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  • 🍔🧠 This is How Booking Scaled to 250M Reviews per Year

🍔🧠 This is How Booking Scaled to 250M Reviews per Year

PLUS: Samsung's New Device 🫢, LLD Interview Blueprint 🟦, Free Programming Books 📚

Author

Alex Zajac
July 15th, 2024

In partnership with

Happy Monday! ☀️

Welcome to the 770 new hungry minds who have joined us since last Monday!
If you aren’t subscribed yet, join smart, curious, and hungry folks by subscribing here.

I just returned from a week in Italy, and I must say: What a beautiful country this is! 🇮🇹 

I’m ready to get back to more development of the newsletter and its partnerships but before we begin, here’s a picture of my last meal! 🍕

🍔 THIS WEEK’S MENU 🥗

  • 📚 Booking.com's customer review system scaling, free programming books, LLD interview strategies

  • 🗞️ Samsung's Galaxy Ring launch, Anthropic's AI prompt engineering, OpenAI's human-level AI progress

  • 👨🏻‍💻 Quick byte: Rust's ownership system ensures memory safety without a garbage collector

Reading time: 5 minutes

A few words from our sponsor this week:

Learn AI in 5 Minutes a Day

AI Tool Report is one of the fastest-growing and most respected newsletters in the world, with over 550,000 readers from companies like OpenAI, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and more.

Our research team spends hundreds of hours a week summarizing the latest news, and finding you the best opportunities to save time and earn more using AI.

Food for Thought
A mindset, an example, and an action item to start the week
❝

"Good code is its own best documentation.”

Steve McConnell

Mindset: Clear, self-explanatory code reduces complexity and improves maintainability, fostering efficiency and collaboration.

Example: Stripe's well-documented codebase enhances developer productivity and facilitates rapid feature development.

Action item: Refactor one function in your codebase to be more self-explanatory, eliminating the need for comments.

The Rabbit Hole
Deep dives, trends, and resources curated to stay ahead

How Booking.com scaled their Customer Review System

Plus, how to improve your ability to focus and why you should prefer complexity in data structures over code

How to Answer a LLD Interview Problem

#19: 5 Steps to answer a LLD Interview Problem

How to Help Underperformers 📉

On systemic performance, the accountability dial, feedback, and the underperformance checklist.

How to set priorities?

as an individual, as a leader or as a team.

Communicate like a Senior: How to write well (Part 1)

10 Tips to Improve your Writing Today

How to have a top performing, healthy and active day as an engineer or a manager

Pioritize having a healthy lifestyle -> see others around you thrive 🚀

Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships

Wisdom from Linus Torvalds, the creator of Git and Linux

How to Memorize a Complex Codebase?

5 tricks to remember important pieces of your massive codebase

State Management & Data Fetching Libraries in React

Notes on using and not using state management and data fetching libraries in React.

💾 SIDE DISHES 💾

ARTICLE (git 0→1)
The Story of Git

GITHUB (prompt-api)
Explainer for the Prompt API

The Weekly Digest
Software, AI, and startup news worth your time

Brief: Samsung debuts the Galaxy Ring, a "smart ring" focusing on health tracking, integrating with smartphones and wearables to challenge Apple in the health-tech space.

Brief: Anthropic introduces new features on Claude to automate prompt engineering, enabling developers to easily fine-tune AI prompts and improve application outputs efficiently.

Brief: OpenAI unveils a five-level system tracking progress towards human-level artificial intelligence, showcasing capabilities from conversational AI to AI conducting tasks for days and even aiding in inventing new creations.

Brief: Microsoft steps down from its observer role on OpenAI's board amid rising regulatory concerns, while Apple opts out of a similar position, signaling a shift in engagement strategies and potential regulatory impacts.

Brief: Samsung to launch upgraded Bixby this year with its own generative AI models and commitment to maintaining multiple voice assistants on devices.

Brief: International researchers set a new world record in fiber optic communications by achieving data rates four times faster than existing systems, utilizing innovative optical amplifiers across various communication bands.

The Quick Byte
One coding tip because you’re technical after all

This week’s coding challenge:

Coding Challenge #68 - Blogging Software

This challenge is to build your own blogging software.

This week’s tip:

Rust's ownership system is a unique feature that ensures memory safety without a garbage collector.

Wen?

  • Resource Management: Ideal for systems programming where precise control over memory allocation and deallocation is crucial.

  • Concurrent Programming: Helps prevent data races and other concurrency bugs by enforcing strict rules on data access.

  • Performance-Critical Applications: Allows for zero-cost abstractions, enabling high-performance code without runtime overhead.

Why?

  • Memory Safety: Prevents common programming errors like use-after-free, double free, and memory leaks at compile-time.

  • Concurrency Without Data Races: The ownership system, combined with borrowing rules, ensures thread safety by default.

  • Predictable Resource Cleanup: Resources are automatically freed when they go out of scope, eliminating the need for manual memory management or garbage collection.

Burp-A-Laugh
The most important meal of your day

That’s it for today! ☀️

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Thanks for spending part of your Monday morning with Hungry Minds.
See you in a week — Alex.

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