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Google - Internet Archive partnership 🤝, use git bisect ✂️, truth about AI tools 🤖

TLDR Web Dev <dan@tldrnewsletter.com>

September 12, 11:17 am

TLDR WebDev
Google has partnered with The Internet Archive to add links to the Wayback Machine in its search results, providing users with historical context 

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Together With Bucket

 TLDR Web Dev 2024-09-12

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Articles & Tutorials

Debugging Till Dawn: How Git Bisect Saved My Demo (3 minute read)

This developer was debugging late at night because a critical bug emerged in their project just hours before a crucial demo. Faced with over 100 commits to sift through, they used git bisect, which uses binary search, to find the commit that introduced the bug. They saved themselves hours of pain by knowing that git bisect exists and also knowing how to use git bisect properly.
SQLite on Rails: The how and why of optimal performance (19 minute read)

SQLite out-of-the-box on Rails isn't production ready. It needs some performance improvements with the help of some Ruby gems (packages) that enable immediate transactions, manage write query queues, and release the Global VM lock while queries wait for database responses. SQLite should be used in the write-ahead-log (WAL) mode and should have separate connection pools for reading and writing operations.
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Opinions & Advice

Why Copilot is Making Programmers Worse at Programming (6 minute read)

AI tools like GitHub Copilot are making programmers worse at programming. These tools can erode fundamental programming skills and create a false sense of expertise. Relying on them without a deep understanding of the code and the ability to problem-solve independently will make developers dependent on AI.
Why Not Comments (5 minute read)

Comments that explain why a certain approach wasn't taken in the code are valuable. While identifiers can describe "what" the code does, they cannot always properly convey the reasoning behind choosing a less optimal but simpler solution.
Why some of us like "interdiff" code review (22 minute read)

Traditional code review systems, like GitHub, suffer from a "diff soup" problem, where multiple commits are crammed together and reviewed as a single diff. This makes it difficult to follow the evolution of code changes and leads to issues with blaming, bisecting, and incremental review. An "interdiff" approach, where revisions of the original commits are published instead of new commits, lets reviewers see incremental changes and lets authors avoid cluttering history with "fix review" commits.
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Launches & Tools

✂️ Cut your QA cycles down from hours to minutes (Sponsor)

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Plate (GitHub Repo)

Plate is a rich-text editor framework for React built on top of Slate. Its key components include a plugin system, unstyled UI primitives, and pre-built styled components.
AWS AI Stack (GitHub Repo)

The AWS AI Stack is a full-stack serverless boilerplate project for building AI applications on AWS. It helps devs quickly create AI chatbots, authentication services, business logic, and asynchronous workers using AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and EventBridge.
VisualDB (Website)

Visual DB is a web-based tool that simplifies database management. It offers a drag-and-drop interface for creating forms, sheets, and reports, and uses AI to assist with form layout and natural language query translation.
🎁

Miscellaneous

Simulator-based reinforcement learning for data center cooling optimization (7 minute read)

Meta has successfully used reinforcement learning to optimize energy and water consumption in its data centers. Its approach uses historical data and a physics-based simulator to train a model that determines the optimal airflow setpoint for various weather conditions.
Leading Effective Engineering Teams: a Deepdive (27 minute read)

This article goes into the research on what makes teams effective. Key dynamics like psychological safety, dependability, and clear communication as necessary for team success.
David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way (5 minute read)

Doing things "the long, hard, stupid way" means maintaining high standards, even in casual settings. This approach, though inefficient, fosters a culture of excellence and ultimately contributes to success.
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Quick Links

Google will now link to The Internet Archive to add more context to Search results (2 minute read)

Google has partnered with The Internet Archive to add links to the Wayback Machine in its search results, providing users with historical context for web pages.
The Dev Tools Performance Monitor Panel (3 minute read)

This developer describes how the Performance Monitor panel in DevTools helped identify and fix a performance issue in an animated spinner component, ultimately reducing CPU usage and improving the overall performance of the website.
Postgres to ClickHouse: Data Modeling Tips (12 minute read)

This is a comprehensive guide on data modeling techniques for migrating from PostgreSQL to ClickHouse that focuses on handling duplicates, understanding data types, and choosing the optimal ordering key for efficient query performance.

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Thanks for reading,
Priyam Mohanty, Jenny Xu & Ceora Ford


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