Month summary - December 2023

Posted by Tobiasz Kedzierski on 31.12.2023

December 2023

I am aggregating here some more or less interesting stuff of various IT related materials which I came across this month. Some of them are strictly related to the things I did or am currently doing.

Articles

Examples of Great URL Design

When I reflect on examples of great URL design I’ve encountered through the years — URLs that, when I saw them, I paused and thought “Wow, that’s really neat!” — these are a few that come to mind.

How Google takes the pain out of code reviews, with 97% dev satisfaction

A study of Google's code review tooling (Critique), AI-powered improvements, and recent statistics.

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

abracadabra: How does Shazam work?

Your phone's ability to identify any song it listens to is pure technological magic. In this article, I'll show you how one of the most popular apps, Shazam, does it.

Productivity

The surprising connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

Slack’s Workforce Index uncovers new findings on how to structure the workday to maximize employee productivity, well-being and satisfaction.

Why do programmers need private offices with doors? (Do Not Disturb

Graham writes that he "once saw a recruiting ad for Microsoft with a big picture of a door. Work for us, the premise was, and we'll give you a place to work where you can actually get work done."

Python

Don’t use Python’s property

In general, though, unless you really know what you’re doing with advanced descriptor use cases, or you have the very specific use case of turning a pre-existing attribute into a method, you probably should be avoiding property, and writing descriptors in general, in your Python code.

Fine Tuning Python WSGI and ASGI applications for Flask, Django, and FastAPI

In this blog post, I’m going to review some best practices for configuring Python web servers like Gunicorn, Uvicorn, and Hypercorn. We’ll recap the architecture of all the bits of software that sit between your Python code and your users. We’ll also touch on verification methods like load testing to check that your configuration stands up against some user traffic.

Tools

Terminal Trove

Terminal Trove curates and showcases all things in the terminal such as command line interface tools (CLI), text mode interface tools (TUI), developer tools and more no matter what platform or medium

Resume Matcher

Resume Matcher is an open source, free tool to improve your resume. It works by using language models to compare and rank resumes with job descriptions.

Videos

SREcon19 Europe/Middle East/Africa - Estimating System Performance from First Principles - Simon Eskildsen, Shopify

Anthony Shaw - Beat the rush! Designing effective load tests for your web application [PyCon AU]