BP’s Daily Digest: “But it works on my machine”?, “When it all falls apart”, GPT-4, and more
New writings to start off your week
Another Monday, another week. In this digest, we’ll see how to write a native Python extension for benchmark testing, walk through the tools you’d need to build a full-stack web3 app, take our TypeScript polymorphism skills up a notch, dig more into the world of Android and iOS, learn a new thing or two about the software engineering hiring game, and browse lots of code.
Programming
“But it works on my machine”? — We’ve all heard this phrase during software development. Ram Pasala and their team have built Neverinstall, a developer tool hosted on a cloud machine. It allows users to share the entire instance and replicate it with consistency — across machines. Hopefully, this tool minimizes the usage of that phrase.
When it All Falls Apart
It takes guts to turn around and say, “Okay, where is the screwup?”. You’re admitting that you made the mistake and that you have to fix it. That takes guts. And as a developer, we get paid to fix our own mistakes— by Jason Manning
From Data Science
GPT-4 Is Coming Soon. Here’s What We Know About It
Alignment: GPT-4 will be more aligned with us than GPT-3. It’ll implement learnings from InstructGPT, which was trained with human feedback. Still, AI alignment is a long way, and efforts should be carefully assessed and shouldn’t be hyped — by Alberto Romero
From Python
A (Simple) Native Python Extension Benchmark
I’ve set up a basic benchmark to test the performance of native modules based on Rust/PyO3 and Cython. For this comparison, I have developed the same algorithm using three approaches:
1. A pure Python implementation: the baseline of this benchmark.
2. A Cython implementation with type hints.
3. A Rust implementation with the PyO3 framework.
— by Matt
From TypeScript
Extending TypeScript Generics for Additional Type Safety
Some quick examples of how to do more advanced maneuvers by extending your generic types — by Jason Byrne
From Android
Activity Embedding in Android
This post goes over how
Activityembedding impacts app behavior on both small and large screens, how to add support for it in your app, and how to configure it and control aspects such asActivitylaunch and back navigation. — by Husayn Hakeem
From iOS
Animations Inside a ScrollView With SwiftUI
Delay playing animations until a view is on screen — by Sarah
From Web3
FullStack Web3 — Everything You Need to Know
We learn exactly how web3 / blockchain / smart contract applications work in the front end using HTML and Javascript. We then go through 6 different ways you can connect your Metamask, Phantom, or other blockchain wallet address to your front end. We’ll look at popular Nextjs / React packages to make your development lifecycle 100 times easier — by Patrick Collins
Ace the Interview Game
Hot off the press! Ishan Khanna has been interviewing candidates for senior Android roles for a while now, at Tinder. Without getting company-specific, he jots down his learnings in this Twitter thread.
Yet Another Guide to Technical Interviews
Tried and tested strategies to help you ace your next job interview — by Rina Artstain
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading.
