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Parties in Online Advertising

I am going to give a talk highlighting elementary concepts in online advertising. It is a good time to review all the basics. DSP Demand-side platforms receive an ad request that they must answer by a time set by the SSP or ad exchange. The time allowed can be as low as 100 ms and range up to a few seconds. DSPs decide whether they want to bid. If they do, they must select an ad, determine a bid price, and return their offer to the ad exchange.
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Beware of Backpressure

One of my junior dev was frustrated today. He was supposed to read from a file stream with NodeJS, piping that into the database. However, he got errors thrown everywhere when dealing with larger files. I helped him identified the problem. He had been dumping async calls (the database insertion) faster than the call could be handled. I remotely remember I run into a similar issue years ago when I wrote a web scraper in NodeJS.
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Compress Url Parameters Without a Storage

In advertising and other online marketing fields, a common practice is to distribute URLs to the clients so that they can report user action through a simple GET request.

Those parameters are fake. But you got the idea. Longer URLs mean higher bandwidth consumption. Moreover, if your URL is too long, you will risk triggering Error 413: request entity too large. I know nginx throws it.

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image from Purposed PHP Dialect: P++

Purposed PHP Dialect: P++

The first time I saw P++ my reaction was “meh, it is not going anywhere”. Anything breaks backward compatibility and abandons existing user base will get punished eventually. Python community took a decade to heal from the wound caused by Python3. In short, I believe it is not worth it to trade backward compatibility for language design purity. I also wrote a blog about Vue3 changes on its new functional APIs.
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image from Rethink The Clean Architecture

Rethink The Clean Architecture

The Clean Architecture is more like a fantasy. It is like a wonderland we will never be in. I would enjoy and appreciate a work where all business domains, application domains, and transports and UIs, etc. are all orthogonal. In reality, they are all wired together like a mess. It is no mess created by engineer though. The world is chaotic by itself, so do all the business around it. Imagine your boss tell your team to add a new button to your website, and you find your business rule doesn’t cover this button what so ever, so you have to update your JSON API, add new test cases, and add new event to your event sourcing bus, and change whatever is affected all the way down to the database level.
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