Better Dev #233 Nov 14, 2022

Let's write a tiny chess engine in go

In this article we will try to understand how chess engines work by porting the sunfish chess engine to Go. Sunfish is notable for its simplicity and small size, while still being capable of playing decent chess. Go is also known as a simple and highly readable language, so I hope the two of them could make a great couple.

Creating fluffy trees with Three.js (part 1)

It seems like a “useless” thing, just draw a tree but I really enjoy reading these kind of rendering/drawing graphic. I learn a bit of GLSL vertex shader today. Highly recommend you give this a try.

How RegEx works

This isn’t an article about how to use regexes; you’ve probably seen plenty of those already. It’s about how you would write a regex package from scratch, in a language like C that doesn’t already have regexes. The author use Perl but you got the idea of writing a RegEx engine.

Reverse engineering an EV charger

I like a lot article about hardware because as a software programmer, hardware is like a blackbox to me :-)

Scaling PostgresML to 1 Million Requests per Second¶

PostgresML engineering team discuss how they horizontally scale PostgresML to achieve more than 1 million XGBoost predictions per second on commodity hardware. Their architecture and benchmarking method.

Seeing through hardware counters: a journey to threefold performance increase

Netflix upgraded their servers to large instances and didn’t see the increaseing performance they are looking for and go hunt it.

Tracing HTTP Requests with tcpflow

Kind of like a short guide for tcpflow. it can analyze the data transmitted via tcp sockets. It can look at any live tcp socket and show the back and forth communications.

Building a BitTorrent client from the ground up in Go

Nothing is better than building a PoC of some established protocol. You’ll learn a lot.

Accidental $70k Google Pixel Lock Screen Bypass

Xdavidhu found a vulnerability affecting seemingly all Google Pixel phones where if you gave them any locked Pixel device, they could give it back to you unlocked. The bug just got fixed in the November 5, 2022 security update.

Inside the mind of a frontend developer: Hero section

it will be interesting to dig into the mind of a frontend developer while they are working on implementing a component. The most important thing here is the thinking process, not the CSS outcome as sometimes it can get fairly straightforward to understand

Faster pagination in Hey

Pagination on a single table with a sort key is easy, but when we add join and filter out query from that join table, the pagination can be slow. Here, Hey.com, an email app shares a technique they used to improve its performance.

WebAssembly and Docker - Better Together

A curated list of Wasm and Docker working togethe

Code to read

tipi

the All-in-one Web Server for Ruby Apps. I found its codebase is quite small enough to read.

Ruby

sunfish

a Python Chess Engine in 111 lines of code. It’s amazing and have lot of comment to help understand it, code is very clean.

Python

perfect-shape

a collection of geometric algorithms that are mostly useful for GUI manipulation like checking containment of a point in popular geometric shapes such as rectangle, square, arc, circle, polygon, and paths containing lines, quadratic bézier curves, and cubic bezier curves. Also, some general math algorithms like IEEE-754 Remainder.

Python

FusionAuth HTTP client and server

A full featured, stand-alone, high-performance HTTP server and client written entirely in plain Java. I am not a Java dev but this library is from FusionAuth which I found very useful replacement for tools like okta or auth0 now that both of them got acquired by big corps.

Java

canvas

a common vector drawing target that can output SVG, PDF, EPS, raster images (PNG, JPG, GIF, …), HTML Canvas through WASM, OpenGL, and Gio. It has a wide range of path manipulation functionality such as flattening, stroking and dashing implemented. I really love to learn how to draw thing with code.

Go

chaosbernie

Azure as an external process source for psDoom-ng. a fun experiment please don’t use it for real.

bash

litedb

Embedded NoSQL database for .NET.

C#

Video

How the Best Hackers Learn Their Craft

Not hacking in term of fraud but for people who know up an down of a system can can escape/avoid a certain rule or retrisction that the eco system put on. Such as how to get root on an iPhone.

Tools

hishtory

Your shell history: synced, queryable, and in context

portmaster

a free and open-source application firewall that does the heavy lifting for you. They are entirely open source, check out portmaster and safing private network

slashbase

Slashbase is an open-source minimal collaborative IDE for your databases in browser.

katana

A next-generation crawling and spidering framework.

sargamicons

A Collection of 262+ Open-source Icons Devoted to Match Your Exquisite Designs.

uiverse

A places that people create and share beautiful custom elements made with CSS and HTML which you can pretty much immediately copy and paste to apply to your website.

mage

modern replacement for Airflow

hono

Ultrafast web framework for Cloudflare Workers, Deno, and Bun. Fast, but not only fast.

age

Graph database optimized for fast analysis and real-time data processing. It is provided as an extension to PostgreSQL.

scrutiny

Hard Drive S.M.A.R.T Monitoring, Historical Trends & Real World Failure Thresholds

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Google Pixel phones GLSL vertex shader one Web Server live tcp socket tiny chess engine threefold performance increase PostgresML engineering team sunfish chess engine

BetterDev #233 - Let's write a chess engine

Better Dev #233 Nov 14, 2022

Code to read

Video

Tools

Key phrases

Older messages

BetterDev #232 - Reducing BigQuery Costs: How We Fixed A $1 Million Query

BetterDev #231 - Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so

BetterDev #230 - Secure your server by limit outgoing connection

BetterDev #229 - BetterDev is back

BetterDev #228 - Memory leaks: the forgotten side of web performance

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