Explore how we developed a fully local search engine for our memo website using DuckDB-wasm, Transformers.js, and Alpine.js. Learn about hybrid search techniques, real-time embeddings, and performance optimizations that deliver fast and accurate results without compromising on privacy or requiring server-side processing.

Building a Local Search Engine for Our Memo Website

Our organization values the research and development (R&D) efforts of our team members and aims to incorporate these contributions into performance reviews. It's important that individual R&D activities not only pursue personal growth but also align with our team and organizational objectives.

How R&D contributes to Performance Review

Dwarves Workflow

Structured Query Language (SQL) is widely used for managing data in relational database management systems (RDBMS). In the context of SQL, the optimization of database queries forms the foundation for efficient data retrieval, providing quicker response times and increasing overall database performance. One key strategy to optimize SQL queries involves the concept of "Sargable" queries...

SQL Saragable Queries and Their Impact on Database Performance

How Blue Green Deployment Helped Mochi

I18n Frontend Guideline

How Doordash designed a successful write-heavy scalable and reliable inventory platform

Case study: Write-heavy scalable and reliable inventory platform

I would like to introduce to you our new initiative called **OGIF** ,  Oh God It's Friday. Moving forward, our Friday Showcase will have a broader range of topics to discuss and share.

OGIF - Oh God It's Friday

These red flags are things we don’t want to see in our peeps. Even when you think they are improper, don’t waste your time with a wrong group of people.

Red Flags

Focus on shipping when you are struggling with what to do next to be better as a software engineer. When you ship something new, users will try out your build and give you feedback.

Focus On Software Delivery

In a recent post I wrote "Inner Circle", I expounded on the importance of contribution and value in relation to a person's work or performance.

Are You Helping

We measure what matters at Dwarves through MMA (Mastery, Meaning, Autonomy). This framework helps us evaluate growth while creating a culture where everyone can thrive and contribute meaningfully.

Use meaningful HTML elements: `<form>`, `<input>`, `<label>`, and `<button>`.

Sign-in Form Best Practices

We want to make impacts or influence people in some ways. That doesn't happen if we wait for the right moment because there isn't. Taking the shot means opening the door to mistakes and failures, and that's a good thing. We learn from them.

Beyond The Title

A couple days ago, I was asked if I were ever a product person, what would I do to make the best out of it. It took me a while. I mean, I've never walked in this shoe before. Wth is a product person? I wondered. And I started digging. Here it is, "Making sure your product/ thing shipped out flawlessly." A perfectionist mindset.

Go The Extra Mile

We can't always make things (or everything) on our own. If that somehow truly happens, then Inc, Corp, Enterprise or Group won't stand a chance with Freelancers. So why delegating?

Delegation And Believe It Will Work

It's in human nature to instantly lose their mind when things get hard, and somehow they split nasty things that can't be undone. So, to reduce the ratio of unnecessary conflicts, let's make the feedback great again.

Constructive Feedback

Bric A Brac

Burnout happens like burning the candle at both ends. But you get to select what time to pull the plug and replace with a new one.

Avoid Burn Out

Sustainable growth companies are built by teams of shining constellations rather than just several bright stars. It all starts with recruiting.

Building A Solid High Performing Team

The OKR

Performance is a final value that will be calculated from other metrics. This value will help to indicate how good all the activities we've done to make the company could grow.

Our Metrics For Performance Review

Considering Factors For Performance Evaluating

Being office-present keeps you effective. Firms lean on that. It explains why companies are down to invest a fortune on building creative office with other benefit packages. There's nothing wrong about that. I'm just saying there are others ways to keep people.

Make Remote Working Works

Blocking Distraction

Discover the technical strategies behind optimizing a Binance trading platform, reducing initial load times to under 1 second for enhanced trader productivity.

Optimizing initial load time for a Trading Platform

Optimize JavaScript performance with code splitting techniques like route-based splitting, lazy loading, and dynamic imports

Code splitting

Code splitting in React

An overview of RAPTOR, a novel approach for improving retrieval-augmented language models for long documents using hierarchical tree summaries.

RAPTOR: Tree-based Retrieval for Language Models

In this second month of 2024, we're eyeing on what's brewing in the tech market, what's happening in our community and internally, the newest topics we're looking forward to researching and putting on the field, and expanding our partner network.

What's New in February 2024

In December, we launched our Consulting Team, released our finding on tech trends, and last but not least, got everyone ready to wrap up 2023.

What's New in December 2023

OGIF (Oh God It's Friday) is our weekly casual office hours meeting, where team members unwind, share updates, and connect in a relaxed environment at the end of each work week.

Mixpanel is a powerful analytics platform that assists companies in monitoring and analyzing user behavior on their websites and mobile applications.

Mixpanel

WebAssembly (abbreviated *Wasm*) was launched in 2017 as a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format, so it’s fast to load, execute, and run with near-native performance.

Webassembly

The key to improving your website speed is to understand where the bottlenecks are, and how much time each step takes.

The fundamental of web performance

Layout Thrashing happens, when you request layout information of an element or the document, while the layout is in an invalidated state.

Prevent Layout Thrashing

We all know that for web applications, perceived performance is highly importance for our users. For data intensive SPAs with CPU-intensive tasks, the single-threaded nature of Javascript starts to hinder the application's perceived performance when you cannot fit those CPU-intensive tasks into a 16.67 ms/frame window (translates to 60fps). That doesn't even account for code execution time of frameworks (React, Vue...etc), which then leaves you with approximately only a 10 ms/frame window or less to complete all your tasks on the main thread to make user interaction feel smooth and snappy.

Mitigate blocking the main thread

React and Vue, two popular front-end frameworks, both use Virtual DOM to improve page rendering efficiency. Understanding the concept of Virtual DOM sheds light on an important aspect of performance optimization on the client side.

Why Virtual DOM is fast?

Zaplib is a frontend framework that helps to port your JS/TS app to Rust/Wasm. This idea was found after the founder's painful work at https://webviz.io when he had to use a bundle of manual memory management techniques such as ArrayBuffers, WebWorkers for performance optimization. Back up with the assumption that an intricate web app like Figma also uses Wasm, they thought there would be a lot of companies experiencing a similar performance issue with their applications and those companies would be keen on using their new tool to 10x speed up the apps.

Zaplib post-mortem

Here's another update from Dwarves for you. Throughout September, we have completed our bi-annual performance review.

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