Issue #418

Tuesday 30th May’s issue is presented by FusionAuth

Don't build your own auth. FusionAuth is your answer. Integrates with any tech stack and is deployable anywhere — cloud, on-premise, or even the server running under your desk.

You're less than five minutes from login / registration, social logins, SSO, MFA, passwordless, passkeys and so much more with FusionAuth. Built for devs, by devs.

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The Next Larger Context

— Camille Fournier

tl;dr: For senior engineers who are looking to step up: “When we are looking to do a larger project than the ones we’ve done before, we need to step out of the context that we normally operate in. When you look one context bigger, you will see immediate new opportunities that you can tackle in adjacent areas… That is where you will find your growth.” Camille highlights this advice with real world examples.

Leadership Management CareerAdvice

Extract The Kernel

— Will Larson

tl;dr: “I’ve started to notice recurring communication challenges between executives and the folks they work with. The most frequent issue I see is when a literal communicator insists on engaging in the details with a less literal executive. I call the remedy, “extracting the kernel.” Focus on the insight or perspective within the question.

Leadership Management

The Modern Guide To OAuth

— Brian Pontarelli

tl;dr: Another guide to OAuth 2.0? Well yes. And no. FusionAuth's Modern Guide to OAuth distills hundreds of conversations about OAuth's eight modes, workflows, and grant types, and then offers advice on choosing the best OAuth mode for your scenario.

Promoted by FusionAuth

Management

You Don't Always Need Indexes

— Jeff Kaufman

tl;dr: “Sometimes you have a lot of data, and one approach to support quick searches is pre-processing it to build an index so a search can involve only looking at a small fraction of the total data. The threshold at which it's worth switching to indexing, though, might be higher than you'd guess.” Jeff illustrates cases where full scans were better engineering choices.

Database

“You can optimize for low latency. You can optimize for high throughput. You can optimize for memory occupation. However 90% of times the most precious thing you should optimize for is maintainability.”

— Mario Fusco

Email Addresses Are Not Primary User Identities

tl;dr: “A lot of applications treat your email address as something immutable that is linked to you and which will never change. It can't be linked to someone else, and it can't change… This is, of course, not true. Email addresses do change. This is the story of how badly applications handled this, how a surprising application handled it perfectly, and how you should handle this in your own code.”

CareerAdvice

How Much Memory Do You Need To Run 1 Million Concurrent Tasks?

— Piotr Kołaczkowski

tl;dr: “In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, Go, Java, C#, Python, Node.js and Elixir.”

Performance

All The Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About When Building Products With LLMs

— Phillip Carter

tl;dr: (1) Context windows are a challenge with no complete solution. (2) LLMs are slow and chaining is a nonstarter. (3) Prompt engineering is weird and has few best practices. (4) Correctness and usefulness can be at odds. (5) Prompt injection is an unsolved problem.

LLM ThoughtPiece

Lua: The Little Language That Could

— Matt Blewitt

tl;dr: “Lua is probably my favourite “little language” — a language designed to have low cognitive load, and be easy to learn and use. It’s embedded in a lot of software, such as Redis. It’s also used as a scripting language in games such as World of Warcraft and Roblox via Luau. This post is a brief love letter to the language, with some examples of why I like it so much.”

Lua ThoughtPiece LanguageDesign

Notable GitHub Repos

Cal: Scheduling infrastructure for everyone.

Gorilla: An API store for LLMs.

Knip: Find unused files, dependencies & exports in JS projects.

Rio: A terminal built to run everywhere.

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