2023.09.18 - Why Is Chinese Civilization Great

Title: 2023.09.18 – Why Chinese Civilization Is Great

Microservices & AI‑generated UI & NGINX Unit & The Use of Uselessness & A Product Is a System

This Week’s Highlights

Death by a thousand microservices
https://renegadeotter.com/2023/09/10/death-by-a-thousand-microservices.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37477095
There’s a well‑known sketch where an engineer tries to explain to a project manager how an overly complex maze of microservices retrieves a user’s birthday—only to fail anyway. The scene perfectly captures the absurdity of today’s tech culture. We laugh, but mentioning it in a serious discussion is practically professional heresy, making you almost un‑hireable. How did we get here? How did we shift from solving the task at hand to burning cash on problems that don’t exist? Additional reading:

• You Want Modules, Not Microservices
• Build a Modular Monolith First

How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
https://engineercodex.substack.com/p/how-instagram-scaled-to-14-million
A simple explanation of Instagram’s guiding principles and tech stack.

My thoughts on Bun and other Adventures
https://adventures.nodeland.dev/archive/my-thoughts-on-bun/
Bun 1.0 release, Node.js performance, and videos on OpenMeter and the EventEmitter anti‑pattern.

NGINX Unit
https://github.com/nginx/unit
A lightweight, versatile open‑source server that simplifies the application stack by natively executing code across eight different language runtimes.

We’re still not innovating with AI‑generated UI.
https://heather-buchel.com/blog/2023/09/ai-generated-ui-is-not-innovative/
No tool that claims you can build production‑grade UI code with AI is truly innovative unless it’s driven by accessibility. It’s also not production‑grade if the generated code is inaccessible. That’s the short and sweet of it. Not everyone claims their AI tool is especially groundbreaking, but, as with most AI topics right now, we’re seeing some wild assertions. Related:

• DeepMind’s co‑founder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI.
• The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection: Thousands of free and open audiobooks powered by Microsoft AI
• Fine‑tune your own Llama 2 to replace GPT‑3.5/4
• How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?
• CodeQL team uses AI to power vulnerability detection in code
• What You Need to Know About Using Generative AI With Your Data
• On‑device content distillation with graph neural networks

In‑Depth Reading

User Interviews 101
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-interviews/
User interviews help you learn who your users are, what their experiences are like, and what they need, value, and desire.

Multi‑page web apps
https://adactio.com/journal/20442
I may be committing a fundamental attribution error here, but I think we’ve arrived at this point not because of any user‑centric reasoning, but because of how it makes us developers feel. Building an old‑fashioned website that uses HTML for navigation feels too easy—almost beneath us. Building an “app” that requires JavaScript just to render text feels like real programming.

JavaScript WTF: Why does every() return true for empty arrays?
https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2023/09/javascript-wtf-why-does-every-return-true-for-empty-array/
How can a condition be satisfied when there are no values to test?

cola: a text CRDT for real‑time collaborative editing
https://nomad.foo/blog/cola
In this post I discuss the theoretical background and technical implementation of cola, a text CRDT for real‑time collaborative editing written in Rust. Reading this isn’t required to use cola, so if that’s all you need, feel free to skip to the documentation. Related:

• Plate: Build your rich‑text editor
• puck: The self‑hosted, drag‑and‑drop editor for React
• Building a ShopifyQL Code Editor

My Node.js is a bit Rusty
https://gal.hagever.com/posts/my-node-js-is-a-bit-rusty
Replacing an internal Node.js module with a native Rust module gave a ×25 performance boost. Let’s understand why.

An Internet of PHP
https://timotijhof.net/posts/2023/an-internet-of-php/
PHP is huge. Trolls may proclaim its “death” until the cows come home, but no amount of heckling changes the fact that the Internet runs on PHP. The evidence is overwhelming. What follows is a loosely organized collection of that evidence.

How Query Engines Work
https://howqueryengineswork.com/
Since my first software‑engineering job, I’ve been fascinated by databases and query languages. It feels almost magical to ask a computer a question and get meaningful data back efficiently. After years as a generalist developer and a data‑tech end‑user, I joined a startup that threw me into the deep end of distributed database development. This is the book I wish had existed when I started. Though introductory, I hope it demystifies how query engines operate.

Last‑Mile Data Processing with Ray
https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/last-mile-data-processing-with-ray-629affbf34ff
In this blog post we share our assessment of ML developer velocity bottlenecks and dive into how we adopted Ray—an open‑source framework for scaling AI/ML workloads—into our ML platform, cutting dataset iteration time from days to hours and pushing GPU utilization above 90 %.

No Sacred Masterpieces
https://basta.substack.com/p/no-sacred-masterpieces
Or “that time I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it a week after launch.”

Fresh Finds

• A First Look at TypeScript 5.3
• Real‑Time 3D Gaussian Splatting in WebGL
• MikroORM 5.8 Released
• WASI support in Go

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Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.