Best of the Heap: First post of the past

We opened up The Heap, our space for user-contributed articles, a few weeks ago, and we’ve already got a few excellent articles posted. For a long time, this blog was something we put together ourselves completely, so it’s been nice to finally get some community involvement in creating articles.I wanted to take a moment to shout out all the articles we’re seen posted so far and encourage folks reading to reach out about your own. We’ve seen a pretty good range of articles, technical deep dives, interview advice, and thought leadership.Without further ado, here’s what we’ve added to the Heap recently.Alexey Saldyrkine walks through their new method for creating compile-time key-value maps. For folks looking to add new algorithmic tools to their bag of tricks, this is a solid one to check out. It’s full of code examples that you can use right now, and walks through exactly what each part of the code is doing.Anybody who has had to implement Oauth2 specs or use a flow created by someone else knows it takes a little doing to get the logic right in your head, especially if you own a specific part of the program flow. Here Srikanth Srinivas runs through what’s important for engineers dealing with the backend part of an application that uses an OAuth flow. Fun fact: I had to explain an OAuth2 flow from an internal spec in an interview once having never seen OAuth flows before. I got the job.Samaresh Kumar Singh, Principal Engineer at HP Inc., dropped this thorough bit of research on intrusion detection in the age of AI and how to implement SnortML to help detect baddies. This isn’t a promo for SnortML, as he goes through the missing pieces after such an implementation. It’s one of those great working-in-public pieces, the process and lessons learned after adding a new technology to a stack.While I first thought this might a tutorial—and we don’t do tutorials here—it turned out to be something much more interesting. Najmul Alam Miraj was building Chrome extensions and found that the MV3 update broke a lot of his code assumptions and behaviors. In the same way that someone puts a sign on a broken stair into the basement, Najmul wrote this article so you could avoid his pain.Everybody who’s shipping AI-generated code is running into similar problems. It looks good, but runs lousy. Priya Gopalsamy, a Senior Engineering Manager at Target, runs through the problems, then comes up with a framework for implementing guardrails that stop vibe-coded bugs cold. Who knew that CATS could catch bugs as well as mice?It’s no wonder there’s a lot of writing about interviews: the stakes and stress are high. Greg Hatchuk, the author of So You Want To Be a Tech Lead, drops a simple insight spoiled in the title (but explicated nicely in the body). As a bonus, this bit seems to be resonating with readers; it’s got more comments than my last article. Not bad!If you want to see your name in H2 the next time we do this round up, get started on your own article and reach out to us!

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