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Amazon 5-day RTO mandate ๐Ÿข, mentorship in Big Tech ๐Ÿ“, Scrum is stressful๐Ÿ˜ฎโ€๐Ÿ’จ

Amazon is requiring its corporate employees to return to the office five days a week. It is also flattening its corporate structure 

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 TLDR Web Dev 2024-09-17

Fix Your Front-End โ€” JavaScript Edition (Sponsor)

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Articles & Tutorials

Rearchitecting core services at X (5 minute read)

X's Core Services team rearchitected the read path for Posts by splitting the read and write path of Tweetypie, a core service, into two separate services. They did this because of the service's resource intensity, unbalanced read and write traffic, and code complexity issues caused by its monolithic nature. The new architecture uses X's distributed ecosystem and has resulted in a highly performant Tweet Entity Service capable of handling millions of operations per second.
The State of ES5 on the Web (16 minute read)

A Google engineer examines the current state of ES5 on the web, challenging the traditional practice of transpiling to ES5. Data shows that many popular websites unnecessarily bundle ES5 helpers with ES6+ code, leading to unnecessary bloat. Instead, it's better for developers to shift towards "Baseline Widely Available" features, which benefits both library authors, who can focus on publishing modern code, and website developers, who can tailor browser support to their specific needs through their build tools.
Modern Data-Fetching in React (14 minute read)

Data-fetching in React has shifted from client-side fetching in traditional SPAs to server-side fetching using frameworks like NextJS and Remix. The React team advocates for server-side data-fetching due to its efficiency and the complexity of client-side approaches. This post goes over using React Router loaders, Tanstack Query, and React Server Components for handling data in React.
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Opinions & Advice

Mentorship: underrated perk of big tech (Reddit Thread)

Working at a Big Tech company offers rare mentorship opportunities that are often overlooked. This developer shares how they learned a lot from experienced colleagues at their Big Tech company, like the engineer who revamped Facebook's newsfeed. Mentorship isn't always a structured program, but rather about proactively reaching out to people for advice and guidance.
Why Scrum is Stressing You Out (6 minute read)

Sprints in Scrum can lead to chronic stress due to their constant nature, lack of autonomy, and insufficient time for preparation. Traditional Waterfall methods have waves of high-pressure periods balanced with more reasonable periods. The ongoing, medium-level stress of sprints, in contrast, can be more damaging.
How to Lead Your Team when the House Is on Fire (12 minute read)

When a company is going through challenging times (โ€œwartimeโ€), engineering managers should focus on goal-aligned delivery, proper building and leading of the team, and supporting individual success. This post provides specific strategies and tactics for each area.
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Launches & Tools

You don't need a dozen monitoring tools (Sponsor)

Teams today use an average of 12+ monitoring tools to collect and analyze trillions of data points (including cloud and on-premises resources). Tool sprawl of this scale can take a severe toll on your ability to mitigate outages and risks. Learn how to consolidate monitoring tools, maximize uptime, and ship faster. Read the Datadog solution brief
react-call (Website)

react-call provides a simple and flexible way to imperatively call React components from anywhere in an application, even outside of React. This makes it ideal for scenarios like confirmations, notifications, popups, and more. It also lets devs present UI, wait for user interaction, and receive response data.
Adze (Website)

Adze is a universal logging library for TypeScript and JavaScript that can run in any JS runtime without configuration. It supports both server and browser environments. Adze has first-class TypeScript support, a chainable API, log listeners, middleware support, log annotations, and various log formats.
jaqt (GitHub Repo)

jaqt is a JavaScript library that uses native array functions to provide a query engine inspired by GraphQL and SQL. It lets devs perform complex data transformations while still writing JavaScript (instead of SQL).
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Miscellaneous

Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week (11 minute read)

Amazon is requiring its corporate employees to return to the office five days a week. It is also flattening its corporate structure by reducing the number of managers and increasing the ratio of individual contributors. The new policies will come into effect on January 2, 2025.
Oracle, it's time to free JavaScript (7 minute read)

This is an open letter signed by prominent figures in the JavaScript community that urges Oracle to release the "JavaScript" trademark. They argue that Oracle has abandoned the trademark through non-use, as they haven't built a product using the mark and haven't actively protected it. They are calling on Oracle to relinquish the trademark to the public domain, and warn that they will challenge its ownership through a petition for cancellation with the USPTO if Oracle doesn't comply.
Deploying dreams: An inside look at a summer internship with Vercel (9 minute read)

A summer intern at Vercel shares his experience working on various projects. He improved the Support Center, implemented citations in the new v0 AI system, and created the "v0 Brain" initiative. His internship involved full autonomy, intense but rewarding work, and learning from industry leaders.
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Quick Links

The HTTP QUERY Method (11 minute read)

This Internet-Draft defines a new HTTP method, QUERY, which allows for safe and idempotent requests that can carry request content, providing an alternative to GET and POST methods for performing queries.
CSS Nano (Website)

CSSNANO is a tool that compresses CSS files for production environments, reducing their size by removing unnecessary whitespace, compressing identifiers, and purging redundant definitions.
The Pragmatic Programmer for Machine Learning (Website)

This online book focuses on software engineering practices necessary for the effective implementation of modern data analysis and machine learning.
Unlearning Leetcode (2 minute read)

Writing simple, readable code is more considerate, durable, and ultimately more satisfying than writing complex code.
AI-written Code Banned from Codeforces: What's Changing? (4 minute read)

Codeforces, a popular online programming platform, has banned the use of AI-generated code in its competitions.

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Thanks for reading,
Priyam Mohanty, Jenny Xu & Ceora Ford


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