Big Tech Digest #9

2023-12-21: How Meta built Threads infrastructure, Building documentation with OpenAI at Okta, Replacing REST and WebSockets with gRPC and more!

Happy Thursday 👋

Exciting news: From now on, each linked article additionally contains an estimated reading time, the publish date, and a concise summary.

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// 📫 Engineering blogs digest

Most notable articles posted in the tech companies’ engineering blogs over the past two weeks.

• "How Meta built the infrastructure for Threads" by Laine Campbell, Chunqiang (CQ) Tang ⸱ Meta ⸱ 9 min read ⸱ 19 Dec

  • Discusses the successful launch of Meta's Threads and the infrastructure behind

  • Describes the use of ZippyDB, a distributed key/value database, and how it was optimized for the Threads launch

  • Explores the role of Async, a serverless function platform, in scaling workload execution for Threads

• "Hashnode's Feed Architecture" by Florian Fuchs ⸱ Hashnode ⸱ 6 min read ⸱ 7 Dec

  • Describes the detailed process of pre-calculating feeds for thousands of users using AWS Step Functions.

  • Uncovers the calculation process for users with cached metadata and those without, showcasing the efficiency without involving the database.

• "Can gRPC replace REST and WebSockets for Web Application Communication?" by Ian Douglas ⸱ gRPC ⸱ 11 min read ⸱ 4 Dec

  • Explores the transition from REST to gRPC-Web

  • Presents practical code samples for replacing WebSocket connections with gRPC-Web, showcasing the advantages of gRPC-Web in server-to-client streaming

• "How I Have Fun With Rust" by Matheus Richard ⸱ thoughtbot ⸱ 5 min read ⸱ 21 Dec

  • Explores using Rust as a secondary language for side projects

  • Discusses an idea of writing fewer tests due to Rust's strong type system

  • Recommends avoiding references and lifetimes as much as possible

• "How I Built an Okta Documentation Chatbot in Python" by Tanish Kumar ⸱ Okta ⸱ 9 min read ⸱ 20 Dec

  • Describes the creation of a Python chatbot called Oktanaut using OpenAI

  • Covers the meticulous training process and self-learning mechanism used to enhance the bot's performance

  • Shares the code and a step-by-step walkthrough for running the chatbot using Google Colab and OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model

• "Understanding Generic and Variance in Kotlin" by Sagar Avhad ⸱ Walmart ⸱ 7 min read ⸱ 14 Dec

  • Describes how generics can help avoid repetitive type checks and casting in Kotlin

  • Gives an overview of using generic constraint to prevent misuse of generic types

  • Explains the concepts of covariance and contravariance in Kotlin generics

  • Presents the use of out and in keywords to enable covariance and contravariance at the use site

• "Using DNS to estimate the worldwide state of IPv6 adoption" by Carlos Rodrigues ⸱ Cloudflare ⸱ 7 min read ⸱ 14 Dec

• "Code review best practices: How to complete a pull request" ⸱ Capital One ⸱ 5 min read ⸱ 20 Dec

  • Explains the importance of understanding the high-level purpose of the PR

  • Covers best practices for reviewing the code, including reusing existing code and ensuring readability

• "Personalizing the DoorDash Retail Store Page Experience" by Luming Chen, Yuan Meng, Anthony Zhou ⸱ DoorDash ⸱ 12 min read ⸱ 12 Dec

  • Gives an overview of the overall framework to generate personalized recommendations for retail store homepages

  • Explores the ML model deep dive, including collection retrieval and item ranking

  • Describes addressing position bias and diversifying recommendations

  • Shares future personalization goals, including incorporating restaurant order histories and moving toward MTML architectures

• "Why Logic Programming Is the Best Choice for Authorization" by Nicholaos Mouzourakis ⸱ Gusto ⸱ 12 min read ⸱ 11 Dec

  • Describes the problems with traditional authorization code and the limitations of data-driven approaches like Role-Based Access Control

  • Presents Prolog as a solution for authorization queries with improved code organization and safety

  • Introduces Open Policy Agent (OPA) and its Rego language as a modern solution for JSON authorization queries

• "Extracting skills from content to fuel the LinkedIn Skills Graph" by Ji Yan ⸱ LinkedIn ⸱ 5 min read ⸱ 13 Dec

  • Describes the use of AI to extract skills from various content sources across LinkedIn

  • Presents the multi-step process and machine learning models used to extract and map skills onto the LinkedIn Skills Graph

• "Offline LLM Evaluation: Step-by-Step GenAI Application Assessment on Databricks" by multiple authors ⸱ Databricks ⸱ 8 min read ⸱ 14 Dec

  • Covers setting up external models in Databricks for managing and accessing large language models

  • Explores using Databricks AI Playground for testing prompts and parameters with LLMs

  • Shows how to create a GenAI POC with LangChain and logging with MLflow

• "Pytest daemon: 10x local test iteration speed" by Ruby Feinstein ⸱ Discord ⸱ 5 min read ⸱ 8 Dec

• "Top 3 security best practices for handling JWTs" by Liran Tal ⸱ Snyk ⸱ 11 min read ⸱ 18 Dec

• "The Top Pinterest Engineering Blog posts from 2023" ⸱ Pinterest ⸱ 1 min read ⸱ 21 Dec

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Enjoy the festive season and see you next year!

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Delivered bi-weekly to your inbox, Big Tech Digest brings you a collection of links to the latest engineering blog posts from +100 Big Tech companies and startups like Airbnb, Uber, Netflix or Meta. Aimed at all Software Engineers 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.

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