by-Step Guide
Modernizing a legacy endpoint led to 30% faster response times, 77% smaller payloads, and 1 million fewer daily database fetches…
How to Choose the Right Database in a System Design Interview
Written by Ashish Pratap Singh
Ex-Meta Staff Eng & YC Startup Cofounder | Rahul Pandey
Written by Ryan Peterman
If You Don't Quit You Win
Written by Kevin Naughton Jr.
💰⌚ How 65 hours DOING THIS saves you 60 working days per year
Written by Fran Soto
💾 SIDE DISHES 💾
ARTICLE (debug like a pro)
How to Improve Debugging Skills?
GITHUB REPO (design on point)
Learn how to design large-scale systems
ARTICLE (offline? no problem!)
What Every Developer Should Know About Offline-First Apps
GITHUB REPO (AI in the house)
An AI-powered automation SDK can control the page
ARTICLE (bloom and zoom)
How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster
GITHUB REPO (recommendation satisfaction)
A Lightweight Recommendation System
ARTICLE (fastmail's secret sauce)
Why we use our own hardware at Fastmail
ARTICLE (changeling changelog)
Keeping a CHANGELOG at Work
GITHUB REPO (prompting greatness)
Task-Aware Agent-driven Prompt Optimization Framework
ARTICLE (long term relationship with code)
On Long Term Software Development
ARTICLE (read to ride)
You Must Read At Least One Book To Ride
ARTICLE (ego-less zone)
Egoless Engineering
The Weekly Digest 🗞️
Software, AI, and startup news worth your time
📺 YouTube Introduces New Features for Enhanced User Experience (2 min)
Brief: YouTube rolls out innovative features aimed at improving user engagement, enhancing content discovery, and personalizing the viewing experience for its millions of users.
🤖 Google Leverages Anthropic's Claude for Gemini AI Enhancements (3 min)
Brief: Google contractors are evaluating Gemini AI's responses by comparing them to Anthropic's Claude, raising questions about potential competing practices in AI development.
🛎️ Apple Develops Face ID-Enabled Smart Home Doorbell (2 min)
Brief: Apple is reportedly working on a new smart doorbell that utilizes Face ID technology for facial recognition, aiming to compete with existing products in the smart home market.
🚀 OpenAI Faces Delays in GPT-5 and Orion Launches (3 min)
Brief: OpenAI announces postponements for its highly anticipated GPT-5 and Orion systems, raising questions about its future AI developments and potential impact on the market.
🕶️ Meta Set to Introduce Displays in Ray-Ban Smart Glasses by 2025 (2 min)
Brief: Meta plans to enhance Ray-Ban smart glasses with integrated displays by 2025, promising a significant upgrade in functionality and user experience.
The Quick Byte 💾
One coding tip because you’re technical after all
This week’s coding challenge:
This week’s tip:
In React, the useCallback hook can be optimized further by using a stable reference pattern with a ref to maintain function identity across renders while still accessing the latest state values.
Wen?
Performance Critical Components: When dealing with components that re-render frequently and pass callbacks to expensive child components or hooks like useEffect.
Real-time Updates: In scenarios where you need to maintain function stability while accessing the latest state values, such as debounced search functions or event handlers.
Memory-Intensive Applications: When working with large applications where unnecessary re-renders can significantly impact performance and memory usage.
Burp-A-Laugh 🤣
The most important meal of your day
That’s it for today! ☀️
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See you in a week — Alex.
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