How DoorDash Fosters Meaningful Engineering Career Development
tl;dr: “In Q2 2023, we revisited our performance expectations for all engineers at DoorDash. We started by gathering a group of engineers to discuss which existing expectations were still relevant, and which ones were no longer serving us. We defined what we see as the traits of our most successful engineers at each level based on our three pillars: (1) Business Outcome: how engineers deliver impact based on our direction and goals. (2) People: how well we collaborate as a team and invest in each other’s development and success. (3) Engineering Excellence: the quality of our products and systems, how fast we can move, and how efficiently our systems use resources.” The team shares these performance expectations publicly, in this post.featured in #451
Selective Column Reduction For DataLake Storage Cost Efficiency
tl;dr: “As Uber continues to grow, the sheer volume of data we handle and the associated demands for data access have multiplied. This rapid expansion in data size has given rise to escalating costs in terms of storage and compute resources. Consequently, we have encountered various challenges such as increased hardware requirements, heightened resource consumption, and potential performance issues like out-of-memory errors and prolonged garbage collection pauses.”featured in #450
Response Time Is The System Talking
- Christoffer Stjernlöf tl;dr: In determining an appropriate request rate for HTTP scraping, Christoffer introduces the concept of system utilization. Rather than aiming for 100% utilization, he recommends a target below 40%. "Response time is a function of utilisation," allowing one to gauge system load. By comparing baseline response time when the system is idle, to loaded response time, one can estimate utilization. Christoffer provides a mathematical breakdown of this relationship, emphasizing its applicability in real-world scenarios.featured in #447
This Is How Quora Shards MySQL To Handle 13+ Terabytes
tl;dr: With data storage requirements in the tens of terabytes and 100,000 queries per second, Quora chose MySQL for its improved read performance. To manage rapid data growth and high write queries, Quora implemented both vertical and horizontal sharding techniques. Vertical sharding involves moving different tables to different servers, improving write scalability. Horizontal sharding, on the other hand, splits a large table into multiple smaller tables. Quora opted to build its sharding solution instead of using third-party service for low latency and easy reuse of existing logic.featured in #445
featured in #444
How We Reduced The Size Of Our JavaScript Bundles By 33%
- Umair Nadeem Rich Hong tl;dr: Dropbox reduced its JavaScript bundles by 33% by replacing its outdated module bundler with Rollup. The existing system led to large bundle sizes and performance issues. Rollup's features like automatic code-splitting and tree shaking optimized the bundling process. Despite challenges in implementation, the transition to Rollup significantly improved performance.featured in #441
featured in #439
How We Improved Our Serverless API 300x
- Daniel Bot tl;dr: ePilot's team improved their serverless API response time by 300x using AWS DynamoDB. They initially faced issues due to a simplistic table design without understanding search patterns and a 10x increase in record data. By redesigning the table and storing more data, they optimized queries, making them 10-20 times faster. The experience emphasized the importance of understanding search patterns and proper design in DynamoDB.featured in #438
Improving Performance With HTTP Streaming
tl;dr: “You may have heard a joke that the internet is a series of tubes. In this blog post, we’re going to talk about how we get a cool, refreshing stream of Airbnb.com bytes into your browser as quickly as possible using HTTP Streaming.”featured in #421
300ms Faster: Reducing Wikipedia's Total Blocking Time
- Nicholas Ray tl;dr: “Wikipedia’s mobile site suffered from a piece of JS that could take over 600ms to execute during page load on low-end devices, effectively blocking user interactions.” Nicholas walks through the steps taken to reduce the execution time of this task by about 50%.featured in #419