A Byte of Coding Issue 398

Howdy,

I shared a little SQL snippet yesterday for determining what tables in your postgres database are taking up the most space. It was useful for determining what data I could skip exporting for a dev environment (or prod database is ~100GB, which isn’t huge, but a bit inconvenient to work with). I’d be curious to hear how people handle dev databases in these kinds of situations.

Anyway, here’s the issue.

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The evolution of Figma’s mobile engine: Compiling away our custom programming language

Published: 1 May 2024

Tags: typescript

Brandon Lin illuminates how Figma migrated from using their custom language Skew to industry standard TypeScript.

Some highlights:

• Switched because it was hard to ramp on talent and was missing a developer ecosystem.

• Migration became possible because more mobile browsers started supporting WebAssembly.

• The process was broken into three steps, write skew → build skew, write skew → build typescript, write typescript → build typescript

The business of wallets

Published: 30 April 2024

Tags: finance, business

Patrick McKenzie explores the economics and functionality of electronic wallets, detailing how they manage money transfers within their ecosystems and generate revenue through both transaction fees and interest on stored funds.

Some highlights:

• Wallets like PayPal earn money by charging fees on transactions and earning interest on customer balances.

• The business model for wallets involves reducing transaction costs within their ecosystem while monetizing both deposits and withdrawals.

• Discusses how electronic wallets have evolved from simply safeguarding money to becoming complex financial tools with broad applications.

The Developer's Guide to Domain Verification

Published: 15 November 2024

Tags: sponsored, networking, auth, dns

WorkOS’ 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

There are Only Four Billion Floats–So Test Them All!

Published: 27 January 2014

Tags: testing

Bruce Dawson explores the idea of exhaustively testing all possible float values in programming to ensure the accuracy of functions that handle floating-point math, highlighting common errors and ways to correct them.

Some highlights:

• Demonstrates how exhaustive testing of all four billion possible floating-point values can identify and help rectify errors in mathematical functions.

• Discusses common issues with ceil, floor, and round functions that fail due to incorrect rounding methods or handling of very small numbers.

• Proposes that while conventional wisdom advises against exact float comparisons, there are situations where such precision is necessary for correctness.