🍔🧠 Payments 101: Stripe's Protocol

PLUS: Apple's M4 chip powers AI 🤖, Database indexes 101 💾, Crawl websites into clean markdown 📄

Author

Alex Zajac
May 13th, 2024

In partnership with

Happy Monday! ☀️

Welcome to the 1902 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 🥗

  • 📚 Learn about Stripe's double payment prevention, dive into database index internals, and see Reddit's high-performance metadata store.

  • 🗞️ Apple's M4 chip tailored for AI tasks, Microsoft's AI model ambitions, Stack Overflow-OpenAI collaboration.

  • 👨🏻‍💻 Quick byte: Async iterators in Node.js streamline asynchronous data processing.

Reading time: 5 minutes

A few words from our sponsor this week:

An entirely new way to present ideas

Gamma’s AI creates beautiful presentations, websites, and more. No design or coding skills required. Try it free today.

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

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."

Henry David Thoreau

Mindset: Unwavering commitment to the process, not the outcome, fuels success - focus on execution, not validation.

Example: Apple's relentless pursuit of innovation, even during periods of doubt, exemplifies this mindset.

Action item: Identify one process you can refine today, and immerse yourself in its optimization.

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

How Stripe Prevents Double Payment Using Idempotent API

#45: A Simple Introduction to Idempotent API (4 minutes)

A detailed guide on Database Indexes

#10 System Design - Database Indexes

How Reddit built a Metadata Store that Handles 100k Reads per Second

We'll talk about the design of Reddit's Metadata Store and the tech behind it. Plus, how Python's Asyncio works, how GitLab automates engineering management and more.

My Mentee Went From Junior -> Senior Engineer in less than 2 years. Here's how.

An actionable plan for promotion no matter your level

The Anatomy of a Successful Team Squad

What I Learned from My Recent Experiment with the Spotify Squad Model

LUC #52: Strategies to Prevent System Misuse and Resource Overload

Plus, how modular monoliths work, principles of OOP explained, and how to use Big O to ace your technical interviews

How to Execute End-to-End Tests at Scale

Running E2E tests reliably and efficiently is a critical piece of the puzzle for any software organization. There are mainly two expectations software teams have when it comes to testing: Ship as fast as possible without introducing (or reintroducing) bugs

How to Use Your Mentor Effectively?

What was the last thing you discussed with your mentor? Was it a quick question about a task, or perhaps seeking feedback on a design document? While these interactions are valuable, they barely scratch the surface of what mentorship can offer.

The Essentials of Software Testing in 5 Minutes

Although I possess a Computer Science degree, I didn’t write a single test throughout college. Therefore I technically graduated with a whopping test coverage of 0%. I don’t recall the testing of software being covered during a single one of my classes. At the time, this seemed totally normal, but now it’s hard to believe.

💾 SIDE DISHES 💾

ESSENTIAL (AWS migration)
Lessons migrating from SAM to AWS CDK

ARTICLE (re-rendering)
Why does React even re-renders?

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

Brief: Apple introduces the M4 chip, optimized for AI tasks with enhanced CPU performance and a new Neural Engine, promising breakthrough products with improved speed and precision.

Brief: OpenAI partners with Stack Overflow to enhance the performance of large language models by integrating Stack Overflow's OverflowAPI, providing improved model insights, and attributing the Stack Overflow community within ChatGPT.

Brief: Apple is finalizing an agreement with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT features into iOS 18, revealing negotiations with Google for its Gemini chatbot and a significant move towards enhancing artificial intelligence capabilities in its devices.

Brief: Microsoft is developing the MAI-1 AI model, aiming to challenge giants like Google and OpenAI by creating a highly advanced and versatile AI system.

Brief: Google's DeepMind introduces AlphaFold 3, an advanced AI model predicting the structure and interactions of life's molecules, facilitating groundbreaking insights and drug development collaborations.

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

This week’s coding challenge:

Coding Challenge #61 - Dropbox

This challenge is to build your own version of Dropbox.

This week’s tip:

Async iterators in Node.js are part of the ES2018 specification and allow handling streams of data asynchronously using a for-await-of loop. This method is particularly effective for efficiently processing large or complex streams of data.

Wen?

  • Handling Stream Data: Ideal for applications dealing with continuous data streams, such as logs, network traffic, or large files.

  • Real-Time Data Processing: Useful in scenarios where data needs to be processed in real-time as it becomes available.

  • Back-Pressure Management: Effective in managing back-pressure in stream processing, ensuring that data isn't consumed faster than it can be processed.

Why?

  • Non-Blocking I/O: Ensures that the application remains responsive by not blocking the event loop while waiting for data.

  • Efficient Data Handling: Enables more efficient data handling and processing, optimizing resource usage.

  • Improved Scalability: Supports better scalability of applications that need to handle high volumes of data or traffic.

Burp-A-Laugh
The most important meal of your day

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).