Lessons from building and maintaining distributed systems at scale

Lessons from building and maintaining distributed systems at scale
3 minutes by Eliran Turgeman

In this post Eliran shares different lessons he learned while developing and maintaining large distributed systems at scale. He highlights five major lessons: avoid sharing cache clusters between services to prevent eviction problems; implement queues between services to handle traffic spikes gracefully; measure end-to-end latency including queue waiting time; design systems to handle inevitable failures through retry policies and circuit breakers; and ensure idempotency in message processing to prevent duplicate operations when using message queues.

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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11
18 minutes by Silent

A mysterious bug caused the Skimmer seaplane to disappear in GTA San Andreas on Windows 11 24H2. Silent's investigation revealed that the root cause was an incomplete vehicle definition in vehicles.ide that omitted wheel scale parameters. The game had accidentally worked for 20 years by reusing values from the previously parsed vehicle, but changes to Windows 11's critical section implementation altered stack memory usage which exposed the uninitialized variables. The bug could be fixed by either modifying vehicles.ide to include the missing parameters or using SilentPatch, which provides default values when parameters are missing.

How JavaScript works behind the scenes
12 minutes by DeepIntoDev

JavaScript is famously single-threaded, yet it manages to handle asynchronous operations like timers, user events, and network requests without freezing the browser. This article breaks down how that works behind the scenes. You’ll learn about the Call Stack, the role of Web APIs, and how the Event Loop coordinates between the Task Queue and Microtask Queue to manage async behavior. Through real code examples and clear explanations, it provides a solid understanding of how JavaScript achieves concurrency while technically running on just one thread.

Refactoring gone wild: Avoiding code smells and cleaning up the mess
14 minutes by Mohamed Elmedany

Mohamed identifies common bad coding practices and provides solutions for transforming messy code into clean, elegant alternatives using Kotlin features. Key issues he addresses include nested conditionals, inconsistent naming conventions, overcomplicated parameter lists, monolithic functions, excessive null checks, complex boolean expressions, inconsistent error handling, and improper use of coroutines. For each problem, Mohamed provides clear before/after examples showing how to refactor for improved readability, maintainability, and reliability.

How to write error messages that actually help users
6 minutes by Amy Hupe

In this post Amy discusses how to create effective error messages, a neglected aspect of user experience design. She outlines key principles including: writing in conversational but not overly whimsical language, using active voice to clearly explain what happened, providing actionable next steps whether users can fix the issue or not, and implementing consistent error message patterns across products. Well-designed error messages respect users' time and goals while building trust, especially during moments of frustration.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• What is Entropy?