🍔🧠 How to Build a Real-Time Gaming Leaderboard That Scales

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📚 Software Engineering Articles

• You can forget to take meeting notes with this app

• Design a real-time gaming leaderboard for scalable, low-latency systems.

• Architect high-throughput data pipelines for real-time processing.

• How to write secure code and avoid common vulnerabilities.

• Context-switching kills productivity; learn how to minimize it.

• Frameworks for managing up as a software engineer.

🗞️ Tech and AI Trends

• OpenAI releases O3 Mini, a cheaper and smarter AI model.

• Alibaba's AI models can now control PCs and phones.

• Google brings "thinking" to Gemini with new AI models.

👨🏻‍💻 Coding Tip

• Safe type extension in Typescript

Time-to-digest: 5 minutes

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Mindset: Decisive action is the hardest part - commitment and perseverance will see you through.

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Action: Make one decision today to take a step towards your goal, no matter how small.

ARTICLE (mind swap alerts)
Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry

GITHUB REPO (gpt-go-getter)
gpt-researcher

ARTICLE (lm-learning machine)
How I use LLMs as a staff engineer

ARTICLE (fast logs and slow jokes)
Search Logs Faster than Sonic

ARTICLE (server drama 101)
The modern way to write JavaScript servers

GITHUB REPO (llm-all-the-things!)
anything-llm

ARTICLE (null is not a joke)
Falsehoods programmers believe about null pointers

ARTICLE (don't stretch that height!)
Don't animate height!

ARTICLE (react-native speed fest)
Pre-built iOS Binaries: Reducing React Native Dev Start Time from Minutes to Seconds

ARTICLE (pdf wizards unite!)
Ingesting Millions of PDFs and Why Gemini 2.0 Changes Everything

ARTICLE (bcrypt and the long username saga)
What Okta Bcrypt incident can teach us about designing better APIs

ARTICLE (AI versus tech debt, the saga continues)
AI makes tech debt more expensive

⏳ OpenAI’s O3 Mini: A New Initiative to Enhance AI Responsiveness (2 min)

Brief: OpenAI reveals the O3 Mini project aimed at improving AI responsiveness, showcasing their commitment to enhance user experience and system efficiency.

💻 Alibaba's Qwen Team Unveils AI Models to Control Devices (3 min)

Brief: Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-VL AI models now enable users to control PCs and mobile apps, competing against leading models while maintaining content restrictions imposed by Chinese regulations.

🤖 OpenAI Launches New ChatGPT Agent for In-Depth Research (4 min)

Brief: OpenAI introduces a ChatGPT agent tailored for deep research, enabling detailed analysis and improved accuracy for professionals in various fields, while prioritizing cited outputs to enhance reliability.

🎉 Apple Unveils Invites App for Custom Event Management (3 min)

Brief: Apple launches Invites, an app for creating custom event invitations that integrates with Photos, Maps, and Music, fostering interactive experiences for users and guests alike.

🤖 Google Unveils Powerful New AI Models with Gemini (2 min)

Brief: Google launches its Gemini 2.0 Pro and Flash Thinking models, emphasizing enhanced reasoning and coding capabilities amidst rising competition from startups like DeepSeek.

📅 Amazon to Launch Advanced Alexa AI on February 26 (2 min)

Brief: Amazon prepares to unveil a next-gen Alexa AI, integrating generative capabilities to enhance user interactions by allowing context-aware conversations and handling more complex tasks.

This week’s coding challenge:

This week’s tip:

In TypeScript, leveraging mapped types allows you to create new types by transforming existing ones in a type-safe manner. This is particularly useful for creating utility types that modify or derive properties from existing types, such as making all properties optional, readonly, or extracting specific subsets of properties.

Wen?

• Immutable Data Structures: When you need to enforce immutability on an object, such as in Redux state management or functional programming paradigms, Readonly mapped types are ideal.

• Partial Updates: Useful in APIs or forms where only a subset of fields needs to be updated, and the rest can remain unchanged. Partial mapped types simplify this by making all properties optional.

• Deriving Types: When you need to create new types based on existing ones, such as making all properties nullable (Nullable<T>) or extracting specific keys (Pick<T, K>), mapped types provide a type-safe way to do so.

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See you in a week — Alex.

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