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Disclosure: This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article. Hello friends, System design ** and ** Software design are two important topics for tech interviews and two important skills for Software developers. Without knowing how to design a system, you cannot create new software, and it will also be difficult to learn and understand existing software and systems. That's why big tech companies like FAANG/MAANG pay special attention to System design skills and test candidates thoroughly. Earlier, I have shared system design interview questions like API Gateway vs Load Balancer , Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling , Forward proxy vs reverse proxy , and common System design concepts , and in this article, I am going to share with you the best System design books to learn Software design. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced developer, you can read these books, as you will definitely find valuable stuff. I have read them, and even though I have been doing Software development for more than 15 years, I have learned a lot. System design ** is a complex process, and you need to know a lot of stuff to actually design a system that can withstand the test of time in production. Software architecture is another field where you are expected to learn a lot of things. It's simply impossible to become a software architect by reading a few books, but if you have experience and a hunger to learn, then these books can be a gold mine. These books allow you to learn from other people's experiences. You can read these books to find what challenges they face when they design a real-world system like Spotify, Google, or Amazon, and how they overcome. Each story is a journey in itself, and you will learn a thing or two by reading and then relating with your own experience. I love to read books, and they are my primary source of learning, along with online courses nowadays. In this art

Your prompts are fine. Your AI output is still garbage. You write carefully. You're specific. You ask for the format, the tone, the length. Hit enter. The AI responds with something that sounds like it was written by a committee of lawyers having a really bad day. Here's what you don't realize: You're not telling the AI to do something. You're describing the problem, and the AI is solving for the statistical average. The fix isn't more detailed instructions. It's three examples. That's it. Three. Not ten, not one, three. This post is the complete guide to few-shot prompting — the single highest-leverage move in prompt engineering. By the end, you'll have a template you can copy into any AI and watch your output quality jump 5x. Prefer watching? Here's the 3-minute version Otherwise, read on — everything's below. Why Instructions Fail (And Examples Work) When you tell an AI to "be funny," it's working off a fuzzy statistical average of everything labeled "funny" in its training data. When you show an AI what you think is funny, you're giving it a precise pattern to match. Here's the difference: ❌ Instruction: "Write a funny one-sentence movie summary" Result: A lukewarm joke that lands in the middle of the comedy bell curve. ✅ Pattern: Funny summary of The Lion King: Cub loses dad. Cub becomes king. Funny summary of Finding Nemo: Dad fish swims very far for his son. Funny summary of Titanic: [AI fills this in] Result: Boy meets girl. Boat meets iceberg. Oops. Same AI. Different universe. The only thing that changed: you showed it the pattern instead of describing it. The Science (Why This Isn't Magic) Language models predict the next token by pattern matching. They've seen millions of prompt-response pairs and learned: "When a prompt looks like this , the output usually looks like that ." One example could be a fluke. Two examples might be a coincidence. Three examples are clearly a pattern. The AI recognizes the pattern and completes it. This is exactly how humans l

We’re calling for targeted amendments to resolve conflicts with open source licensing and align with international transparency frameworks while preserving regulatory intent. The post GitHub joins coalition advocating for fixes to California AI Transparency Act to protect open source appeared first on The GitHub Blog .

A wide day rather than a deep one — four separate threads across a few projects, each with a lesson worth keeping. I'll teach the patterns and keep the specifics generic. The through-line: make the system honest about what it's actually doing — which queries it fires, whether a service is really up, what a tool will do when you call it twice, and in what order a password change should land. The performance thread got big enough that I split it into its own focused post; here's the short version plus the three other threads. Thread 1 — Stop paying for queries you don't use A sustained sweep through an app (and the package behind it) hunting wasted database work. The highlights: Arm an N+1 detector in dev only. A query detector wired in behind an environment check turns invisible lazy-loads into a visible to-do list. Never in production — it's a developer aid, not a runtime guard. Unused eager loads are N+1s in disguise. Index screens love to with(['creator', 'approver']) for columns a redesign later removed. Not a loop, but the same disease: queries you hydrate and throw away. Delete the eager loads with no consumer in the view. Memoize per-request constants. A default-connection resolver and a sidebar unread count were both recomputed on every call. ??= once, reuse for the rest of the request. Collapse a dashboard's stat queries. ~20 count() calls became one grouped query per table, wrapped in a short-lived cache. A dashboard can tolerate being a few seconds stale; trade live-to-the-second for cheap. The meta-lesson: performance at this layer is mostly removal , and you lock it in with a Pest query-count assertion so nobody quietly re-adds an N+1 six months later. Full write-up in the focused post. Thread 2 — Health checks that actually check Here's a trap I keep seeing in "is it up?" tooling: the check verifies the record exists, or that a config row is present, and calls it green. That's not a health check — that's a config check. The service can be configured per

