🍔🧠 How Netflix Handles 220M Subscribers With Pure Java

Happy Monday! ☀️

Welcome to the 940 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.

📚 Software Engineering Articles

• Build and deploy agents that scope issues, code, and review PRs alongside teams building products in Linear

• Essential tips for scaling your database from zero to millions

• Instagram Principal Engineer shares candid insights about tech leadership

• Advanced guide to Progressive JSON for optimized data loading

• Your manager isn't your friend: maintaining professional boundaries

• Deep dive into Linear's sync engine architecture

🗞️ Tech and AI Trends

• Anthropic reaches $3B in revenue, challenging OpenAI's dominance

• Amazon tests humanoid robots for package delivery

• Google enables offline AI on smartphones

👨🏻‍💻 Coding Tip

• Rust pattern matching with guards creates cleaner, safer code flows

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. 💚

One human. Dozens of AI agents. Infinite possibilities.

Build and deploy agents that scope issues, code, and review PRs alongside teams building products in Linear.

Linear is inviting engineers to build agents on their API.

How Netflix built a Java-powered streaming empire ☕

Netflix serves millions of concurrent streams worldwide through a sophisticated Java-based backend. Their architecture proves that Java remains powerful and relevant for modern, high-scale systems when leveraged correctly.

Implementation highlights:

• Federated GraphQL gateway: Routes and aggregates requests across multiple domain-specific services

• Spring Boot foundation: Standardized platform with Netflix-specific extensions for security, metrics, and service discovery

• Virtual threads: Leverages JDK 21+ features for efficient concurrent processing without reactive complexity

• ZGC optimization: Uses generational garbage collection to minimize pause times and improve throughput

• gRPC communication: Powers internal service-to-service calls with high performance and strong typing

Results & Learnings:

• Reduced latency: Near-zero GC pause times and parallel request processing

• Better scalability: Higher throughput without thread pool bottlenecks

• Simplified development: Clean programming model without reactive complexity

Netflix's approach shows that Java can be both modern and maintainable at scale. Their success comes from thoughtfully evolving the platform rather than chasing trending alternatives.

Just like your favorite Netflix show, sometimes the best tech stack is the one you've been binge-watching all along!

ESSENTIAL (manager-not-your-bff)
Your Manager Is Not Your Best Friend

ESSENTIAL (docs-like-code-magic)
Adopting Docs-As-Code At Pinterest

GITHUB REPO (prompt-fu)
Anthropic's Interactive Prompt Engineering Tutorial

ARTICLE (threads-gobble-memory)
Virtual Threads Ate My Memory: A Web Crawler's Tale of Speed vs. Memory

ARTICLE (ruby-goes-zoom)
Concurrent Web Crawling in Ruby with Async

ARTICLE (stop-asserting-start-living)
Do NOT Assert on Requests (Do This Instead)

ARTICLE (astro-goes-brainy)
No Server, No Database: Smarter Related Posts in Astro with transformers.js

ARTICLE (inline-everything-chaos)
What Happens If We Inline Everything?

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.

🚀 Anthropic Hits $3B Annualized Revenue as Business Demand for AI Soars (2 min)

Brief: Anthropic reaches $3B annualized revenue amid surging business demand for AI, positioning itself as a key player in the enterprise AI market by 2025.

🚀 Moonhub Joins Salesforce to Accelerate AI Recruitment Mission (2 min)

Brief: Moonhub’s team is joining Salesforce to advance its AI strategy, including Agentforce, after pioneering AI-powered hiring solutions for startups and Fortune 500s.

🚀 ChatGPT's Next Big Leap: OpenAI Teases "Super Assistant" Upgrades (2 min)

Brief: OpenAI previews major ChatGPT enhancements, including multimodal capabilities, deeper personalization, and proactive task automation, aiming to transform it into an all-purpose AI super assistant.

📱 Google Launches Offline AI Feature for Smartphones via Edge Gallery App (2 min)

Brief: Google’s Edge Gallery app enables offline AI access on smartphones, letting users download models like Gemma 3n and Qwen 2.5 for tasks like conversations and image analysis without an internet connection.

🏗️ Elon Musk Plans Enormous Texas Mega-Project Amid Legal Hurdles (2 min)

Brief: Elon Musk aims to construct a massive new Texas mega-project, but the plan faces legal challenges, hinting at potential delays or restructuring.

🤖 Amazon Tests Humanoid Robots for Last-Mile Package Delivery (2 min)

Brief: Amazon is developing AI-powered humanoid robots to autonomously deliver packages from its Rivian vans, testing them in a specialized "humanoid park" before real-world trials.

This week’s coding challenge:

This week’s tip:

Use advanced Rust pattern matching with guards and bindings to create expressive, safe control flow without explicit if-statements. Pattern matching in Rust can combine multiple conditions, extract values, and enforce exhaustive checking at compile time.

Wen?

• Complex state machines: Handle multiple interrelated conditions and state transitions cleanly without nested if/else blocks.

• Error handling flows: Combine Result and Option types with custom error conditions in a single match expression.

• Data validation: Create sophisticated validation rules that can extract, test, and bind values in one declarative block.

“We have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.”
Elon Musk

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).