Evolving our infrastructure through the messaging system model in Dropbox (14 minute read)
Dropbox's asynchronous platform initially struggled with scalability and developer productivity. To address these issues, its team implemented a Messaging System Model (MSM), inspired by the OSI model, which organizes the platform into five layers: frontend, scheduler, flow control, delivery, and execution. This layered approach simplified the asynchronous interface for Dropbox, making it better to use.
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TypeScript enums: use cases and alternatives (17 minute read)
TypeScript enums can act as both objects mapping keys to values and types restricting allowed values. Common use cases for enums include creating namespaces for constants and defining custom types with unique values. This post covers exhaustiveness checks and member enumeration for enums and their alternatives, along with when to use enums versus alternative patterns.
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5 Technical JavaScript Trends You Need To Know About in 2025 (8 minute read)
JavaScript trends in 2025 include serverless architectures, WebAssembly integration, and localized state management. Serverless frameworks, especially with edge functions, will improve performance and developer experience, while WebAssembly will optimize performance-intensive tasks. The rise of microfrontends using tools like Webpack Module Federation will enable more scalable development.
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The Essence of Successful Abstractions (6 minute read)
Software complexity is unavoidable, but it can be managed by strategically locating it. Successful abstractions, like Rust's borrow checker or TypeScript's type system, isolate complexity into specific areas (e.g., "unsafe" blocks in Rust), preventing it from pervading the entire system. This controlled complexity allows developers to focus on other aspects of the program without constantly managing low-level details.
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Moving on from React, a Year Later (6 minute read)
A year after abandoning React, Scholarly maintains a server-rendered stack (Rails, Stimulus, and MySQL) supplemented by Turbo and ActionCable for interactivity. This approach prioritizes server-side logic, resulting in faster page load times (86ms p50 and 350ms p75) and fewer testing complexities compared to client-heavy architectures. JavaScript is actually viewed as a liability during development, so its usage is heavily reduced, if used at all.
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Reanimated 4 is new, but also very familiar (5 minute read)
Reanimated 4 Beta, a React Native animation library, has been released. This update incorporates CSS-compatible animations, making it familiar to developers already comfortable with CSS while retaining the performance benefits of native animations. Despite the new CSS-based approach, Reanimated 4 maintains its worklet-based APIs for scenarios requiring real-time responsiveness and platform integration.
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Syntax Finder (GitHub Repo)
SyntaxFinder is a Ruby gem that uses Prism to find and count specified syntax patterns in Ruby code. It offers parallel processing for improved performance and provides examples for custom pattern creation.
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Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant? (6 minute read)
Stack Overflow's question volume has plummeted to 2009 levels. This decline began before ChatGPT's release in late 2022 and is influenced by factors like stricter moderation policies and a lack of innovation from Stack Overflow.
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Agents (42 minute read)
AI-powered agents are systems that perceive and act upon their environment using tools and planning. Agents use tools for knowledge augmentation, capability extension, and performing actions. Opportunities are available for careful tool selection and the potential for failures. Planning is an important aspect of agent functionality, with different planning granularities, control flows, and methods for reflection and error correction.
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Guided by the beauty of our test suite (13 minute read)
This developer improved his software project with a comprehensive testing suite. This involved setting up GitHub Actions for cross-platform CI testing, introducing snapshot testing to visually verify screen renders, and using a novel static panic prevention technique. He also used cargo-fuzz to compare his Rust interpreter with a hand-written assembly version, which helped reveal and fix several discrepancies and bugs.
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Evo (GitHub Repo)
Evo is an open-source, offline-first version control system that emphasizes workspaces over branches and has intelligent merge capabilities.
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Sigstore (Website)
Sigstore is an open-source project that automates code signing and verification for open-source software.
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