Programming Digest - PD#576 Engineering for Slow Internet

Engineering for Slow Internet
30 minutes by brr

How to minimize user frustration in Antarctica. If you’re an app developer reading this, can you tell me, off the top of your head, how your app behaves on a link with 40 kbps available bandwidth, 1,000 ms latency, occasional jitter of up to 2,000 ms, packet loss of 10%, and a complete 15-second connectivity dropout every few minutes?

WorkOS: Enterprise-grade Auth designed for B2B SaaS
sponsored by WorkOS

WorkOS is a modern identity platform for auth as well as complex enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. It provides modular and easy-to-use APIs, helping hundreds of high-growth companies like Vercel, Webflow, and Perplexity become Enterprise Ready. Integration is simple, and you can enjoy free User Management up to 1,000,000 MAUs.

Three Laws of Software Complexity
4 minutes by Mahesh Balakrishnan

Most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.

What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs
37 minutes by Eugene Yan et al.

LLMs are also broadly accessible, allowing everyone, not just ML engineers and scientists, to build intelligence into their products. While the barrier to entry for building AI products has been lowered, creating those effective beyond a demo remains a deceptively difficult endeavor.

Instead of "auth", we should say "permissions" and "login"
3 minutes by Nicole Tietz

Most computer systems we interact with have an auth system of some kind. The problem is, that sentence is at best unclear and at worst nonsense. "Auth" can mean at least two things: authentication or authorization1. Which do we mean for an "auth system"? It's never perfectly clear and, unfortunately, we often mean both.

What does idempotent mean in software systems?
9 minutes by David Boike

In distributed systems (and your TV at home), commands can be sent or received more than once. Idempotency ensures the outcome is consistent.

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