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🍔🧠 How Airbnb Handles a Million User Events/Second

PLUS: Amazon's New AI Lab 🤖, Redis Scaling Lessons 📚, From New Grad to Meta Staff 🦸‍♂️

Author

Alex Zajac
December 16th, 2024

In partnership with

Happy Monday! ☀️

Welcome to the 936 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 🥗

📚 Software Engineering Articles

🗞️ Tech and AI Trends

👨🏻‍💻 Coding Tip

  • useImperativeHandle in React exposes specific child methods to parent components

Reading time: 5 minutes

A few words from our sponsor this week:

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

"I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples."

Mother Teresa

Mindset: Recognize your individual impact and how it can spark broader change.

Example: Patagonia's environmental initiatives inspire customers to adopt sustainable practices.

Action: Identify one small way you can contribute to a cause you care about today.

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

How Airbnb Processes a Million User Events Every Second

An introduction to Apache Flink, the Lambda Architecture and the Architecture of Airbnb's platform. Plus, how Duolingo cut their AWS bill by 20%, Google's State of the Art Quantum chip and more.

How to Make Coding Fun and Addictive

The Dopamine Hack

How to Name Things 💬

Finally addressing the hardest problem in software

New Grad to Staff at Meta in 3 years: Evan King

On Speed, Being Bold, and Depositing Into the “Favor Bank”

15 Best Leadership Books

That made a better leader from me.

Using Transformers.js for AI in the Browser

A look at Transformers.js and doing GenAI work in the browser.

💾 SIDE DISHES 💾

ARTICLE (time-teller's dilemma)
Storing times for human events

GITHUB REPO (gem-in-a-cookbook)
Examples and guides for using the Gemini API

ARTICLE (commentary on clarity)
Writing system software: code comments

ARTICLE (small but mighty database)
What you need to know about SQLite

ARTICLE (redis-ing to the occasion)
Lessons learned from running Redis at scale

ARTICLE (manager-in-training blunders)
The 6 Mistakes You're Going to Make as a New Manager

ARTICLE (CSS dance-off)
Thoughts on Tailwind 4

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

Brief: OpenAI’s 12 days of 'ship-mas' launches new features, including the o1 reasoning model, a $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription, and the much-anticipated Sora text-to-video AI.

Brief: xAI unveils AURORA, an advanced image generator in Grok 2, enabling users to create photorealistic visuals from text with enhanced detail and fewer restrictions, igniting excitement and ethical debates in AI creativity.

Brief: Amazon's new AGI Lab in San Francisco aims to develop foundational AI capabilities for practical applications, enhancing productivity and real-world interactions.

Brief: OpenAI launches Sora, a new video generation model offering realistic video creation from text, enhanced features, and safety measures while aiming for responsible use.

Brief: Google DeepMind reveals Gemini 2.0, an advanced AI model featuring multimodal capabilities and new projects like Astra and Mariner, prioritizing responsibility and safety in AI development.

Brief: Google reveals its 105-qubit "Willow" chip, marking a significant leap in quantum error correction and supremacy, while sparking lively discussions among tech leaders and the quantum computing community.

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

This week’s coding challenge:

Build Your Own DNS server

Real-world proficiency projects designed for experienced engineers. Develop software craftsmanship by recreating popular devtools from scratch.

This week’s tip:

In React, the useImperativeHandle hook allows child components to selectively expose specific methods or properties to parent components through refs, enabling controlled access to internal functionality while maintaining encapsulation.

Wen?

  • Complex Form Controls: When building custom form components that need to expose specific methods like focus, validate, or reset to parent components.

  • Animation Control: In components with complex animations where you want to expose play, pause, or reset methods to parent components.

  • Media Components: When creating custom audio/video players where parent components need controlled access to specific functionalities like play, seek, or volume control.

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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