Hello! 👋

I’ve migrated the newsletter to a new email service provider. Hopefully, it’ll mean that new issues are landing in your inbox more reliably. Let me know if something seems a bit iffy.

And I did a tiny rebrand with a new logo from my mate Charles and I can finally introduce the majestic Internet Blue. Do you like the new style?

Optimism vs Pessimism in Distributed Systems
7 minutes by Marc Brooker

Avoiding coordination is the one fundamental thing that allows us to build distributed systems that out-scale the performance of a single machine. When we build systems that avoid coordinating, we end up building components that make assumptions about what other components are doing.

Solve 30+ hacking challenges at Snyk's Fetch the Flag CTF!
sponsored by Snyk

Ready to put your security skills to the test? Mark your calendar for Snyk's Fetch the Flag CTF on October 27! Bring your team and learn security best practices as you exploit vulnerabilities in 30+ Capture the Flag hacking challenges, including web and binary exploitation.

Making CRDTs 98% More Efficient
22 minutes by Jake Lazaroff

State-based CRDTs grow monotonically, but that doesn't mean they can't be efficient. We'll learn how to compress the pixel editor state by 98%.

How I built an affiliate tracking system in a weekend with serverless
5 minutes by Yan Cui

Learn to build production-ready serverless applications on AWS. It takes less than a day’s work in total and has no running cost as everything is under the free tier.

Redis Pub/Sub under the hood
11 minutes by Jim Fisher

Do you want to code a chat app? Here you’ll see how to do it the hard way. I show how Redis Pub/Sub works in detail, all the way down to the bits and bytes! This is the first part of a series of deep dives into Redis.

Gall’s law and how it applies to software architecture
3 minutes by Bart Wullems

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

USB-C head-to-head comparison
5 minutes

The reign of the Lightning cable is over, and the USB-C era has begun — leaving us wondering what sets one charger apart from another. We do a teardown of Apple's Thunderbolt 4 and its competitors.

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