~betterdevlink | Issues #273 Jan 12, 2025 (25)

Pixel Federation Swaps Amazon MSK for WarpStream, Saves 83% on Apache Kafka Costs The video game company Pixel Federation uses Kafka as the message bus to power its real-time data streaming infrastructure. However, they were leveraging Amazon MSK and their bill was growing faster than their data volumes and they had to use complex networking like VPC peering. By switching to WarpStream, they saved...

Operating System in 1,000 Lines build a small operating system from scratch, step by step. You might get intimidated when you hear OS or kernel development, the basic functions of an OS (especially the kernel) are surprisingly simple. Even Linux, which is often cited as a huge open-source software, was only 8,413 lines in version 0.01. Today’s Linux kernel is overwhelmingly large, but it...

A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions So without further ado, I present to you … Regex Chess: sequence of 84,688 regular expressions that, when executed in order, will play a (valid; not entirely terrible) move given a chess board as input.

Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases Working in large established codebases is one of the hardest things to learn as a software engineer. You can’t practice it beforehand (no, open source does not give you the same experience). Personal projects can never teach you how to do it, because they’re necessarily small and from-scratch.

Seconds Since the Epoch People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00. This is not true. Or rather, it isn’t true in the sense most people think. For example, it is presently 2024-12-25 at 18:51:26 UTC. The POSIX time is 1735152686. It has been...

How NAT traversal works How 2 devices under a NAT can connect directly to each other without a server beind in the middle to relay traffic?

Linux Routing Fundamentals Routing table define what what happens when an IP packet is sent from or through a Linux box. But the simplify is which destination a package should send to? how do your computer know that a LAN ip need to send to othe laptop, and the rest go out to internet?

Writing a simple pool allocator in C When you need memory for your program, you can malloc. Similarly to malloc, a pool allocator allows the user to allocate memory at run time. The pool allocator, however, is much faster than malloc1, at the cost of having a fixed pool size. It allows the user to allocate and free memory blocks (referred to as chunks,...

Behind the scenes with Stream Live, Cloudflare’s live streaming service Stream Live accepts audio/video content from broadcasters and makes that content available to viewers around the world in real time through the Cloudflare network. This post look into how they build broadcast ingestion with RTMPS, SRT, WHIP and Spectrum. The data is converted and store in their Durable Object, then serve to viewer through...

B-Trees: More Than I Thought I'd Want to Know B-Trees were essentially “better” Binary Search Trees, with some hand-waving done that they had improved performance when used in database applications. But it’s more than just that, today we will look into disk constraint, slotted pages to see how B-Tree node fit naturally into a page - a chunk of data that the harddrive read...

Breaking Up with Long Tasks or: how I learned to group loops and wield the yield Arrays are in every web developer’s toolbox, and there are a dozen ways to iterate over them. Choose wrong, though, and all of that processing time will happen synchronously in one long, blocking task. The thing is, the most natural ways are the wrong ways.

rumale a machine learning library in Ruby. Rumale provides machine learning algorithms with interfaces similar to Scikit-Learn in Python.

go-haystack Track personal Bluetooth devices via Apple’s “Find My” network using OpenHaystack and Macless-Haystack with tools written in Go/TinyGo. No Apple hardware required!

MegaParse File Parser optimised for LLM Ingestion with no loss 🧠 Parse PDFs, Docx, PPTx in a format that is ideal for LLMs.

termo a simple terminal emulator that can be used to create a terminal-like interface on your website

vanir a source code-based static analysis tool that automatically identifies the list of missing security patches in the target system. By default, Vanir pulls up-to-date CVEs from Open Source Vulnerabilities (OSV) together with their corresponding signatures so that users can transparently scan missing patches for an up-to-date list of CVEs.

OpenGFW OpenGFW is a flexible, easy-to-use, open source implementation of GFW (Great Firewall of China) on Linux

Pig: The Postgres Extension Wizard Ever wished installing or upgrading PostgreSQL extensions didn’t feel like digging through outdated readmes, cryptic configure scripts, or random GitHub forks & patches? The painful truth is that Postgres’s richness of extension often comes at the cost of complicated setups—especially if you’re juggling multiple distros or CPU architectures. Enter Pig, a Go-based package manager built to tame Postgres and...