Development gets better with age

Development gets better with age
4 minutes by Werner Vogels

Amazon CTO reflects on how age brings valuable perspective to the tech industry. Older developers have seen many patterns repeat and gained battle scars from past failures. This experience helps them approach generative AI with healthy skepticism rather than getting caught up in hype. When customers ask about using AI, most are driven by fear of missing out rather than specific business needs. The key is to pause, understand real problems first, then choose appropriate solutions.

Diff algorithms
20 minutes by Florian Zenker

Florian created a new Go diff library after being unsatisfied with existing options. Most current libraries have limitations like poor performance on large different files, support only for text, or lack of readable output formats. The new library addresses these issues by supporting arbitrary data types, providing both structured and unified diff formats, and using optimized algorithms with preprocessing steps. It offers three modes balancing performance and accuracy for different use cases.

The software essays that shaped me
16 minutes by Michael Lynch

Michael started reading software blogs before he got my first programming job 20 years ago. At this point, he's read thousands of blog posts and essays about software, but only a small handful stuck in his mind and changed the way he thinks. He shares the top 10.

What is "good taste" in software engineering?
9 minutes by Sean Goedecke

Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can have strong technical abilities but poor taste, or weak skills with good taste. Technical taste means choosing the right engineering values for your specific project, like prioritizing speed over readability when performance matters most. Bad taste comes from being inflexible and applying the same solutions everywhere regardless of context.

Building a resilient data platform with write-ahead log at Netflix
14 minutes by Prudhviraj Karumanchi et al.

Netflix built a Write-Ahead Log system to solve data reliability problems at massive scale. The system captures data changes and delivers them reliably to downstream services. It handles challenges like data corruption, cross-region replication, and retry mechanisms using a simple API that works with different storage systems like Kafka and SQS.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Taking a look at compression algorithms