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!
Hi there 👋! Thanks for reading Big Tech Digest. I encourage you to subscribe, if you haven’t already, to receive new issues directly to your inbox every two weeks.
// 📫 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
Thanks for reading Big Tech Digest!
P.S. Please don’t forget to spread the word if you found this digest interesting!
Delivered bi-weekly to your inbox, this manually-curated newsletter brings you a collection of links to the latest engineering blog posts from Big Tech companies and startups. Aimed at all Software Engineers (backend, frontend, data, DevOps, mobile) and AI/ML folks at any level, Big Tech Digest is focused on engineering problems and their proposed solutions at tech companies that I find particularly interesting. No marketing or non-tech stuff. Subscribe now to join our community and keep learning!