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Backend Engineering Skills Are Emphasized Too Heavily for Principal Engineers

There is a bias toward backend engineers at the principal engineer level. This leaves frontend engineers heavily disadvantaged when it comes to promotion time.

When someone says they’re a fullstack engineer, what they usually mean is one of two things: 1) They’re a coding bootcamp grad that has minimal experience with Node.js and an emphasis on the frontend. Or, 2) they’re an experienced backend engineer that knows a little bit of HTML and CSS. A truly fullstack software engineer is a rare find.

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SLA and Its Impact on REST API Architectural Styles

Introduction

REST APIs are the most common way of communication between systems in current scenarios. Though many systems responses are time-critical in nature, where caller expects the response to come back for a given request in defined SLA (Service Level Agreement).

As systems are evolving and the wide adoption of microservices, the number of dependencies for a given microservice is ever-increasing, thus impacting the overall SLA. In order to meet the given SLA, we need to adopt different REST API architectural styles. This article discusses the old way of doing REST with a single bounded context vs. the new evolved way with multiple coordinating bounded contexts.

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Performance Optimization Techniques

Performance is an integral part of the Application design and plays a vital role in the success of your product/application. This is Part-2 of the performance optimization articles series. Performance optimization considerations for an enterprise-level application are discussed as part of Part-1.

Before delving into performance optimization techniques, let us discuss the factors that impact the performance of an application. Below are the most critical factors that impact the performance from my view.

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How I Used Brotli:11 to Get Even Smaller CSS and JavaScript Files at CDN Scale

This article is about my experience using Brotli at production scale. Despite being really expensive and a truly unfeasible method for on-the-fly compression at higher compression levels, Brotli is actually very economical and saves cost on many fronts, especially when compared with gzip or lower compression levels of Brotli.

Brotli’s Beginning…

In 2015, Google published a blog post announcing Brotli and released its source code on GitHub. The pair of developers who created Brotli also created Google's Zopfli compression two years earlier. But where Zopfli leveraged existing compression techniques, Brotli was written from the ground-up and squarely focused on text compression to benefit static web assets, like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even web fonts.

At that time, I was working as a freelance website performance consultant. I was really excited for the 20-26% improvement Brotli promised over Zopfli. Zopfli in itself is a dense implementation of the deflate compressor compared with zlib's standard implementation, so the claim of up to 26% was quite impressive. And what's zlib? It's essentially the same as gzip.

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WebAssembly vs. JavaScript

“Will WebAssembly replace JavaScript by 20XX?” This is one of those “sensationalizing” questions of the moment, right? But still: if we were to run a WebAssembly vs. JavaScript performance comparison, which one would be the winner?

And would we have the same winner for different implementations?