Dev Catch Up

Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the last week

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Jun 23, 2023

Started in 2020, Dev Shorts, a newsletter for developers published more than #28 issues. Today we are introducing a new series aimed at developers to bring up to speed on the latest dev news from the last week(s).

Developer world is increasingly becoming simpler in tools, technologies and processes and it is becoming harder to track the same advancements at any point of time. The fear of missing out latest happenings is real, as the number of newsletters, newsletter platforms, persons of interest, technologies increase.

We at Dev Shorts, are hoping to simplify the same using this series. Catch all the action that happened in the recent past!

Must reads

🛢️Vector databases have been gaining some reputation in the technology sphere over recent times. But what is it? These types of databases index and store vector embeddings collected from a range of unstructured data like audio, video, images, etc., and helps in finding similar items be it an image or a text, recommend similar products, etc. Read more about it from this segment from Byte Byte Go.
🪲In the world of Site Reliability Engineering, there is always a confusion between an incident and a bug. Now, an incident and a bug are related to each other. But you need to know the difference between them to map out your response when tackling either of the two. While an incident is an unplanned event responsible for the cause of disruption of a system, a bug is a flaw or an error that shows an unintended behaviour in your software application. Luis Gonzalez sums it up beautifully in his article Incident vs Bug, where you can read more about it in detail.
🧑‍💻A buzzword that has gained momentum over the last few years in the developer’s circle is a term called Low code. It is a visual representation approach that involves less code with the help of using pre-built templates and drag-and-drop interfaces. To learn more about Low code tools and their benefits, take a look at this article from Sophie Becker posted with technically.
🏢Amazon Prime Video recently announced that they are shifting to a monolithic architecture from a serverless one. They were using Amazon’s Step Functions and Lambda services but faced scalability issues. In their own words, switching from a distributed microservices architecture to a monolithic application helped in high scalability with more resilience and a reduction in costs. Ian Miell writes more about this on the container-solutions blog explaining the whole move in detail.
🔍OpenTelemetry has been in the news this past week. It is a collection of tools, SDKs, and APIs that helps in collecting, generating, and exporting logs, metrics, etc., usable to analyze the health and performance of your software application. Folks at Uptrace built a monitoring tool with OpenTelemetry that can monitor the metrics of CPU, RAM, disks, etc. Get a detailed overview on this from their blog here.

Following on to the next section, we will come across some of the scoops that made headlines in the recent weeks.

Good to know stuffs

We know Prometheus as a popular and great tool for observability and monitoring. To use this tool with proper effects from now on, increase your Prometheus knowledge with Julius Volz from his 7 things you didn’t know about Prometheus video.
Service Level Indicator (SLI) and Service Level Objective (SLO) may sound similar but are actually pretty different. SREs scratch their heads daily bothering about these numbers. Alex Ewerlof writes about how these service levels are different from any regular alarms and whether they are worth bothering among other works here.
Parca is a continuous profiling tool from PolarSignals and has been gaining reputation in the cloud native space. The systematic way of collecting and storing computer profiles like memory, I/O, CPU, etc., is called continuous profiling. Cloud-native engineer and educator David Flanagan teaches everything about Parca in his Introduction and overview of Parca for continuous profiling video.
Observability and monitoring tools help you monitor and analyze the health of your software application or system. But there are potential downsides and pitfalls to these tools and also, there are imminent traps on the marketing strategy of the vendors to get you to use them. Avoid all these from having a detailed read from David Cauhill’s article on Observability and delusion.
There are several kinds of deployment strategies available to deploy your code to production. Learn about them from this video of Alex Xu.

In the last section, we will catch wind of some of the miscellaneous information that made a breakthrough in the past weeks or in general useful to the tech community.

Notable FYIs

The big thing this past week is the emergence of Apple’s vision pro and that set the company’s footmark in the virtual reality space. Learn about Vision Pro, virtual reality, and metaverse from this podcast by Eric Newcomer.
With conversational AI being one of the most discussed topics this year, the interest in AI keeps getting a surge. Tune into an exciting podcast from Latent Space on Debugging the internet with AI agents.
Notion just made a huge revelation by launching their new product Notion AI and people are visibly excited. Learn all about the new product from this podcast by Latent space, where they will take you to an exciting journey filled with tech and AI.
Organizations use the same sounding different storage solutions in the form of databases, data warehouses, etc. Learn about the differences between databases, data warehouses, and data lakes from Seattledataguy’s video here.
Documentation plays an important role while understanding a new feature, a complex code, or getting stuck in the midst of a hands-on. Writing one is never easy and as a result, Luca Rossi guides you on how you can write documentation in a proper manner from this article from Refactoring.