Programming Digest - PD#604 Storing times for human events

Hello, 👋

I'm migrating back to my homebrewed email service provider. It's a bit rough around the edges but should do the job. Please let me know if you run into any issues.

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Storing times for human events
8 minutes by Simon Willison

Simon discusses the challenges of storing event times in software applications and argues against the common practice of storing everything in UTC. He worked on various event websites and based on that past experience, he shares his recommendations.

Shrinking a Postgres Table
6 minutes by John Nunemaker

John shares his experience of solving a database disk space issue by using table swapping in PostgreSQL. After discovering that the database was using 87% of disk space, he identified that the 'downloads' table contained millions of unprocessed records dating back to 2021, consuming 57GB. Rather than attempting time-consuming batch deletions, he used a table swap approach - creating a new table with only recent, relevant data and swapping it with the old one - which solved the problem in seconds and reduced disk usage from 87% to 53%.

Modernizing a Legacy Endpoint and Why It’s Worth It
11 minutes by Poorvi Sharma

Booking.com successfully modernized their legacy Update Management API by migrating it from Perl to Java, resulting in significant improvements: 30% faster response times, 77% smaller payloads, and 1 million fewer daily database queries. The year-long migration process involved breaking down a complex, 14-year-old endpoint that had accumulated 21 different functionalities into manageable pieces, while maintaining backward compatibility.

Egoless Engineering
18 minutes by Dan McKinley

This talk discusses organizational dysfunction in tech companies and paths to improvement. Dan shares experiences from various companies where strict role divisions and lack of cooperation led to inefficiencies and poor outcomes. He advocates for breaking down silos between different roles (like developers, designers, security teams) and emphasizes the importance of having domain experts rather than domain owners.

You Must Read At Least One Book To Ride
18 minutes by Ludicity

The article discusses the paradox of being considered both a high-performing engineer locally while feeling inferior to many others in the broader tech community. The author explores how reading just one good book on a technical topic can significantly elevate someone above the majority.

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