engineering

Tom Stanton built a gravity-powered trebuchet that launched a projectile at 776 mph, breaking the sound barrier for the first time with a purely mechanical design.

Shopify engineering describes replacing Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations, using MySQL's SKIP LOCKED feature to achieve high-throughput scaling during peak traffic and eliminate consistency issues between separate systems.

This article introduces an agent observability and behavior tuning framework: adjusting agent behavior by promoting or demoting the resources it can access (tools, memory, subagents), and discusses lenses such as performance, execution, user alignment, and sources of evidence. From Alan Yahya of Lexifina.

Gergely Orosz highlights how Bending Spoons fixed Evernote's fragile legacy infrastructure, which ran on 750 manually provisioned GCP VMs and a Java 11 monolith, in about six months.

The author argues that AI agents are essentially API calls with loops, emphasizing that production success depends on defensive engineering like retries, timeouts, and human approval rather than model choice.

This page presents an unedited transcript of Buckminster Fuller's 42-hour 'Everything I Know' lecture series, covering his inventions and philosophy, with an invitation for public editing.

Ray Fernando shares a workflow tip for running Codex agents more efficiently, claiming it avoids messy output and saves tokens, and is used by engineers at top FANG companies.

An essay exploring why the bicycle was invented only in the late 1800s despite being a simple mechanical device, discussing hypotheses such as metalworking limitations, design iteration, road quality, competition from horses, economic growth, and cultural factors.

Engineers at Katalyst Space Technologies are working to stabilize their Link satellite after it spun out of control during its mission to rescue NASA's Swift gamma-ray observatory, using the spacecraft's plasma engines to regain attitude control.

Cisco highlights the concept of 'yellow teams' that combine security and engineering to proactively build AI defenses, as reported by Dark Reading.

An encyclopedic overview of the Pareto front, the set of Pareto-efficient solutions in multi-objective optimization, commonly used in engineering to evaluate trade-offs.

A free comprehensive course on 3D printing and additive manufacturing, covering core technologies, materials, design, and applications, is now available on freeCodeCamp.

Adam Mosseri reveals that engineering hiring has shifted from coding proficiency to judgment, with Instagram no longer requiring a full technical loop. He admits being a mediocre engineer, underscoring an industry change where tool judgment matters more than technical depth.

AMD and OpenAI engineers collaborate to share insights on performance optimization, featuring a behind-the-scenes look with OpenAI's VP of Compute Strategy, Sachin Katti.

A developer shares their experience of accidentally discovering 'loop engineering' while submitting 108 pull requests in eight days, highlighting a new approach to software development.

The article details how Douglas McIlroy compressed a 250kB dictionary into 64kB RAM for Unix spell using stemming, Bloom filters, and Golomb coding, achieving near-theoretical-limit compression.

Anthropic shares insights into the engineering challenges, architectural decisions, and agentic capabilities behind building Claude Code, their AI-powered coding assistant.

Tweet about neural control technology, referencing IntEngineering.

Elon Musk explains his decision to switch Starship from carbon fiber to stainless steel, providing a detailed rationale.

Elon Musk comments on the latest heat shield design for SpaceX Starship, highlighting improvements across flights 10-13 and noting that progress is being made.