Written by In this week’s episode, we explore the journey of Alejandro Aspinwall, a Frontend Engineer at Amazon. You’ll hear how Alejandro began his career deeply immersed in the world of music and what led him to transition to the world of tech. He emphasizes the importance of adaptability in his career shift and provides insights into […]
Easily the most important and complex screen in the Buy on Etsy Android app is the listing screen, where all key information about an item for sale in the Etsy marketplace is displayed to buyers. Far from just a title and description, a price and a few images, over the years the listing screen has […]
Meet Shawn Charles, Developer Advocate & Community Manager at The Hunt. Shawn shares with Saron how he got into tech solely by building and maintaining websites for local businesses, what inspired him to level up by enrolling in a bootcamp, and his advice on those who might feel overwhelmed in identifying their career path in […]
172: Transformers and Large Language Models Intro topic: Is WFH actually WFC? News/Links: Falsehoods Junior Developers Believe about Becoming Senior https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/falsehoods-junior-developers-believe-about-becoming-senior/ Pure Pursuit Tutorial with python code: https://wiki.purduesigbots.com/software/control-algorithms/basic-pure-pursuit Video example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYR7mmcwT2w PID without a PHD https://www.wescottdesign.com/articles/pid/pidWithoutAPhd.pdf Google releases Gemma https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-open-models/ Book of the Show Patrick: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (Wheel of […]
I’ve been doing not just Unit Testing for my sites but full on Integration Testing and Browser Automation Testing as early as 2007 with Selenium. Lately, however, I’ve been using the faster and generally more compatible Playwright. It has one API and can test on Windows, Linux, Mac, locally, in a container (headless), […]
Balancing Engineering Ambition with Product Realism Introduction In July of 2023, Etsy’s App Updates team, responsible for the Updates feed in Etsy’s mobile apps, set off with an ambitious goal: to revamp the Updates tab to become Deals, a home for a shopper’s coupons and sales, in time for Cyber Week 2023. The Updates tab […]
I’ve blogged about generic ways of getting top 1 or top n per category queries before on this blog. An Oracle specific version in that post used the arcane KEEP syntax: SELECT max(actor_id) KEEP (DENSE_RANK FIRST ORDER BY c DESC, actor_id), max(first_name) KEEP (DENSE_RANK FIRST ORDER BY c DESC, actor_id), max(last_name) KEEP (DENSE_RANK FIRST ORDER […]
In a previous blog post, we’ve advertised the use of SQL EXISTS rather than COUNT(*) to check for existence of a value in SQL. I.e. to check if in the Sakila database, actors called WAHLBERG have played in any films, instead of: SELECT count(*) FROM actor a JOIN film_actor fa USING (actor_id) WHERE a.last_name = […]
Intro topic: Monitor setups News/Links: BlueScuti, Willis, beats Tetris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJ5UuknsHU PalWorld accused of being an AI Product https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/01/22/palworld-accused-of-using-genai-with-no-evidence-so-far/?sh=26a9651b4239 4 Billion if-statements to determine if a number is even or odd https://andreasjhkarlsson.github.io/jekyll/update/2023/12/27/4-billion-if-statements.html Seamless M4T https://ai.meta.com/blog/seamless-m4t/ Book of the Show Patrick: Foundation by Isaac Asimov https://amzn.to/3SrmgnP Jason: Propaganda by Edward Bernays https://amzn.to/47JUCXJ Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Tool of […]
Prezi has quite a sophisticated engineering culture where solutions are built that do the job. Some solutions that have been built in the past stood out and aged well. In other areas, some solutions have lost traction compared to industry standards. In the second half of 2023, we modernized one of those areas that was […]