The Complete Engineer Newsletter - Edition 2

13 yr old broke tetris 🕹️, 3D displays from hydrogen red 🧊🖥️ and some undertaker memes 🧛⚰️...

Author

Anirudh J
January 20, 2024

Tech News

Global

Gist: A 13-year-old has beat Tetris. The game itself was released in 1989 by Nintendo. Nobody has achieved the score of “999999” except AI. I know it sounds simple but this is the first time this has ever happened 🤷 . Amazing stuff kid. 👍️ 

Gist: This article talks about how Nvidia has built AI into video game NPCs. This is great news cause no more corny dialogues and the characters will be memorable and will remember our previous conversations. Graphic cards are going to cry though unless we shell out for the new shiny Nvidia cards. (Nvidia stonks 💯 📈 )

Gist: The company behind Hydrogen Cameras is building the next generation of 3D displays. The article contains video snippets and photos of the display and how insane it looks. Go check it out.

India

Gist: Companies like Wow! Momo, Aqua Mobility, and much more were able to raise more investor capital again. Startup founders are optimistic about the investor prospects of 2024. Let’s wait and watch how this pans out.

Gist: Amazon has been accused of misleading users of its platform by selling fake ram mandir prasad online. Lol, amazon What? 🤣 🤣 

Gist: Tofee Insurance( Insurance for millennials), Morph.ai, and MoneyTap are some companies to look out for in 2024.

Open source Github Repos

Gist: 🤖 Chat with your SQL database 📊. Accurate Text-to-SQL Generation via LLMs using RAG 🔄.

Gist: Framework for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents. By fostering collaborative intelligence, CrewAI empowers agents to work together seamlessly, tackling complex tasks.

Gist: JavaScript library to zip and unzip files supporting multi-core compression, compression streams, zip64, split files, and encryption.

Gist: High-performance Node.js image processing, the fastest module to resize JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and TIFF images. Uses the libvips library.

Find the output

Answer for the last week’s question

Last week’s question 

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

Answer: The output of the code will be 

2
1

Explanation: In JavaScript, when a variable is declared as var inside a function, it takes the value declared inside and only lives until the scope of the function. Hence the first line is 2. And once the scope is over the value goes back to the one declared in the global scope. Hence we see 1 in the next line.
Kudos if you got the correct answer.

Question for this week 

(function immediateA(a) {
  return (function immediateB(b) {
    console.log(a); // What is logged?
  })(1);
})(0);

Though provoking thread

In this blog post, the author talks about the different reasons why employers prefer paying new hires more than the ones staying and how to overcome this.

Question for you the reader:
If you are offered a high-paying job with a bond for X years and you get to know before joining that the company routinely pays new hires more the the same role every year, will you still take it up? Are there any cases when you would feel money is more important than the feeling of being valued?
Let me know your thoughts as replies to this email or DM me on my LinkedIn.

Interesting Engineering blog

Indies

Gist: Node automatically runs a garbage collector which removes memories that have unreferenced data. But from time to time, even after the scope of variables, the reference is maintained which increases RAM consumption. This article discusses how to identify them and solve them.

Gist: Dynamic Programming is a method used to solve complex problems by breaking them down into simpler subproblems. Many common algorithms are the application of dynamic programming to specific problems, including Dijkstra’s path-finding algorithm. Quentin provides an introduction and examples.

Gist: AWS charges data transfer fees between regions and availability zones. By uploading data to Amazon S3 within the same region and then downloading it from S3, users can save over 99% on data transfer costs compared to standard methods. This article explains and demonstrates this cost-saving approach with real-world experiments, completing a $21.49 data transfer job for only 8 cents.

Gist: This thread talks about the various reasons why someone might not get hired. Also, what are some good practices and some speculations around job markets in the US, UK, and European countries?

Big tech

Gist: Apple uses FoundationDB and Cassandra for iCloud and CloudKit, their cloud backend service, running one of the largest Cassandra deployments in the world. This deployment includes over 300,000 instances or nodes, managing hundreds of petabytes of data, possibly extending to exabytes. Each cluster in this deployment can handle over two petabytes of data, and there are thousands of such clusters. This indicates a highly distributed and scalable storage system spread across multiple data centers.

Coding Challenge

Credits - Frontend mentor

Check out the link above to get the design files and what to build. You can use Shadcn or Chakra UI as level 1 with React. If you can do this with HTML, CSS, and pure JS, you are most likely a master of the frontend. Cheers 👏 

Cool Car Wallpaper

Modified VW Golf GTI MK2 by Khyzhl Saleem

Job board - India

Big Tech

Gist: 3+yrs, Route53 team, DSA, any backend.

Startups

Gist: Miko is hiring for a couple of roles but mostly 4+ years of experience. Roles with requirements like, Java, GoLang, and Flutter. (Mostly contractual roles)

Gist: SDE 3, 6-8Yrs, Java, Redis, Kafka, DBs, the usual suspects. Cloud expertise is a must.

Gist: Senior SDE, 4+ yrs, Any backend language, DBs, and batteries(redis, kafka etc), Startup experience is plus, Cloud experience is plus.

Tech Events

WTM X The Product Folks Offline meetup - 28 Jan 2024 - Chennai, India

ICST 2024 - 29-30 Jan 2024 - Banglore, India

NG-India - 10 Feb 2024 - Delhi, India

W3Summit 2024 - 8-9 March - Banglore, India

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We are at the end of the cone for this week. See you next week. Bye 👋