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Happy Monday (last of the year)! ☀️
I wish everyone happy holidays and I can’t wait to unveil what we have planned for the next year. I’ve been working hard in the past 6 months to build a better system for curating the best content for the new generation of software engineers (you!) 🔥
See you next year 😉
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📚 Software Engineering Articles
Explore optimized database design for SSDs
Deep dive into Meta's internal dev tooling
Everyone's a Staff Engineer now, but what's the catch?
Understanding why nobody truly knows how large software works
Build better AI apps with Vercel's AI SDK 6
🗞️ Tech and AI Trends
Sam Altman reveals OpenAI's path to dominance
Meta adopts Steam Deck's Linux scheduler for servers
Amazon wrestles with AI shopping bots decision
👨🏻💻 Coding Tip
TimescaleDB continuous aggregates optimize time-series data with automatic materialized views
Time-to-digest: 5 minutes
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Voice AI is moving from experimentation to enterprise deployment.
In this new handbook, ElevenLabs breaks down…
The architectures
Trade-offs
and real-world case studies
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Shopify's platform processed a mind-bending 90 petabytes of data during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2025, handling 489M requests/minute at peak. This massive scale required a complete rebuild of their readiness program, involving thousands of engineers working for nine months.
The challenge: Prepare a global e-commerce platform to handle unprecedented traffic spikes while maintaining reliability across multiple regions, with some systems facing their first BFCM.
Implementation highlights:
Three-track approach: Parallel execution of capacity planning, infrastructure roadmap, and risk assessments with continuous feedback
Game Days: Chaos engineering exercises simulating production failures at BFCM scale, starting in early spring
Resiliency Matrix: Centralized documentation tracking vulnerabilities, incidents, and fixes across the platform
Load testing at scale: Custom tool (Genghis) simulating real user behavior across three Google Cloud regions
Progressive testing: Five major scale tests ramping up to 150% of previous year's load
Results and learnings:
Massive scale: Successfully handled 200M requests/minute in final tests
Regional resilience: Validated disaster recovery through complete regional failovers
System hardening: Identified and fixed critical issues in analytics, API layers, and core infrastructure
The key takeaway? Success at scale requires systematic, continuous testing - not just hope and last-minute fixes. Shopify's approach shows that preparation isn't about surviving one big day - it's about building lasting infrastructure improvements.
GITHUB REPO (claude-master-tips)
Claude How To
ARTICLE (meta-dev-secrets)
The Pulse #157: Internal dev tooling at Meta & the "trajectories" feature
ESSENTIAL (code-future-crystal-ball)
Coding Intelligence Asymptotics
ARTICLE (ai-power-level-up)
AI SDK 6
ARTICLE (python-types-party)
Python Typing Survey 2025: Code Quality and Flexibility As Top Reasons for Typing Adoption
ESSENTIAL (tiny-framework-drama)
Avoid Mini-frameworks
ESSENTIAL (werner-knows-best)
Werner Vogels is right
ARTICLE (ai-on-a-budget)
A guide to local coding models
ESSENTIAL (winning-is-weird)
Success is Asymmetrical
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Let’s work together! Whether it’s your product, service, or event, we’d love to help you connect with this awesome community.
Brief: OpenAI CEO discusses plans to triple compute capacity yearly, predicts scientific breakthroughs within 5 years, and reveals major enterprise push for 2026, while addressing competition from Google's Gemini and infrastructure commitments worth $1.4 trillion.
Brief: From product marketing intern to VP of Google Labs, Josh Woodward led Gemini to outperform ChatGPT with 650M monthly users while balancing rapid AI innovation with safety concerns, marking Google's competitive comeback in the AI race.
Brief: Morgan Stanley reports that Netflix and Disney+ saw all their net subscriber growth come from ad-supported tiers in 2025, with ad tiers now making up 30% of Netflix and 50% of Disney+ subscribers as streaming prices continue to rise.
Brief: Meta unveils new SCX and LAVD server technologies aimed at enhancing Steam Deck gaming performance through improved streaming capabilities and server-side optimization.
Brief: As AI shopping agents gain traction, Amazon faces strategic decisions between blocking competitors while developing its own tools like Rufus, as the market could reach $1 trillion by 2030 and reshape e-commerce dynamics.
Brief: Venture capitalist shares 12 predictions for 2026, including AI agents outspending human workers, record-breaking tech IPOs led by SpaceX and OpenAI, and a dramatic shift toward agent-first web design and autonomous AI systems.
This week’s coding challenge:
This week’s tip:
TimescaleDB continuous aggregates enable real-time downsampling of time-series data with automatic materialization and refresh policies. These materialized views update incrementally as new data arrives, dramatically reducing query latency for analytical workloads.
Wen?
IoT monitoring dashboards: Replace expensive real-time aggregation queries with pre-computed hourly/daily rollups
Financial analytics: Maintain running OHLC calculations for trading data without scanning millions of tick records
Application metrics: Create efficient time-bucketed views of request rates, error percentages, and response times
There is no absolute success in the world, only constant progress.
Jonathan Swift
That’s it for today! ☀️
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See you in a week — Alex.
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