Shipping video calling on Facebook

Shipping video calling on Facebook
7 minutes by Philip Su

Facebook's first video calling feature launched around 2011, built by a tiny team using Skype's unreliable technology, where 18% of calls simply failed to connect. Skype had no data tracking this, believing only user satisfaction reports mattered. The six weeks after launch meant around 16 hours of work daily to fix bugs. Despite junk food and poor sleep, the result brought genuinely new experiences to people, including the engineer's first ever video call with his own parents.

Learn how leading teams are building and scaling AI agents in production
sponsored by LangChain

Agents can write and run code seconds before execution, often without human review.  Local environments and standard containers weren’t designed for that level of autonomy. LangChain’s latest guide explains what safe agent execution requires, including isolation, permissions, observability, fast provisioning, and persistent state. Read the guide to learn when a managed sandbox makes sense, what capabilities to look for, and how to give agents the tools they need without handing them your infrastructure.

AI is removing the middle class of software engineering
7 minutes by Florian Herrengt

AI tools let engineers ship code far faster than anyone can properly review it. This accelerates bad decisions and technical debt at a pace that quickly becomes unmanageable. The engineers who thrive will be those with enough judgment to guide and question AI output, not just prompt it. Those without that judgment now cause damage faster than ever before.

The fastest double-to-string algorithm you’ve never heard of
6 minutes by Victor Zverovich

A binary-to-decimal algorithm from the yyjson library runs faster than most alternatives by using just one multiplication instead of two or three. It finds the shortest decimal that converts back to the original float by testing four candidate values against a rounding interval. A visualization using an 8-bit float format shows how the algorithm works, including a boundary case where a small rounding correction in a lookup table changes which output gets chosen.

Quake shareware: CD just a little too full
6 minutes by Fabien Sanglard

In 1996, id Software included encrypted versions of their game catalog on the Quake shareware CD, letting players unlock titles by calling a phone operator and paying by credit card. The plan fell apart within 39 days when hackers discovered the unlock code was generated entirely on the user's machine, making the phone call pointless. The CD's software simply checked user input against a code it had already calculated itself, with no secrets coming from the server. The scheme collapsed, leaving id stuck with 150,000 unsold discs.

How Instacart built a modern search infrastructure on Postgres
13 minutes by Ankit Mittal

Instacart moved search from Elasticsearch to Postgres, then added semantic search using pgvector instead of a separate FAISS service. This let them combine keyword and meaning based search in one system, cutting overfetching and easing maintenance. The switch also improved recall, leading to 6% fewer searches with zero results and a real revenue boost.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Compression is prediction