Performance work has a reputation for being glamorous — the heroic "we cut latency by 80%" story. Most days it's not that. Most days it's a janitorial pass: you go looking for the queries you're firing without realizing it, and you quietly delete them. That was today. One sustained sweep across an app and the package that backs it, chasing the same theme everywhere: stop asking the database for things you don't use. Let me walk through the patterns, because they generalize to any Laravel app of a certain age. First, make the invisible visible You can't fix N+1s you can't see. The first move was wiring up an N+1 detector in the local/dev environment only — beyondcode/laravel-query-detector . It hooks into the request lifecycle, watches your Eloquent relationship loads, and screams (in the console, or as an exception if you want it strict) when it spots the classic loop-and-lazy-load pattern. The "dev-only" part matters. You never want a query detector running in production — it adds overhead and it's a developer aid, not a runtime guard. So it goes in behind an environment check, registered only when the app isn't in production: public function register (): void { if ( $this -> app -> environment ( 'local' , 'testing' )) { $this -> app -> register ( \BeyondCode\QueryDetector\QueryDetectorServiceProvider :: class ); } } Think of it like a smoke detector you only arm while you're cooking. It's noisy by design — that's the point. The noise is a to-do list. Eager loads you don't actually use are just N+1s wearing a disguise Here's the counterintuitive one. We're all trained to fix N+1s by adding with() . But the opposite bug is just as common and almost never gets caught: you eager-load a relationship, and then... never touch it in the view. Index screens are the worst offenders. Someone builds a listing, eager-loads creator and approver so the table can show names, then a redesign drops those columns — but the with(['creator', 'approver']) stays. Now every page load hyd

If you write software for a living and you're considering a trip to China in 2026, the friction you'll hit is not what you expect. The Great Firewall is the headline, but it's rarely what trips up a first-time visitor. What actually breaks your week is the small stuff: a QR code at a noodle shop, a metro turnstile that won't take your foreign card, a hotel Wi-Fi that quietly drops every request to Google. This is a brief survival guide written from a developer's mindset: what's actually changed in 2026, what you can fix before you leave, and what you should just accept. 1. Visa-free entry now covers most Western devs As of late 2025, China extended its 30-day visa-free transit policy to passport holders from 38 countries, including the US, UK, Germany, France, Australia, the Netherlands, and most of the EU. If you're flying in for a vacation, a conference, or even a short remote-work stretch, you may not need to apply for a visa at all — you just need an onward ticket within 30 days. The catch: the rules per nationality drift quarterly, and the official guidance is scattered across embassy pages. I keep a more current breakdown here: FirstTripChina visa-free guide — worth checking the week you book your ticket. 2. The payment problem is the real "API" you need to integrate China runs on two payment rails: Alipay and WeChat Pay. Cash is technically legal but vendors below the level of a 4-star hotel will look at you like you handed them a stone tablet. Foreign credit cards work at airports and big chains; they do not work at the dumpling place you actually want to eat at. The fix that exists in 2026 — and that did not exist three years ago — is "Tour Card" inside Alipay and "International" mode inside WeChat Pay. Both let you link a Visa/Mastercard issued outside China and pay via the same QR system locals use. Setup steps (roughly): Install Alipay (App Store / Play Store, US/EU regions both work). Verify with passport + selfie (KYC takes about 3 minutes). Tap Tour C

