balalaika IT newsletter #10

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General

• Back to basics. Do you remember how NAT traversal works? David Anderson wrote a lengthy post with great visuals to remind you.
• Steve Yegge explains why vendor locks mixed with poor backward compatibility could make anyone question the benefits of a cloud.
• CockroachDB team recently introduced Pebble, an open-source K/V store inspired by RocksDB. Read this blog post to learn why they decided to do write it.
• Here is a great series of blog posts on implementation of Linux epoll for those of you who enjoy learning about kernel.
• If you're not familiar with Log-structured merge-tree data structure (aka LSM tree), but want to learn it, Tarantool DB team did a great job on documenting their implementation.

Java

• Java 15 is GA. It brings internal JVM changes (say, it disables biased locking), stable releases of low-latency garbage collectors (ZGC and Shenandoah), experimental APIs (such as Foreign-Memory Access API), and some more goodies.
• JNI has a fame of being "slow". But where the JNI overhead comes from and how critical it is? If you want to hear an explanation with all low-level details, here is a great talk by Cliff Click.

JavaScript

• Moment.js team now considers the library to be a legacy project in maintenance mode. It is not dead, but it is indeed done. Read more about the reasoning here.

React

• Animations can make a site stand out. Or, they can just as easily kill the experience. Prasanjit Singh presents us with the ground rules to master web animations.
• AVIF is a fairly new kid on the block and it promises us a new future of the leaner web with smaller images. JPEG is not dead yet, but we keep our fingers crossed. Here is a concise read from Jake Archibald on the new image format.
• Wondering how Facebook's Recoil works? Bennett Hardwick explained it for you in 100 lines of code.