🍔🧠 gRPC: The Ultimate Deep Dive

PLUS: Mind-controlled cursor gaming breakthrough 🕹️, Scaling e-commerce cart architecture 🛒, Proxy Pattern primer 🧱

Author

Alex Zajac
April 1st, 2024 • Time-to-digest: 9 minutes

Happy Monday! ☀️

Welcome to the 230 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 🥗

  1. 📚 Dive deep into gRPC technology, 15 types of databases and how to use them, how Stripe built smart retries with ensembling

  2. 🗞️ Mind-controlling cursors in Neuralink trials, Apple's potential AI app store, and Grok-1.5 reveal by X.ai

  3. 👨🏻‍💻 Quick byte: Proxy Pattern for controlled access and added functionality

Reading time: 5 minutes

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

‘Success is not in what you have, but who you are.’

Bo Bennett

Mindset: True success is defined by character, not possessions - cultivate integrity, resilience, and a growth mindset.

Example: Patagonia's mission goes beyond profit, championing environmental responsibility and ethical labor practices.

Action item: Identify one personal value you'll prioritize over material gains today, no matter how small.

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

Tech Dive on gRPC

We'll talk about RPCs, gRPC, Pros/Cons, Real World Examples and more. Plus, principles from Deep Work by Cal Newport

15 Types of Databases and When to Use Them

#4 System Design - Types of Databases

How Amazon Scaled E-commerce Shopping Cart Data Infrastructure

#41: Break Into Amazon Dynamo White Paper (8 minutes)

LUC #47: Database Sharding Explained — Strategies for Scalable Database Management

Plus, API design best practices, What is Kafka, and how does it work, MVC vs MVP architecture

How to be a multiplier as a leader

In this issue, we will talk about how leaders can get the most out of their teams, inspired by learnings from the book "Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter" by Liz Wiseman. So, let’s dive in.

💾 SIDE DISHES 💾

ESSENTIAL (testing better)
A Few Words on Testing Practices

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

Brief: Neuralink releases video of a paralyzed individual using brain implant to control cursor in chess, showcasing advancements in mind-computer interaction.

Brief: Apple could unveil an AI App Store at WWDC 2024, potentially showcasing how consumers can access a variety of AI apps from different vendors, emulating its success in other industry-shaping storefronts.

Brief: Worldcoin Foundation releases essential components of the Orb's software on GitHub, emphasizing privacy, image processing transparency, and humanness verification for users online.

Brief: X.ai introduces Grok-1.5, boasting significant advancements in reasoning, scoring notably higher in mathematics and programming language tasks, with expanded contextual understanding of up to 128,000 tokens.

Brief: OpenAI and Microsoft collaborating on a massive $100 billion data center project, codenamed "Stargate," aiming to build a powerful AI supercomputer using innovative design and alternative power sources.

Brief: Hume AI secures a $50M Series B led by EQT Ventures, introducing their Empathic Voice Interface utilizing innovative generative AI for human-like interactions.

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

This week’s coding challenge:

Coding Challenge #55 - xxd

Build you own hexdump tool.

This week’s tip:

The Proxy Pattern is a structural design pattern that provides a surrogate or placeholder object that controls access to another object, called the subject. The proxy can perform tasks such as access control, caching, or lazy initialization before or after forwarding requests to the subject.

Wen?

  • When you need to control or manage access to an object or resource.

  • When you want to add additional behavior or functionality before or after forwarding requests to the subject.

  • When you need to implement lazy initialization or caching for expensive objects.

Why?

  • Promotes the principle of least privilege by controlling access to the subject.

  • Allows you to introduce additional functionality or behavior without modifying the subject's implementation.

  • Provides a way to create a surrogate object that can be used in place of the subject, while still maintaining the same interface.

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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