Big Tech Digest #2

2023-06-15: Understanding Real-Time Application Monitoring, Examining HTTP/3 usage one year on, Migrating Netflix to GraphQL Safely, Building Etsy’s Search by Image Feature and more!

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// 📫 Engineering blogs digest

Recent, selectively picked blog posts from tech companies’ engineering blogs.

• [Netflix] Ensuring the Successful Launch of Ads on Netflix uncovers best practices when rolling out new major features at Netflix by Jose Fernandez, Ed Barker, Hank Jacobs

• [Expedia] Understanding Real-Time Application Monitoring explains how observability and monitoring improve operational excellence at Expedia by Ritesh Kapoor

• [Airbnb] Metis: Building Airbnb’s Next Generation Data Management Platform how Airbnb evolved its data catalogue into a platform for managing and governing its data warehouse at scale by Xiaobin Zheng

• [Paypal] Unlocking the Power of JunoDB: PayPal’s Key-Value Store Goes Open-Source is a new, extremely scalable and highly available key-value NoSQL store by Yaping Shi

• [Netflix] Migrating Netflix to GraphQL Safely discusses no-downtime migration to GraphQL at Netflix by Jennifer Shin, Tejas Shikhare, Will Emmanuel

• [Cloudflare] Examining HTTP/3 usage one year on by David Belson and Lucas Pardue

• [Etsy] Building Etsy’s Search by Image Feature describes Etsy’s journey to search by image feature by By Eden Dolev and Alaa Awad

• [The Guardian] Roll Over Rollups! The Big Future of Ophan’s Historical Data how the Guardian’s real-time analytics tool pivoted from ElasticSearch Rollups to BigQuery and what we learnt along the way by Sam Hession

• [Cockroachlabs] Data loss prevention during outages (you might be losing data without knowing it) discusses the tradeoffs between synchronous and asynchronous replication by Charlie Custer and John Sheaffer

• [Confluent] GPT-4 + Streaming Data = Real-Time Generative AI describes a framework for how streaming and GPT can work together by Michael Drogalis

• [Angular] Angular at Google I/O 2023 by Emma Twersky

// ⭐️ Misc

a.k.a. the nerd section 🧑‍💻!

• Memory Allocation is a brilliant ELI5-style introduction to memory allocation with malloc and free by Sam Rose

• View Counting at Reddit explains the magic behind post view counting at scale using Hyper Log Log by Krishnan Chandra

• The HTTP crash course nobody asked for is a comprehensive explanation of HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 mechanics with examples in Rust by Amos

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