Archive

How Photoshop works with files that can't fit into memory

April 01, 2024

The software makes innovative use of WebAssembly with features like SIMD

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

March 24, 2024

CPU performance for web apps hasn't scaled as quickly as bandwidth

40 years of programming

March 17, 2024

Luxor ABC-802, with a Z80 CPU, 64 kilobytes of RAM

Leap Day Bugs

March 10, 2024

Did your build remain green last Thursday?

Pains of building your own billing system

March 03, 2024

Beast of complexity that can tangle up everything from customer support to compliance

If Architects had to work like Programmers

February 25, 2024

Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer

Finding a New Software Developer Job

February 18, 2024

A job hunting experience after a layoff

Continuous Integration

February 11, 2024

Every developer integrates their work into mainline at least every day

The advantages of queues on logs

February 04, 2024

Queues vs logs and how we actually can build better queues on top of logs

why lowercase letters save data

January 28, 2024

Lowercase letters and uppercase letters use the same amout of data — 1 byte each

How software engineers create value

January 21, 2024

Work on the most impactful features for users and decrease the delivery time

Learning about debuggers

January 14, 2024

How they work, which technologies are under the hood

Database Fundamentals

January 07, 2024

Problems a database engineer thinks about in the shower

Becoming a go-to person gets you promoted

December 17, 2023

To reach the Senior level, you need to increase your scope, impact, and ownership.

How does Shazam work?

December 10, 2023

Your phone's ability to identify any song is pure technological magic

Ship / Show / Ask

December 03, 2023

A branching strategy that helps teams wait less and ship more

Scaling Airbnb’s Payment Platform

November 26, 2023

191 countries, over 70 currencies, and a network of over two dozen payment routes

How one line of code caused a $60 million loss

November 19, 2023

60,000 people lost full phone service, half of AT&T's network was down, and 500 airline flights were delayed

Habits of great software engineers

November 12, 2023

It's a combination of many different skills, mindsets, and disciplines.

Lessons learned from two decades of Site Reliability Engineering

November 05, 2023

Two decades ago, Google had a pair of small datacenters, each housing a few thousand servers