Hey, I would like to personally thank and welcome everyone to this amazing journey. My goal for 2024 is to become a better engineer and build with the community. I hope this newsletter gives you exciting news and actionable insights to become a better engineer. Our collective aim is to become 1% better than yesterday.

Also, for all the motorheads like me, look out for a surprise in every edition.

Cheers
Anirudh 🖖 

Tech News

Global

The Best of CES 2024

Gist: Tons of crazy cool tech was showcased at CES 2024. From Pocket-based AI devices to full-blown washing machines with intelligence that can land two rockets on the moon. Check out the link to know more.

Rabbit AI’s iPhone moment

Gist: The startup has developed a virtual assistant that learns whatever digital errands you teach it. The interface is extra cute: a handheld device you use to issue voice commands to your bot army.

The year starts with the usual round of layoffs at big tech to please investor overlords

Gist: As unpleasant as it is, the year started with a round of tech layoffs. Though small, concerns are raised as it might lead to bigger rounds as the year progresses. Point to note, Google started to hire back in July, August 2023 after a round of layoffs in Feb 2023.

Personal insights to everyone reading:
1. This is common in tech, so don’t be scared. Expect things like this and be prepared.
2. Why can’t companies map people to other functions when they know that they are gonna hire again? (Well they don’t know that but they only come to know later and could be that they want fresh talent to work on the next big thing)
3. There will always be the “next big thing”, In the last couple of years it was crypto, and now it’s GenAI. So don’t worry too much about the next big thing. Focus on the fundamentals cause you can never go out of a job when you are strong with the fundamentals.

India

TamilNadu Global Investors Summit Highlights

Gist: Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Godrej, Qualcomm, and more pledge investments in 1000s of crores and 1000s of job opportunities. Lots of new tech innovations were showcased.

Byju’s valuation dropped from $22 Billion to $1 Billion

Gist: BlackRock, the World’s largest private investor group has dropped the value of Bjyus stock by almost 90%. This turmoil has been happening for a while now at Byju’s. Their strategy to make some money before shutting for good will be to sell Aakash Educational Services Ltd. (NEET prep coaching) and Epic! (Education platform for under 12yr kids) as these are money-making assets.

Open source Github Repos

Awesome Interview Questions

Gist: Awesome list of curated interview questions for many languages.

Better Commits

Gist: Better Commits is a CLI tool that generates conventional commits through prompts, ensuring consistent, high-quality commit messages by inferring the ticket and commit type from the branch.

Turbo

Gist: Incremental bundler and build a system optimized for JavaScript and TypeScript, written in Rust – including Turbopack and Turborepo.

Bun

Gist: Next-generation Javascript runtime. Incredibly fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager – all in one.

Shadcn/ui

Beautifully designed components that you can copy and paste into your apps. Accessible. Customizable. Open Source.

Find the output

What’s the output of the following Javascript code? The answer will be revealed in the next edition.

var a = 1
function foo(){
 var a = 2
 console.log(a)
}
foo()
console.log(a);

Though provoking thread

Google is eating the internet!!!

In this thread, Emmet Shear (Founder and CEO of Justin.tv, Ex CEO of Twitch) talks about how Google killed many businesses. More importantly how consumer behavior is shifting to a biased state. For example, when you start using social media apps, the algorithm doesn’t know who you are but once you like and engage with content, it understands your personality and suggests more such content. But the dark side of this tale is that we become more biased and marginalized than ever. As we see more content that our brain likes, we reject other premises, which leads to a bigger gap in society than ever before.

Question for you as a reader:
How many times have you seen content on social media that is opposite of your view?
Will you be open to conversations that oppose your view?
Are you a person that acts more on merit than personal bias?

Interesting Engineering blog

Indies

Weird Things Engineers Believe About Web Development (15 mins)

Gist: Common developer myths like web browser engineers have extensive knowledge of web development, web specification creators possess a deep understanding of web development, web developers are experts in web development, etc are discussed in the blog.

Rising stars - Javascript 2023(10 mins)

Gist: List of popular projects and trends in the javascript ecosystem. In 2023, projects like shadcn/ui, Bun, Excalidraw, and Next.js were very prominent. React continues to be the most-used front-end framework, while HTMX and Svelte are growing as popular alternatives.

Interview: Can You Stop “forEach” in JavaScript?(5 mins)

Gist: Think a little bit about how you would before diving into this article to find the hilarious answer. 😉 

Judicious JSON (20 mins)

Gist: JSON is much deeper than it seems. Engineers working with it should know about the 2 major specifications and the differences between them.

Big tech

How Lyft processes Terabytes of real-time data

Beginner-friendly post: https://blog.quastor.org/p/lyft-processes-terabytes-real-time-data

Gist: This blog post explains how Druid has been used at Lyft and what led them to adopt ClickHouse for their sub-second analytic system.

How Discord modernized MFA with WebAuthn

Gist: WebAuthn is an API supporting public key cryptography, implemented across all major browsers and devices. The blog covers three major benefits of WebAuthn: its resistance to phishing, inability to be guessed, and ease of use.

Coding Challenge

Create your own wc tool

Credits - John Crickett

This is a default tool that comes with any Linux-based OS. It gives you the count of bytes, characters, words, and lines based on the arguments passed. Check out the link for more details.
Personal suggestion: Try this challenge with rust. Even though I haven’t personally used rust, I have heard great things about rust, especially with CLIs. Give it a shot and let me know your thoughts.

Cool Car Wallpaper

Job board - India

Big Tech

Product Development Engineer 2 - Razorpay

Gist: Banglore, onsite, full-time, 3+ years experience, Frontend centric role, knowledge of backend will be a plus, Open source contributions will be a great plus.

Software Engineer 1 - Microsoft

Gist: Hyderabad, onsite, full-time, full-stack role, Azure skills are a plus.

Startups

Backend Software Engineer - One2N

Gist: Semi remote, required to locate to Pune for first 3 months of tenure, no DSA/Leetcode style interview, REST API, OOPS, DB, and CICD.

Tech Events

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