[Dev Catch Up #46] - Time in Distributed Databases, Moondream 1.9B, Composable Caching in Next.js, Codegate.ai, AsyncLocalStorage in Node.js, and much more.
Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the trends including, a bunch of exciting developments and articles.
Welcome to the 46th edition of DevShorts, Dev Catch Up!
I write about developer stories and open source, partly from my work and experience interacting with people all over the globe.
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Some recent issues from Dev Catch up:
How to use Postgres as a Vector Database with BGE Embedding model
Apollo video LLM, Gemini 2.0, lla file explorer, Database migration
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Must Read
In distributed systems, coordination between nodes are required for satisfying some correctness properties but as it requires frequent message communication, there are performance tradeoffs that prevents node from communicating frequently. Hence, time-stamping events and ordering them becomes highly important. This article is the first of the five part series explaining the use of time in distributed databases.
Last week, Moondream.ai launched a new model Moondream 1.9B, that has made improvements around areas with structured formats and better OCR. It also includes a new capability of gaze detection alongside exciting benchmark results. Learn more about the model from its official blog.
Understanding the entire render cycle of React and how it works with a browser is not easy for a developer. Modern react documentation contains information about it with visuals but it can be confusing to someone getting started with it. This article explains the working of React’s render, effects, and refs under the hood.
Directives are compiler instructions that define where code should run, allowing the framework to optimize and orchestrate individual pieces for you.
‘use cache’
directive is a simple and powerful caching model for Next.js. It makes your application faster by caching data and components when needed. Learn more about this directive from this article defining composable caching with Next.js.
After this, shouting out a top open-source project is a delight and here it is:
OSS Highlight of the Week
In this week, we are looking at a tool that aims at visualizing your python code execution. Viztracer is a low-overhead logging/debugging/profiling tool that can trace and visualize your python code execution. This tool has raked up quite a number of stars in the recent times and you can check it out from its official GitHub page.
Now, we will head over to some of the news and articles that will be at a place of interest for developers and the tech community out there.
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Good to know
In a microservices environment, testing of user journeys that spans across multiple bounded contexts requires collaboration amongst teams and a clear delineation of responsibilities. This article shows how you can do end-to-end testing for microservices spanning round bounded contexts.
LLMs don’t possess or accept the formats in which most of the world’s data is stored. Accessing this data is crucial. While VLMs and multimodal models claim to fill this gap, there are a lot of discrepancies that led to loss in quality of data and high costs. To overcome this, FireworksAI introduced Compound AI and Document inlining, a system built on top of it that can transform any LLM into a VLM. Here is a detailed article on the technological development.
Since, we are in the age of increasing developer productivity with AI coding assistants, maintaining privacy and enhancing security is very real. CodeGate is local prompt gateway that sits between your AI coding assistant and LLM to enhance privacy and security by performing code security reviews, identifying vulnerabilities in package dependencies, and more. Learn more about CodeGate from its official documentation.
AsyncLocalStorage gives you a way to maintain context across your async operations without manually passing data through every function and thus, helps solve context management in asynchronous Node.js apps. Here is a detailed article on simplifying context management with AsyncLocalStorage in Node.js.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications are the new type that came along with the AI and LLM boom. Fetching contents for these apps can be done through scraping web pages but parsing contents from the page is a pain. Readability.js is a useful tool for extracting just the important parts of a web page. Here is a guided tutorial on cleaning up HTML Content for Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Readability.js.
Lastly, we will take a look at some of the trending scoops that hold a special mention for the community.
Notable FYIs
Developments in the field of HTML happen rather slowly than that of its frontend counterparts like CSS and JavaScript. This article wraps up all the developments for HTML happened in the past year.
AI agents are the future that will shorten the work of the developers and help end-users in their everyday work. This tutorial shows how to build an AI agent that automates blog post creation by leveraging LlamaIndex's document processing and agentic framework capabilities alongside NVIDIA Llama 3.3 70B LLM NIM and NeMo Retriever E5 embedding NIM.
Rust is one of developer’s favourite programming language that has made headlines several times over the past year. Here is an article showing great things about the language apart from its performance.
Development experience is improving daily and terminal experience for a developer also needs to keep up with the pace. This Julia Evans’s blog tells you all about the modern terminal experience.
DSQL is Amazon’s new serverless PostgreSQL-compatible datastore. It is highly available, durable, and consistent with the ability to withstand infrastructure failures and network partitions. Get more details about Aurora DSQL from Marc Brooker’s blog.
That’s it from us with this edition. We hope you are going away with a ton of new information. Lastly, share this newsletter with your colleagues and pals if you find it valuable and a subscription to the newsletter will be awesome if you are reading for the first time.