🍔🧠 How Grab's Rust Migration Cut Server Costs By 70%

Happy Monday! ☀️

Welcome to the 578 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.

Since I joined the NA continent 1 month ago, I’ll be publishing the Hungry Minds digests at a bit friendlier times right now for NA as well :)

📚 Software Engineering Articles

• This AI agent is not like any other

• Learn the critical difference in concurrency vs parallelism

• How Netflix scales threat detection without streaming architecture

• Comprehensive system design guide for technical interviews

• Tracking down memory regression across hundreds of Go pods

• The challenges of React hooks migration at scale

🗞️ Tech and AI Trends

• Cursor's Bugbot launches automated code review capabilities

• Revolutionary blood test detects cancer years before diagnosis

• GPT-5 announcement coming next month from OpenAI

👨🏻‍💻 Coding Tip

• Go's select statement with timeout channels ensures robust concurrent operations

Time-to-digest: 5 minutes

Big thanks to our partners for keeping this newsletter free.

If you have a second, clicking the ad below helps us a ton—and who knows, you might find something you love. 💚

Ditch the vibes, get the context

Augment Code's powerful AI coding agent meets professional software developers exactly where they are, delivering production-grade capabilities and deep context into even the gnarliest codebases.

Index and navigate millions of lines of code, get instant answers about any part of your codebase, and build with the AI agent that gets you, your team, and your code.

From Go to Rust: A Counter Service rewrite that saved 70% in costs 🦀

Grab's Integrity Data Platform team took on the challenge of rewriting a high-traffic Go microservice in Rust. The service, processing tens of thousands of QPS, was chosen for its simple functionality yet significant infrastructure footprint. The results? A 70% reduction in infrastructure costs while maintaining similar performance levels.

The challenge: Rewrite a production-grade Go service in Rust while maintaining performance, dealing with async complexities, and ensuring the team could effectively maintain the codebase despite Rust's steep learning curve.

Implementation highlights:

1. Strategic service selection: Chose Counter Service for its simple functionality but high impact potential

2. Fresh perspective approach: Rebuilt from scratch rather than line-by-line translation to ensure idiomatic Rust

3. Ecosystem validation: Carefully evaluated OSS library support and created custom solutions where needed

4. Async optimization: Addressed performance bottlenecks by properly handling blocking vs non-blocking operations

5. Parser development: Built custom config parser using nom to replace Go-specific internal libraries

Results and learnings:

• Resource efficiency: 80% reduction in compute resources (from 20 cores to 4.5 cores for same QPS)

• Similar latency: P99 latency remained comparable to the Go version

• Enhanced reliability: Eliminated common Go-related bugs through Rust's strict compile-time checks

The rewrite proves that Rust can deliver significant infrastructure savings without sacrificing performance. While async Rust has its learning curves, the investment pays off in both resource efficiency and code reliability.

Remember: just because your service is written in Go doesn't mean it can't use a little Rust-ic charm! 🦀

ESSENTIAL (AI’s “helping” hand)
Measuring The Impact Of AI On Software Engineering

ESSENTIAL (keep it simple, silly)
Building Systems, Simply

GITHUB REPO (big-brain-designs)
system-design-primer

GITHUB REPO (claude’s cheat sheet)
awesome-claude-code

ARTICLE (memory go brrr)
How we tracked down a Go 1.24 memory regression across hundreds of pods

ARTICLE (agents in timeout)
Why I'm Betting Against AI Agents in 2025 (Despite Building Them)

ARTICLE (3D party tricks)
Three.js Instances: Rendering Multiple Objects Simultaneously

ARTICLE (sleep is for the weak)
Work-Life Balance Slows Careers (E9 Engineer, ex-Meta)

ARTICLE (React’s marathon)
The world's longest React hooks migration

ARTICLE (Router’s glow-up)
React Router and React Server Components: The Path Forward

Want to reach 190,000+ engineers?

Let’s work together! Whether it’s your product, service, or event, we’d love to help you connect with this awesome community.

🤖 Key Lessons in Context Engineering for AI Agents from Building Manus (5 min)

Brief: Manus shares six actionable lessons for optimizing AI agent performance, from KV-cache efficiency to error-driven adaptation, based on real-world experience scaling their agent framework.

🐞 Cursor’s Bugbot Uses AI to Detect and Fix Code Bugs Before Production (2 min)

Brief: Cursor’s Bugbot employs advanced AI models to catch real bugs and security issues in code reviews, helping 3,000+ teams ship higher-quality software with fewer errors.

🔬 New Blood Test Detects Cancer Tumors Early Using DNA Analysis (2 min)

Brief: A breakthrough blood test identifies cancer tumors early by analyzing circulating tumor DNA, offering a less invasive alternative to traditional screening methods.

📱 Apple's Foldable iPhone to Reportedly Come in Two Display Sizes (2 min)

Brief: Apple's long-rumored foldable iPhone may launch with two screen size options, potentially competing with Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold and Flip series.

🤖 OpenAI’s GPT-5 Launches Next Month Amid Global AI Race (2 min)

Brief: OpenAI confirms GPT-5 is set for an August 2025 release, with enhanced coding, reasoning, and API-accessible mini-versions, as the U.S. accelerates efforts to outpace China in AI dominance.

This week’s coding challenge:

This week’s tip:

Use Go's select statement with default case and timeout channels for graceful concurrent operation handling. This pattern combines multiple channel operations with fallback behavior and time limits, essential for robust concurrent systems.

Wen?

• Microservice communication: Handle API timeouts and cancellations gracefully in distributed systems.

• Resource management: Implement clean shutdown procedures with timeout fallbacks.

• Concurrent data processing: Manage multiple data streams with timeout and cancellation support.

“The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences.”
Christopher McCandless

That’s it for today! ☀️

Enjoyed this issue? Send it to your friends here to sign up, or share it on Twitter!

If you want to submit a section to the newsletter or tell us what you think about today’s issue, reply to this email or DM me on Twitter! 🐦

Thanks for spending part of your Monday morning with Hungry Minds.
See you in a week — Alex.

Icons by Icons8.

*I may earn a commission if you get a subscription through the links marked with “aff.” (at no extra cost to you).