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Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 169 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

"That which optimizes one part of the system necessarily undermines the system as a whole." - Eric Ries

Reading List

Why You (Probably) Don’t Need to Fine-tune an LLM
In this post, we’ll talk about why fine-tuning is probably not necessary for your app, and why applying two of the most common techniques to the base GPT models — few-shot prompting and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — are sufficient for most use cases.

10⁹ Operations: Large Histories with Jepsen
The article delves into the complexities of managing large histories in distributed systems, as examined through the lens of Jepsen's testing methodology. It explores challenges, potential issues, and techniques for ensuring data consistency and integrity in systems dealing with significant operational histories.

Introducing pg_later
Asynchronous Queries for Postgres, Inspired by Snowflake.

How we reduced the size of our JavaScript bundles by 33%
This post outlines Dropbox's successful efforts to decrease the size of their JavaScript bundles by 33%, detailing the optimization techniques and tools used to improve frontend performance and user experience.

Open challenges in LLM research
Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools that can be used for a variety of tasks, but they still have some limitations. Some of the open challenges in LLM research include reducing hallucinations, optimizing context length, and incorporating other data modalities.

TDD with GitHub Copilot
Will the advent of AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot mean that we won’t need tests? Will TDD become obsolete? To answer this, let’s examine two ways TDD helps software development: providing good feedback, and a means to “divide and conquer” when solving problems.

Slack’s Migration to a Cellular Architecture
In recent years, cellular architectures have become increasingly popular for large online services as a way to increase redundancy and limit the blast radius of site failures. In pursuit of these goals, we have migrated the most critical user-facing services at Slack from a monolithic to a cell-based architecture over the last 1.5 years. In this series of blog posts, we’ll discuss our reasons for embarking on this massive migration, illustrate the design of our cellular topology along with the engineering trade-offs we made along the way, and talk about our strategies for successfully shipping deep changes across many connected services.

The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill
How much would AWS cost for Amazon Prime Day? Here's Corey Quinn's best guess at the company's AWS bill for the two-day shopping event.

Watch and Listen

Unit (Visual Programming System)
Unit is a visual programming system created by Samuel Timbó. It's a wild-looking, playfully weird, surprisingly deep and nuanced tool.

How to supercharge your engineering org
Kellan Elliott-McCrea is a Head of Engineering at Adobe. He discusses how software engineering has changed in the last 10-15 years, the importance of alignment and tactics for achieving it, how to think about and enable engineering productivity, and lessons on culture from Adobe, Dropbox and Flickr.

Casey Muratori on Clean Code, Horrible Performance?
Casey Muratori caused some strong reactions with a blog post and an associated video in which he went through an example from the “Clean Code” book by Robert Martin to demonstrate the negative impact that clean code practices can have on performance. In this episode, he joins SE Radio’s Giovanni Asproni to talk about the potential trade-offs between performance and the qualities that make for maintainable code, these qualities being the main focus of Clean Code.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Onboard AI
Onboard lets you enter the link for any GitHub repo and turns into a subject matter expert on it. You can ask our AI chat questions to find where in the repo certain functionality is, where a specific code change should be made, and more.

Minimum Viable Secure Product
A minimum security baseline for enterprise-ready products and services

GodMode
AI Chat Browser: Fast, Full webapp access to ChatGPT / Claude / Bard / Bing / Llama2!

VisionScript
A high-level programming language for using computer vision.

stable-diffusion.cpp
Stable Diffusion in pure C/C++

Jakt
Jakt is a memory-safe systems programming language.

Incus
Incus is a modern, secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager.

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