featured in #512
In Loving Memory Of Square Checkbox
- Nikita Prokopov tl;dr: "But despite all this chaos and temptation, operating system vendors knew better. To this day, they follow The convention: checkboxes are square, radio buttons are round. Maybe it was part of their internal training. Maybe they had experienced art directors. Maybe it was just luck. I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter but somehow they managed to stick to the convention. Until this day."featured in #484
featured in #470
Communicate Design Tradeoffs Visually
- Tim Lyakhovetskiy tl;dr: “A goal of any written design or project proposal is to present and evaluate alternatives. However, documents that include multiple solutions can be difficult to read when the qualities of each solution are not clearly expressed. A common approach to simplifying proposals is to use “pros and cons” for each alternative, but this leads to biased writing since the pros and cons may be weighed differently depending on the reader’s priorities.” Tim shows us how to color code these tradeoffs to make it easier for readers to parse ideas.featured in #459
How GitHub Indexes Code For Blazing Fast Search & Retrieval
- Shivang Sarawagi tl;dr: “The search engine supports global queries across 200 million repos and indexes code changes in repositories within minutes. The code search index is by far the largest cluster that GitHub runs, comprising 5184 vCPUs, 40TB of RAM, and 1.25PB of backing storage, supporting a query load of 200 requests per second on average and indexing over 53 billion source files.”featured in #458
featured in #454
How Instagram Scaled To 14 million Users With Only 3 Engineers
- Leonardo Creed tl;dr: Instagram scaled from 0 to 14 million users within a year (October 2010 to December 2011) with three engineers. The success was attributed to three guiding principles: simplicity, not reinventing the wheel and using proven technologies. The article provides a detailed walkthrough of the tech stack. Instagram relied on AWS, using EC2 and Ubuntu Linux, with the frontend developed in Objective-C. They utilized Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer, Django for the backend, PostgreSQL for data storage, and Amazon S3 for photo storage, caching using Redis and Memcached.featured in #449
featured in #435
featured in #434
Everything That Uses Configuration Files Should Report Where They're Located
- Chris Siebenmann tl;dr: Chris regularly interacts with various programs, each of which has its configuration files in different locations, sometimes system-wide, other times user-specific. Given the variability and their infrequent interaction with some programs, they struggle to remember the configuration file locations, which can lead to time-consuming searches through manuals or documentation. Their proposed solution is for programs to offer an easy method, preferably via command line, to report the location of their configuration files.featured in #433