Arc Notes Weekly #74: Breakers
This week, we uncover the deprecation of HBase, slow internet got you down? We wrap up with what people have learned working with LLMs.
This week, we uncover the deprecation of HBase, slow internet got you down? We wrap up with what people have learned working with LLMs, and round everything else down with GraphQL is out of vogue (finally).
Enjoy this week's round-up!
— Mahdi Yusuf (@myusuf3)
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Articles
Evolving the Backend Storage for Platform Metrics
Go behind the scenes of Heroku's metrics infrastructure to see how they future-proofed their storage backend. This inside look reveals the challenges of scaling with self-hosted Cassandra, and the major benefits - from reliability to cost savings - achieved by migrating to AWS DynamoDB. Packed with valuable insights on evolving high-scale storage systems and key strategies for a smooth cloud database migration.
Engineering for Slow Internet
This first-hand account reveals how minor developer oversights - from hardcoded timeouts to unresumable downloads - can render apps nearly unusable in bandwidth-constrained environments. Packed with eye-opening examples and practical suggestions for making web services more robust and accessible on even the slowest connections.
What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs
Distilling a year's worth of hands-on experience, this deep dive reveals key lessons for building reliable apps with large language models. From crafting effective prompts to optimizing retrieval-augmented generation to implementing rigorous evals. A must-read practitioner's guide packed with insights for putting LLMs to work on real problems.
Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL
Discover the hard-earned lessons that changed his mind, from security pitfalls to performance headaches to architectural coupling. A thought-provoking reality check on the tradeoffs of GraphQL, grounded in deep practitioner insight and balanced analysis. Plus, a look at promising alternatives for those seeking the benefits of GraphQL without the complexity.
Composable Data Management at Meta
The blog post provides a detailed and insightful look into Meta's journey towards a more composable and modular data management architecture. The post does an excellent job explaining the challenges Meta faced with their previous monolithic data systems, the rationale for moving to a composable architecture, and the key components and design principles of their new approach.
HBase Deprecation at Pinterest
Pinterest recently completed the impressive feat of fully deprecating HBase from their tech stack. The article dives into why they originally adopted HBase, the challenges they faced scaling it, and how they migrated a massive 5.5 petabytes of data off it to their own custom storage solution called Zen. It's a fascinating read on the evolution of Pinterest's backend as they've grown to hundreds of millions of users.
Projects
ragapp
As simple to configure as OpenAI's custom GPTs, but deployable in your own cloud infrastructure using Docker.
How Large is a 160 Bit Number?
