Read what ships.

21GitHub · migration

Improving site performance by shipping more CSS

GitHub faced performance degradation on server-side rendering and initial page loads due to scaling issues with its CSS-in-JS solution. The engineering team executed a multi-year migration to CSS Modules and eliminated dynamic styling props using incremental rollouts, wrapper components, and automation tools. This resulted in significant performance gains, including 55% faster server-side rendering and the complete removal of styled-components.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read4 weeks ago

FrontendPerformance

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22Sentry · practice

Should you use a log or a metric?

This post explains the distinction between logs and metrics in application monitoring, noting that logs capture what was true during specific events for debugging while metrics track ongoing numerical trends over time. The author demonstrates how to implement both using Sentry SDKs during a user signup flow and outlines criteria for choosing between them. The resulting takeaway helps engineers decide whether to log an event or track it as a metric based on the questions they need to answer.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read5 days ago

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23Martin Fowler · practice

The Craft of Practitioner Voice

The author explores a missing category of writing called Practitioner Voice, which is grounded in earned experience and visible personal judgment rather than academic rigor, corporate polish, or AI generation. They examine how AI can be used as an extended cognitive tool for practitioners without losing human accountability. Ultimately, the piece argues that maintaining personal judgment and consequence-bearing experience is essential for authentic professional writing.

DEPTH ■■■■■39 min read13 days ago

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24GitHub · architecture

Rendering huge pull requests in the GitHub Copilot app

Rendering extremely large pull requests with millions of lines and hundreds of comments requires separating deterministic code row geometry from unpredictable dynamic comment blocks. The team implemented an idle-gated measurement scheduler, separate height indices, and identity-based scroll anchoring to maintain smooth scrolling. As a result, the pull request view remains performant and responsive even under extreme loads.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read4 weeks ago

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25Amazon Web Services · tutorial

Deploy Oracle Database step by step on Amazon EVS with FSx for ONTAP

This post provides a step-by-step guide to deploying Oracle Database 19c on Amazon Elastic VMware Service using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as an NFS datastore. It covers provisioning storage, mounting datastores, installing Oracle, configuring SnapMirror for cross-region disaster recovery, and outlining four migration paths. The result is a fully functional enterprise database deployment that preserves existing operational workflows.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read3 weeks ago

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26Sentry · practice

How Etsy gets its mobile apps ready for peak traffic

Etsy prepares its mobile apps for peak holiday traffic through advance planning, operational guardrails, and risk management rather than relying on capacity scaling or the ability to quickly revert binaries. The engineering team utilizes a phased code slush, dual crash reporting, remote feature flags, and custom error tagging to surface and mitigate issues effectively under heavy loads. By connecting crash rates to business metrics and automating manual triage workflows incrementally, the organization maintains high visibility and reliability when updates cannot be instantly rolled back.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read3 weeks ago

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27GitLab · tutorial

Three developer tasks worth handing to an agent

The post explains how to use GitLab Duo Agent Platform features such as automated code reviews, CI/CD pipeline failure diagnosis, and cross-project chat. It provides setup instructions for configuration and outlines a consumption-based pricing model using credits. The features aim to automate routine developer workflows using broader project context than standard IDE assistants.

DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read8 days ago

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28Amazon Web Services · architecture

Architect highly available Oracle Database on Amazon EVS and FSx for ONTAP

Enterprises migrating Oracle databases to Amazon Elastic VMware Service face challenges with storage latency, disaster recovery, and operational consistency. The team designed a highly available architecture combining Amazon EVS bare metal instances with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP NFS datastores and cross-region SnapMirror replication. The resulting setup delivers sub-millisecond storage latency, preserved VMware operational workflows, and robust disaster recovery capabilities.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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29Martin Fowler · practice

Fragments: October 4

This post discusses the evolving role of software development and code in the era of large language models. It explores how shifting from deterministic building to inferential nurturing changes processes, why high-level representations remain critical for managing context windows, and how conceptual modeling becomes more important than the mechanical act of writing instructions.

DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read3 weeks ago

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30Amazon Web Services · tooling

Deploy open source Regional availability tools in your VPC

Engineering teams planning multi-Region architectures often struggle with evaluating AWS service availability and managing compliance risks. The team built and open-sourced two VPC-hosted solutions that deploy an automated Regional availability dashboard and a workload analysis pipeline using CloudTrail and CloudFormation. This setup allows organizations to securely filter and inspect the 20 to 30 services they actually use instead of hundreds.

DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read3 weeks ago

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31Martin Fowler · practice

Principles for effective slides

Presenters often rely on text-heavy slide decks that distract audiences and undermine storytelling. To fix this, speakers can use minimalist slides as a complementary visual channel to control the rate of information and manage cognitive load. This approach leads to more engaging presentations where visuals reinforce the spoken narrative rather than replace it.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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32Amazon Web Services · migration

Accelerating airline retailing innovation: how Datalex modernized with AWS Experience-Based Acceleration and agentic AI

Datalex partnered with AWS for a three-day Experience-Based Acceleration workshop to modernize its mission-critical airline retail platform from Java 8 and EJB2 to Spring Boot on Java 21. The team used parallel workstreams and agentic AI to prove migration feasibility, implement automated CI/CD pipelines, and integrate generative AI capabilities without disrupting existing airline operations. This effort successfully established repeatable migration patterns, reduced memory usage by 35%, and accelerated the timeline for long-term platform evolution.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read3 weeks ago

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33GitHub · performance

How we make AI coding more cost efficient without sacrificing task quality

GitHub optimized GitHub Copilot to improve cost efficiency without sacrificing task quality by evaluating changes across the entire agentic workflow. The team implemented four targeted adjustments including selective output compression, removing unused line-number formatting, shortening prompts via meta-prompting with behavioral tests, and delivering background work completions directly. These modifications reduced token usage and model inference costs globally without causing task-success regressions.

DEPTH ■■■■■9 min read7 weeks ago

Machine Learning

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34Sentry · performance

Application Metrics caught my broken size estimator

An engineer integrated application metrics into a client-side video conversion tool to monitor file size estimation accuracy without using invasive telemetry. By tracking key performance indicators and analyzing the metric distributions, they discovered that an AI-generated estimation formula was flawed and producing results off by up to 83 percent. Replacing the broken logic with a correct bitrate-based formula brought the size estimation accuracy to within five percent of real-world results.

DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read8 weeks ago

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35Amazon Web Services · architecture

Running multi-day AZ evacuation drills with ARC Zonal Shift

This post explains how to run multi-day Availability Zone evacuation drills using ARC Zonal Shift to prove application resilience under sustained stress. The team details step-by-step procedures across ECS, EKS, and PostgreSQL databases to uncover hidden failure modes like unoptimized scaling and stale connections. The result is a practical framework for moving from theoretical multi-AZ architectures to proven operational resilience.

DEPTH ■■■■■19 min read3 weeks ago

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36Sentry · tooling

Seer, the Sentry MCP and CLI, or your own coding agent: where each one fits

Engineers often struggle to choose between native debugging agents, Model Context Protocols, and command-line tools when integrating error tracking into their workflows. Sentry demonstrates how its debugging assistant Seer, the Sentry MCP, the Sentry CLI, and various coding agent integrations complement each other rather than compete. The resulting setup allows teams to diagnose complex application errors and automatically generate pull requests through whichever surface they prefer.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read3 weeks ago

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37Amazon Web Services · architecture

How MHK built a HIPAA-eligible agentic AI solution on Amazon Bedrock

Healthcare technology company MHK faced fragmented AI infrastructure and lengthy development cycles while trying to process unstructured medical documents under strict HIPAA standards. To solve this, they built a multi-tenant, event-driven agentic workflow framework called the SmartProminence AI Orchestrator on AWS using Amazon Bedrock, ECS, and SQS. The new system reduced manual review effort by 90% and shortened AI feature deployment times from months to weeks.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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38Martin Fowler · practice

Build your slide template

Presenters often struggle with the visual design of slides and default to cluttered or uniform corporate templates. To build a better presentation foundation, the author recommends sticking to a restricted color palette, limiting the number of fonts, and using minimal layouts without unnecessary floodmarks like page numbers or logos. This approach results in a cohesive visual identity that provides greater flexibility during slide construction.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read12 days ago

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39Amazon Web Services · architecture

Build adaptive AI interfaces with the AG-UI protocol, agent swarms, and Nova Act on AWS

AI applications produce variable outputs that cannot be effectively handled by static user interfaces, leading to development friction and poor user experiences. The team implemented an adaptive interface pattern using the AG-UI protocol, the Strands Agents SDK Swarm pattern, and Amazon Nova Act on AWS to dynamically render components and automate legacy integrations. This architecture streams agent findings over Server-Sent Events, enabling real-time multi-agent consensus and reducing interface development overhead.

DEPTH ■■■■■22 min read3 weeks ago

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40Sentry · tooling

Measuring the back/forward cache with Application Metrics

Engineering teams often lack visibility into back/forward cache performance because successful cache hits leave no telemetry traces and browser heuristics frequently change. To solve this blind spot, the team introduced an opt-in application metrics integration in their JavaScript SDK that models browser bfcache signals into hits, specific miss reasons, and reload durations. As a result, developers can track, query, and fix silent navigation regressions using customizable dashboards.

DEPTH ■■■■■6 min read4 weeks ago

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