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🍔🧠 Lyft's Ride to 21M Users: A Tech Dive

PLUS: Robotaxi unveiling this August 🚗, AWS S3 deep dive 🌐, and dynamic class creation in Python 🐍

Author

Alex Zajac
April 15th, 2024

Happy Monday! ☀️

Welcome to the 320 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. 📚 Terminal setups for peak productivity. Caching strategies supercharge app performance. Frontend interview prep essentials.
    🗞️ Meta's Llama 3 revolutionizes AI. GPT-4 Turbo enhances developer capabilities. Cohere & Azure launch enterprise AI model.
    👨🏻‍💻 Quick byte: Dynamic Python metaclasses control class behavior.

Reading time: 5 minutes

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

‘Software, like entropy, tends to increase over time unless it’s maintained.’

Robert L. Glass

Mindset: This quote highlights the importance of constant improvement and maintenance to prevent stagnation and decay in business.

Example: Pixar, known for its innovative animated films, consistently updates its software and technology to maintain its creative edge.

Action item: Review your company's software and technology stack today and identify one area that needs maintenance or improvement.

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

How Lyft Support Rides to 21 Million Users

#43: Break Into Lyft Architecture (11 minutes)

Tech Dive on AWS S3

A tech dive on Object Storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage). Plus how to avoid SMS fraud attacks, the history behind inheritance and more.

How I Setup my Terminal for Ultimate Productivity

#6 Software Development - Setting up the Terminal

Caching: the single most helpful strategy for improving app performances

In system architecture, caching stores frequently accessed data in a faster, more readily accessible location. This technique allows you to retrieve it quickly without hitting the original, potentially slower source every single time. The core benefit is

Dealing with Impostor Syndrome in the Engineering World

Practical advice on how to deal with one of the most common psychological states in engineering.

LUC #49: Unpacking Vertical Slice Architecture: Principles, Practices, and Potential

Plus, API security best practices, how terraform works, and ACID properties explained

The best way to prepare for Frontend Interviews (aff.)

The only end-to-end front-end interview preparation platform.
Brought to you by big tech Senior / Staff Front End Engineers.

💾 SIDE DISHES 💾

ESSENTIAL (mental health)
Mental Health in Software Engineering

ARTICLE (meta-learning)
Learning to Learn

ARTICLE (distribute it)
A Distributed Systems Reading List

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

Brief: Tesla CEO Elon Musk accelerates plans to unveil the 'Robotaxi' on August 8th, debunking rumors of a scrapped "Model 2," marking a significant shift in the company's autonomous vehicle program.

Brief: Spotify introduces an AI Playlist beta feature, allowing users to curate personalized tracklists through text prompts, enhancing music discovery and playlist creation experiences.

Brief: iOS 18 could introduce a novel 'Safari Browsing Assistant' leveraging iCloud infrastructure for privacy-centric data sharing, potentially requiring an iCloud+ subscription.

Brief: Cohere introduces Command R+, a robust large language model (LLM) optimized for real-world enterprise tasks, emphasizing efficiency and accuracy on Microsoft Azure.

Brief: Meta announces the upcoming release of Llama 3, an advanced AI model set to revolutionize services with capabilities like booking trips and shaping our digital interactions through sophisticated models.

Brief: OpenAI launches GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, combining text and image processing in one model, simplifying development for a wide range of AI applications.

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

This week’s coding challenge:

Coding Challenge #57 - Snake

This challenge is to build your own version of the classic game snake.

This week’s tip:

Metaclasses in Python are an advanced feature that allows for the creation of classes in a programmatically controlled way. They are used to modify the behavior of classes at the time of their creation, offering powerful customization options for class creation.

Wen?

  • Custom Class Creation: Useful in frameworks and libraries where behavior needs to be injected into multiple classes.

  • Automatic Resource Management: Effective in situations requiring automatic setup and teardown within classes, like logging or validation.

Why?

  • Enhanced Control Over Classes: Allows programmers to define how classes are constructed, and how they should behave.

  • Dynamic Modification: Enables modifications to a class before its creation, making it highly dynamic and flexible.

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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