#441 Gentle introduction to GPUs inner workings

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Gentle introduction to GPUs inner workings

This article summarizes some lower level aspect of how GPU executes. Although GPU programming is not that complicated when compared to CPU, it also doesn’t match to what hardware is doing exactly. The reason is that we can’t just program GPU without some API, which is an abstraction over its inner workings. Since few years now, we have modern explicit APIs like DirectX 12 or Vulkan, which shrunken the gap to what is happening with hardware. Yet there still are few low-level bits (pun intended) that are worth explaining.

Responsible tech playbook

Those of us developing software don’t need to be told what a big impact it’s had on humanity this century. I’ve long maintained that this places a serious responsibility on our profession.

The speed of time

A Cassandra database cluster had switched to Ubuntu and noticed write latency increased by over 30%. A quick check of basic performance statistics showed over 30% higher CPU consumption. What on Earth is Ubuntu doing that results in 30% higher CPU time!?

Postgres 14: It's the little things

A lot of years Postgres will have some big pillar or theme to the release. Often this is thought of after the fact. Everything that is committed is looked at and someone thinks, "This is the key thing to talk about." In Postgres 9.2 it was JSON, in 9.4 it was JSONB, in 10 it was logical replication, 12 was a broader performance theme. While I look forward to each of these big highlights, in each release I'm equally excited to browse through and pull out the small things that simply make my life better.

20 things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

You’re about to read a blog post with a lot of advice. Learning from those who came before us is instrumental to success, but we often forget an important caveat. Almost all advice is contextual, yet it is rarely delivered with any context.

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Issue tracker in IDE: track technical debt and codebase issues

Stepsize is an editor-first issue tracker for a healthy codebase. Create, view, and prioritise code issues, like technical debt and refactoring work, directly from your editor. Stepsize integrates with your existing tools like Jira, Slack, and GitHub, so you can track and address issues without context switching. Install the Stepsize VS Code or JetBrains extension.

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