#536 – August 20, 2023
Readability is more objective than you'd think.
Readability is often treated as a subjective thing. When someone says code is more readable, what they really mean is they can more easily read it. The straw-man goes, this is all taste and convention, just follow the team’s rules and use the auto-formatter.
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I built a garbage collector for a language that doesn’t need one
If carcinization happens when languages evolve to be more like Rust, then what do you call it when Rust evolves to be more like Java? Caffeination?
An introduction to graph theory
This is a graduate-level introduction to graph theory, corresponding to a quarter-long course. It covers simple graphs, multigraphs as well as their directed analogues, and more restrictive classes such as tournaments, trees and arborescences.
Squeeze the hell out of the system you have
About a year ago, I raised a red flag with colleagues and managers about Postgres performance. Our database was struggling to keep up with the load generated by our monolithic SaaS application. CPU utilization was riding between 60 and 80%, and at least once it spiked to 100%, causing a brief outage.
Speed was a company-wide initiative for eBay starting in 2019, with many teams determined to make the site and apps as fast as possible for users. For every 100 milliseconds improvement in search page loading time, eBay saw a 0.5% increase in “Add to Cart” count.
How we reduced the size of our JavaScript bundles by 33%
When was the last time you were about to click a button on a website, only to have the page shift—causing you to click the wrong button instead? Or the last time you rage-quit a page that took too long to load?
CSS Selectors: A Visual Guide & Reference
Visual guide to CSS selectors, including pseudo-classes (:nth-child, :hover,…), functional pseudo-classes (:not, :is,…) and pseudo-elements.