Techreport blog

Engineering Insights & Guides

The best problem-solving writing in software engineering — databases, performance, security, frontend and distributed systems, in one feed.

11,670 articles
Frontend — The World of CSS Transforms

The World of CSS Transforms

The “transform” property is such a powerful part of the CSS language! In this blog post, we'll take a deep look at this property and see some of the nifty things it can do.

JWJosh W. Comeau·August 9, 2021Frontend
Networking — Risk-driven backbone management during COVID-19 and beyond

Risk-driven backbone management during COVID-19 and beyond

What the research is: A first-of-its-kind study detailing our backbone management strategy to ensure high service performance throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic moved most social interactions online and caused an unprecedented stress test on our global network infrastructure with tens of data center regions. At this scale, failures such as fiber cuts, router misconfigurations, […] Read

MEMeta Engineering·August 9, 2021Networking
Performance — HTTP/3 From A To Z: Core Concepts — Smashing Magazine

HTTP/3 From A To Z: Core Concepts — Smashing Magazine

After almost five years in development, the new HTTP/3 protocol is nearing its final form. Earlier iterations were already available as an experimental feature, but you can expect the availability and use of HTTP/3 proper to ramp up over in 2021. So what exactly is HTTP/3? Why was it needed so soon after HTTP/2? How can or should you use it? And especially, how does it improve web performance? Let

RMRobin MarxRobin Marx·August 9, 2021Performance
Performance — New Nuxt Features past v2.10

New Nuxt Features past v2.10

Nuxt offers an incredible developer experience, with a lot of performance and application setup best practices baked in. In recent releases, they’ve been

SDSarah DrasnerSarah Drasner·August 6, 2021Performance
SRE & Ops — How we built a general purpose key value store for Facebook with ZippyDB

How we built a general purpose key value store for Facebook with ZippyDB

ZippyDB is the largest strongly consistent, geographically distributed key-value store at Facebook. Since we first deployed ZippyDB in 2013, this key-value store has expanded rapidly, and today, ZippyDB serves a number of use cases, ranging from metadata for a distributed filesystem, counting events for both internal and external purposes, to product data that’s used for […]

MEMeta Engineering·August 6, 2021SRE & Ops
Performance — Cloudflare Helps K-12s Go Back to School

Cloudflare Helps K-12s Go Back to School

Cloudflare is excited to announce our Back to School initiative that provides special K-12 Education pricing to help school districts stop cyber attacks while improving web performance.

NKNandini, Kristina WilliamsNandini, Kristina Williams·August 5, 2021Performance
Engineering — Release Radar

Release Radar

It’s been a busy time of the year for our Hubbers (GitHub employees). We’ve been shipping products, getting ready for launches, and taking some much needed time off for the…

MDMichelle DukeMichelle Duke·August 5, 2021Engineering
Design & UX — Usability Pitfalls of Disabled Buttons, and How To Avoid Them — Smashing Magazine

Usability Pitfalls of Disabled Buttons, and How To Avoid Them — Smashing Magazine

How can we make disabled buttons more inclusive? When do they work well, and when do they fail on us? And finally, when do we actually need them, and how can we avoid them? In this article, Vitaly Friedman will take a look to common usability issues with disabled buttons, how to fix these issues and when disabling buttons actually makes sense. We’ll start from the beginning, looking into when disa

VFVitaly FriedmanVitaly Friedman·August 5, 2021Design & UX
Security — Open sourcing Winterfell: A STARK prover and verifier

Open sourcing Winterfell: A STARK prover and verifier

We are releasing Winterfell, our implementation of a STARK prover/verifier to Crates.io Winterfell is an easy to use open source implementation of STARKs for security and privacy applications. One potential application for Winterfell’s zero-knowledge proofs is blockchain privacy and scalability. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Clarke’s Third Law What if the

MEMeta Engineering·August 4, 2021Security
Performance — React Children And Iteration Methods — Smashing Magazine

React Children And Iteration Methods — Smashing Magazine

In this article, we’ll discuss and learn about the use case of iterating over React `children` and the ways to do it. In particular, we will deep dive into one of the utility methods, `React.Children.toArray`, that React gives us, which helps to iterate over the children in a way which ensures performance and determinism.

AVArihant VermaArihant Verma·August 4, 2021Performance
Performance — Durable Objects: Easy, Fast, Correct — Choose three

Durable Objects: Easy, Fast, Correct — Choose three

When multiple clients access the same storage concurrently, race conditions abound. Durable Objects can make it easier. We recently rolled out improvements to Durable Objects that automatically correct many common race conditions while actually making your code faster.

KVKenton VardaKenton Varda·August 3, 2021Performance
Frontend — How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine

How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine

Embracing the fragility of the web empowers us to build UIs capable of adapting to the functionality they can offer, whilst still providing value to users. The User Experience (UX) doesn’t need to be all or nothing — just what is usable. This premise, known as graceful degradation allows a system to continue working when parts of it are dysfunctional — much like an electric bike becomes a regular

CHCallum HartCallum Hart·August 3, 2021Frontend