Big Tech Digest #2
Tags: programming, news, newsletter
Published: 2023-07-04 14:07:55

Hi there 👋! Welcome to Big Tech Digest. This is a manually-curated newsletter that brings you a collection of links to the latest engineering blog posts from Big Tech companies and startups. Aimed at all Software Engineers (backend, frontend, data, DevOps, mobile) and AI/ML folks at any level, Big Tech Digest is focused on engineering problems and their proposed solutions at tech companies that I find particularly interesting. No marketing or non-tech stuff. [Subscribe now](https://bigtechdigest.substack.com/) to join our community and keep learning!

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### // 📫 Engineering blogs digest

Recent, selectively picked blog posts from tech companies’ engineering blogs.

- ⭐️ **[Netflix] [Ensuring the Successful Launch of Ads on Netflix](https://netflixtechblog.com/ensuring-the-successful-launch-of-ads-on-netflix-f99490fdf1ba)** uncovers best practices when rolling out new major features at Netflix **by Jose Fernandez, Ed Barker, Hank Jacobs**
- ⭐️ [**Expedia**] **[Understanding Real-Time Application Monitoring](https://medium.com/expedia-group-tech/essential-application-monitoring-metrics-a08519ecab9d)** explains how observability and monitoring improve operational excellence at Expedia **by Ritesh Kapoor**
- ⭐️ [**Airbnb**] **[Metis: Building Airbnb’s Next Generation Data Management Platform](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/metis-building-airbnbs-next-generation-data-management-platform-d2c5219edf19)** how Airbnb evolved its data catalogue into a platform for managing and governing its data warehouse at scale **by Xiaobin Zheng**
- ⭐️ [**Paypal**] **[Unlocking the Power of JunoDB: PayPal’s Key-Value Store Goes Open-Source](https://medium.com/paypal-tech/unlocking-the-power-of-junodb-paypals-key-value-store-goes-open-source-ee85f935bdc1)** is a new, extremely scalable and highly available key-value NoSQL store **by Yaping Shi**
- ⭐️ **[Netflix] [Migrating Netflix to GraphQL Safely](https://netflixtechblog.com/migrating-netflix-to-graphql-safely-8e1e4d4f1e72)** discusses no-downtime migration to GraphQL at Netflix **by Jennifer Shin, Tejas Shikhare, Will Emmanuel**
- ⭐️ **[Cloudflare]** **[Examining HTTP/3 usage one year on](https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-usage-one-year-on/) by David Belson and Lucas Pardue**
- ⭐️ [**Etsy**] **[Building Etsy’s Search by Image Feature](https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/from-image-classification-to-multitask-modeling-building-etsys-search-by-image-feature)** describes Etsy’s journey to search by image feature **by By Eden Dolev and Alaa Awad**
- ⭐️ **[The Guardian]** **[Roll Over Rollups! The Big Future of Ophan’s Historical Data](https://www.theguardian.com/info/2023/jun/07/roll-over-rollups-the-big-future-of-ophans-historical-data)** how the Guardian’s real-time analytics tool pivoted from ElasticSearch Rollups to BigQuery and what we learnt along the way **by Sam Hession**
- ⭐️ **[Cockroachlabs]** **[Data loss prevention during outages (you might be losing data without knowing it)](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/data-loss-prevention-during-outages-you-might-be-losing-data-without-knowing-it/)** discusses the tradeoffs between synchronous and asynchronous replication **by Charlie Custer and John Sheaffer**
- ⭐️ **[Confluent]** **[GPT-4 + Streaming Data = Real-Time Generative AI](https://www.confluent.io/blog/chatgpt-and-streaming-data-for-real-time-generative-ai/)** describes a framework for how streaming and GPT can work together **by Michael Drogalis**
- ⭐️ [**Angular**] **[Angular at Google I/O 2023](https://blog.angular.io/angular-at-google-i-o-2023-ed800269070e) by Emma Twersky**

### // **⭐️** Misc

a.k.a. the nerd section 🧑‍💻!

- ⭐️ **[Memory Allocation](https://samwho.dev/memory-allocation/)** is a brilliant ELI5-style introduction to memory allocation with *malloc* and *free* **by** **Sam Rose**
- ⭐️ **[View Counting at Reddit](https://www.redditinc.com/blog/view-counting-at-reddit)** explains the magic behind post view counting at scale using [Hyper Log Log](https://engineering.fb.com/2018/12/13/data-infrastructure/hyperloglog/) **by Krishnan Chandra**
- ⭐️ **[The HTTP crash course nobody asked for](https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-http-crash-course-nobody-asked-for)** is a comprehensive explanation of HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 mechanics with examples in Rust **by Amos**

**Thanks for reading Big Tech Digest!**

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💡 **Subscribe to the [official newsletter here](https://bigtechdigest.substack.com/) to receive one email every two weeks!**

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