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  • 🍔🧠 Database Scaling: How Figma 100x Their PostgreSQL Stack

🍔🧠 Database Scaling: How Figma 100x Their PostgreSQL Stack

PLUS: AI engineer talks code 🤖, MemCached rules at Facebook 👍, Roadmap generation with AI 🗺️

Author

Alex Zajac
March 18th, 2024

Happy Monday! ☀️

Welcome to the 612 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.

🍔 THIS WEEK’S MENU 🥗

  1. 📚 Figma scaled PostgreSQL by 100x. How Khan Academy scaled to 30 million users. Anthropic's free prompt library.

  2. 🗞️ Meet 'Devin': the first autonomous AI software engineer. Figure 01 robot: chat, see, plan, perform tasks. Elon Musk: xAI will open-source Grok chatbot

  3. 👨🏻‍💻 Quick byte: Decorator pattern dynamically adds behaviors without modifying structure.

Reading time: 5 minutes

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

‘Be a positive energy trampoline – absorb what you need and rebound more back.‘

Dave Carolan

Mindset: Use positivity to grow yourself and help others do the same.

Example: Google, known for its positive culture, drives innovation and team spirit.

Action item: Give a teammate a positive comment today to boost the mood around you.

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

How Figma Scaled their Databases by 100x

From 2020 to 2024, Figma's database stack has grown by 100x. We'll talk about how they did this. Plus, lessons learned from two decades of SRE at Google, how to avoid wasting your career and more.

How Khan Academy Scaled to 30 Million Users

#39: Break Into Khan Academy Architecture (5 minutes)

How Facebook created the largest Memcached system in the world

Facebook handled billions of requests per second efficiently

Behind the draw - How Canva's drawing tool works

Some of the engineering challenges we encountered while developing our vector drawing tool

How Discord's Live Streaming Works

We'll delve into Discord's Live Streaming Feature and how it works. Plus, Productivity Tips from Sam Altman, a Guide to Software Engineering Contracting and more!

Grokking Coding Interview Patterns in Python (aff.)


Efficiently prepare for coding interviews in weeks by learning essential patterns behind common questions, as devised by FAANG hiring managers, available in multiple programming languages.

💾 SIDE DISHES 💾

TOOL (on the road again)
Generate tailored roadmaps with AI

ARTICLE (infinite)
Playing with infinity in CSS

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

Brief: Cognition Labs unveils Devin, the pioneering autonomous AI software engineer capable of building apps, finding bugs, and training AI models through long-term reasoning, planning, and collaboration.

Brief: Sources reveal Elon Musk's SpaceX is secretly developing a spy satellite network for a US intelligence agency, likely the National Reconnaissance Office.

Brief: Figure unveils Figure 01, a conversational robot powered by OpenAI that can describe scenes, plan actions, and execute tasks by understanding language and visual inputs.

Brief: Elon Musk announces xAI will open source Grok, its ChatGPT rival, reigniting the open source AI debate amid his lawsuit against OpenAI for abandoning its open roots.

Brief: Code in TikTok's Android app suggests ByteDance may be working on "TikTok Photos" - a dedicated photo-sharing platform to rival Instagram.

Brief: A briefly published OpenAI blog post hints at GPT-4.5 Turbo, a new AI model touting superior speed, accuracy, and an expanded knowledge base over GPT-4.

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

This week’s coding challenge:

Coding Challenge #53 - Bloom Filter Spell Checker

This challenge is to build your own micro spell checker using a Bloom filter.

This week’s tip:

The Decorator pattern allows you to dynamically add new behaviors or responsibilities to an object without modifying its structure. It provides a flexible alternative to inheritance for extending functionality.

Wen?

  • Extensible Functionality: When you need to dynamically add or remove responsibilities or behaviors to objects at runtime without affecting other instances of the same class.

  • Avoiding Complex Inheritance Hierarchies: If you find yourself creating an explosively large inheritance hierarchy to achieve functionality extensions, the Decorator pattern can provide a cleaner and more flexible solution.

  • Composing Behaviors: When you want to compose different behaviors or functionalities into an object by wrapping it with multiple decorators, creating complex combinations dynamically.

Why?

  • Flexibility and Extensibility: Decorators allow you to extend an object's behavior without modifying its code, promoting the Open/Closed principle (open for extension, closed for modification).

  • Code Reuse and Composition: Decorators can be reused across different components, and multiple decorators can be composed around a single component to create complex behaviors.

  • Separation of Concerns: By separating core functionality from additional responsibilities, decorators promote better code organization and maintainability.

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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