A Byte of Coding Issue 379

Hey,

I had something I wanted to write about here, but it has totally slipped my mind as I created this issue. Damn. I gotta start writing stuff down more.

Anyway, here’s the issue.

Made possible through generous sponsorship by:

Interviewing Tips: Technical Challenges – Coding & more

Published: 29 November 2023

Tags: career, interview

Tobias Pfeiffer dives deep into how to interview for a technical position.

Some highlights:

• for any technical challenge, no matter how trivial, treat it like you’re writing production code

• always try to clarify details for any challenge

• generally don’t be an asshole

Inside an unusual 7400-series chip implemented with a gate array

Published: 30 March 2024

Tags: hardware

Ken Shirriff dissects “a military-grade chip built by Integrated Device Technology (IDT)”.

Some highlights:

• has 1500 transistors in an orderly matrix, but less than 20% of them are actually used

• it implements the "1-of-4" decoder function

• “discuss[es] why it sometimes makes sense to build chips with a gate array design such as this, despite the inefficiency”

The Developer's Guide to Domain Verification

Published: 15 November 2024

Tags: sponsored, networking, auth, dns

WorkOS’s blog “examines best practices to consider when building in-house as well as a simple alternative” that they provide when it comes to domain verification.

Some highlights:

• “Domain verification is a crucial security measure for SaaS providers, ensuring that services are securely delivered to the legitimate owners of a domain”

• “Don’t place TXT records on the root domain”

• WorkOS offers a simple API you can integrate with to do domain verification

Speed up PostgreSQL® pgvector queries with indexes

Published: 8 March 2024

Tags: postgres, ai, machine learning

The article dives into “using indexes IVFFlat, HNSW and traditional indexes” to optimize queries in postgres when you’re using pgvector for vector embeddings.

Some highlights:

• “embeddings ar a representation of a piece of information (such as text, image, sound, or video)”

• covers using distance, inner product, and cosine as similarity metrics between two embeddings

• “The Inverted File with Flat Compression (IVFFlat) index groups vectors in clusters”, whereas the Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW) index “creates layers of increasingly dense linked vectors”