Happy 2023! 🍾

I hope you had a great break and we'll jump straight to the amazing articles that popped up over the break.

8 Hard Truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

Getting laid off is a profoundly lonely experience. You will face platitudes weaker than the industrial toilet paper your startup switched to as they tried to rein in costs. The one thing I craved more than anything after getting laid off, even more than another job, was for someone to stand up and speak plainly, honestly, and frankly. That is my goal for this piece.

How Kalix Abstracts Away Headaches (sponsor)

Through abstraction, Kalix allows developers to build high-performance, low-latency applications without worrying about architectural complexity, database management, or developer operations.

Avoiding Double Payments in a Distributed Payments System

How we built a generic idempotency framework to achieve eventual consistency and correctness across our payments micro-service architecture.

What Does Lock-Free, Wait-Free Really Mean?

It seems to be a common belief that code which uses mutexes/locks/synchronized methods is "slow" and, as soon as you replace them with atomics, your code becomes fast and lock-free. Atomic operations don't make your code wait-free, lock-free, or even obstruction-free. This tiny blog post is dedicated to the above definitions.

HTTP/3 Prioritization Demystified

If you deal with Web Performance, you’ve probably heard about HTTP resource prioritization. This is especially true since last year, as Chromium added so-called “Priority Hints” with the new fetchpriority attribute, which allow you to tweak said prioritizations. You may have also heard that the prioritization system changed between HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.

How to Be a Good Developer: 20 Practical Tips

So what can you do to become a good developer? Here’s a list of ready-made hints and tips from professionals experienced in the developer profession.

And we'll wrap up with a few pieces from history and internet nostalgia. 📚

Historical Source Code That Every Developer Should See

These historical codebases built the foundation of today’s computer technology.

What Did Ada Lovelace's Program Actually Do?

The first ever piece of code was written in 1842, well before the first actual machine that could be called a computer

Building a website like it's 1999… in 2022

I'm on a bit of a mission this year to bring back the spirit of the old web. The creativity and flair of the late 90s and early 2000s. So I've recreated some of that old web magic, in modern HTML, CSS and JS.

I'll see you next week! 👋