I've been working as Software Developer mainly focussed on Java and builts many application using Eclipse RCP framework or VS Code Application. Almost all the time I had to deal with multiple large files (either read/generate/validate) them which seemed very difficult and some of them almost impossible as most of them would be dependant on each other and would be referencing each other (just like how java files work together). Now assume client1 requires the same content in multiple Json files and client2 needs it in xml files. We couldn't go on writing a different application or go on adding if conditions and blah blah blah !!!! Wouldn't it be easier if as soon as I execute the application it generates the content in whatever format I choose and also taking care of dependencies/ references (like adding import statements). Additionally integrate with features of IDE and provide proposals, perform validations on the fly. Rela World Examples : Try googling Arxml once (Trust me I've dealing with these files for almost 7 years and it's always a nightmare to debug these) Solution: Xtext framework In this tutorial, I will show you how to use Eclipse Xtext and Xtend to build a simple, readable DSL that automatically generates Java boilerplate for you. Fair Warning: There will be no running executions screenshots or anything. You are gonna have to run it yourself and check the results and of course questions are always welcome in the comments section. But if for some reason you are unable to replicate this then let me know I'll try to explain further. I believe the best way to learn is by doing it yourself. The Goal: What are we building? Instead of writing 100 lines of Java with private fields, getters, and setters, we want our developers to write 5 lines of code in our own custom language (basically you can create your own programming language with your own custom syntax), like this: entity User { var name : String var age : Integer } When this file (assume file extension

Yeti coolers are very nice and very expensive. Three very different models are on sale right now.

A few weeks ago I published corridor-lab — a Docker lab that proved a triage mismatch: a service that stores nothing sensitive can become high-priority because of where it sits in the path to a sensitive downstream system. The lab proved the premise. The next question was whether a tool could identify those nodes automatically — without manual path declaration, without value labels, from graph position alone. So I built corridor-id. You point it at a Docker Compose file. It discovers the topology, computes depth from exposed surfaces, and identifies which nodes expand forward reach into deeper parts of the environment. No asset-value labels. No sensitivity ratings. No human classification. Reach and graph position only. Then I pointed it at four architecturally different Docker environments. Two had corridor nodes. Two had none. Both answers were useful. But the zero-corridor results taught me more than the positive ones. What corridor-id does The tool reads a Docker Compose file and builds a reachability graph from service definitions, network memberships, and port mappings. It then orients that graph from exposed surfaces using BFS and identifies nodes that provide forward reach — access to strictly deeper nodes that the exposed surface cannot reach directly. The output is a ranked list with two metrics: exposure distance (how close to the surface) and forward reach gain (how many deeper nodes become reachable through this node). One command: python corridor-id.py docker-compose.yml No manual path declaration. No value labels. No configuration. From graph position alone. The four tests corridor-lab — segmented, depth 3 My own lab, five services across five segmented networks. The tool independently identified status-api as a corridor node — the same finding the lab was built to prove. Corridor nodes found: 3 → status-api Exposure distance: 1 Forward reach gain: 1 → log-monitor Exposure distance: 1 Forward reach gain: 1 → internal-admin-api Exposure distance: 2 For

Some days the work spreads across a few projects instead of landing as one big feature. Today was that — three distinct threads, each with a lesson worth keeping. I'll keep things generic and teach the pattern rather than the project, but the through-line is the same: move things that were hardcoded or ephemeral into something you can configure, repeat, and trust. Thread 1 — Make scheduled tasks configurable instead of code-only If you've run a Laravel app for any length of time, you know the scheduler lives in code: routes/console.php or the kernel, a wall of ->daily() , ->everyFiveMinutes() , ->cron(...) . That's fine until the day an operator — not a developer — needs to change when something runs. Then you're shipping a deploy just to nudge a cron expression. Silly. Today's work pulled scheduler configuration into a settings-backed UI. The pattern is worth stealing: instead of the schedule being a literal in code, the code reads its cadence from a settings store, and there's an admin screen to edit it. // Instead of a hardcoded cadence... $schedule -> command ( 'subscriptions:reconcile' ) -> daily (); // ...read it from settings, with a sane default baked in. $schedule -> command ( 'subscriptions:reconcile' ) -> cron ( $this -> schedulerSettings -> reconcileCron ?? '0 2 * * *' ); Two things made this clean. First, a SchedulerSettings object (Spatie's settings pattern) so the values are typed, cached, and migratable — not loose rows you Setting::get('...') by string key. Second, grouping the more user-facing schedules behind their own modal rather than dumping every cron in one giant form. A subscription-related schedule belongs next to subscriptions; a platform schedule belongs in admin. Same data, but organized by who needs to touch it . The edge case to watch: a UI-editable cron is a foot-gun if you let people type nonsense. Validate the expression on save, and always keep a default so a blank setting can never silently disable a job. Thread 2 — A load-testing

The Steam Machine is here, with a base price of $1,049. Yes, that's nearly twice the price of a PS5, but what you're buying here isn't a console but a full-on PC - and a tiny one at that. Valve says it's selling the Steam Machine basically at cost. So we asked ourselves: What would […]

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