Issue #9
This week: From a bug that broke the internet to Big Tech promotion tips, AWS outage survival, performance hacks, and new dev tools
Trend of the Week
A Hidden Bug Just Took Down ChatGPT, Spotify, and Thousands of Websites
Cloudflare’s routine update accidentally woke up a sleeping bug that crashed their bot protection system. Major platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, X, and Spotify went dark for hours until engineers fixed it, read more…
Engineering Leadership
How to Actually Get Promoted at Big Tech Companies
A former Amazon VP who promoted over 1,000 engineers reveals the real tactics that work for climbing from L5 to L6 and beyond at Big Tech companies. He explains what leadership actually looks for when deciding who gets promoted and when to switch into management, read more…
Distributed Systems in Practice
How We Stayed Online During the Massive AWS Outage That Took Down Everyone Else
When AWS “us-east-1” crashed and brought down Disney+, Reddit, and thousands of other sites, this auth platform stayed up by using multi-region failover, edge compute, and smart health checks that catch problems before Route 53 does. They break down the math behind achieving 99.999% uptime and why you can’t just trust AWS SLAs, read more…
Performance Corner
Supercharge Your Ad Tech: Performance Tactics That Pay Off
This post breaks down simple ways to cut latency, reduce noise in logs, and tune caching so your real-time pipeline runs smoother. Perfect if you want faster delivery and lower costs without big rewrites., read more…
Tool / Library Spotlight
Brimstone: New JavaScript Engine Written in Rust
New JavaScript engine written from scratch in Rust, aiming to have full support for the JavaScript language. Brimstone is a WIP but already supports almost all of the JavaScript language (>97% of the ECMAScript language in test262). Not ready for use in production, read more…
Thanks for reading!