/Best Practices

What Are Cursor Rules?

- Zack Proser tl;dr: “Cursor Rules allow you to codify the foundational decisions in your codebase, to reduce hallucinations across agentic composer and chat sessions. By placing these rules in special files, you can tailor Cursor’s suggestions or completions to match your team’s coding style and best practices.”

featured in #604

Use Abstraction To Improve Function Readability

- Palak Bansal Mark Manley tl;dr: The team at Google compares two functions and highlights how one is easier to follow due to its consistent level of abstraction, providing a top-down narrative of the code’s logic. createPizza is a high-level function that delegates the preparing, baking, and boxing steps to lower-level specialized functions with intuitive names. Those functions, in turn, delegate to their own lower-level specialized functions (e.g., heatOven) until they reach a function that handles implementation details without needing to call other functions.

featured in #604

Logging Practices I Follow

- Eliran Turgeman tl;dr: "There are many pitfall that can lead to useless, wasteful and confusing logs. Therefore I follow a specific set of practices which allows me to write better logs while also being consistent across the system." Eliran discusses here. 

featured in #603

The 4 Biggest API Challenges (and How To Beat Them)

tl;dr: APIs are the backbone of modern applications, but security vulnerabilities, latency issues, integration complexities, and compliance risks can turn them into a nightmare. From preventing data breaches to optimizing performance and ensuring seamless scalability, tackling these challenges requires the right strategies. This article dives deep into the most common API pitfalls and provides technical solutions engineers can apply today. Read the full breakdown to strengthen your API architecture and build more resilient systems.

featured in #602

What Is Device Fingerprinting And How Does It Work?

- Zack Proser tl;dr: “Every time a device connects to your server, it broadcasts a wealth of information through its browser. Some of these signals are obvious, while others are subtle technical artifacts of how browsers and hardware work together.” Zack breaks down what servers can see and how to mitigate bad actors. 

featured in #600

What Makes Code Hard To Read: Visual Patterns Of Complexity

- Mark Griffin tl;dr: “I ended up figuring out what made this codebase so difficult to stick with, but it didn’t turn out to be what I expected (Cyclomatic Complexity). After doing a little reflection and research, it ended up being something more related to readability – something I didn’t have a lot of data on, but was curious to learn if there was objective terminology or common metrics.” Mark shares his observations. 

featured in #599

In S3 Simplicity Is Table Stakes

- Werner Vogels tl;dr: “A few months ago at re:Invent, I spoke about Simplexity – how systems that start simple often become complex over time as they address customer feedback, fix bugs, and add features. At Amazon, we’ve spent decades working to abstract away engineering complexities so our builders can focus on what matters most: their unique business logic. There’s perhaps no better example of this journey than S3.”

featured in #599

How Long Should Functions Be?

- Kent Beck tl;dr: When someone says, “Functions should be X-ish lines long,” they miss this fundamental truth. Regardless of how long functions start out, they’re going to grow. That growth is subject to natural laws, chief of which is, “The long get longer.” Picking a number of lines ignores how functions actually grow. The question is not, “How long should functions be?”, it’s, “What is the distribution of function length?”

featured in #598

[Webinar] Best practices for AI Agent Tool Calling

tl;dr: “Why doesn’t my AI agent call the right tool?” For AI agents that automate work across 3rd-party tools to be adopted, tool calling and tool use accuracy is critical. Join this webinar, where our dev advocate will cover the basics around AI agent tool calling as well as evaluations we ran to uncover optimizing tool calling performance. Register here - you’ll receive the recording and slides afterward, even if you can’t make it.

featured in #594

"A Philosophy of Software Design" vs "Clean Code"

- Robert Martin John Ousterhout tl;dr: The document that features a dialogue between Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and John Ousterhout discussing their differing software design philosophies. They debate three main topics: method length, comments and test-driven development.

featured in #594