🍔🧠 100X Faster: How Netflix’s ML Workflow Engine Works

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Happy Monday! ☀️Welcome to the 966 new hungry minds who have joined us since last Monday!If you aren’t subscribed yet, join smart, curious, and hungry folks by subscribing here.📚 Software Engineering ArticlesThis company literally solved the VA problemExperience parallel AI agents in new programming trendNode.js achieves 78% faster processing with buffer optimizationMaster your first 90 days with this engineering onboarding guideLearn to unlock Claude’s full potential for codingComplete guide to HTTP caching for better performance🗞️ Tech and AI TrendsMeta launches React Foundation to secure framework’s futureGoogle releases Gemini 2.5 with enhanced computer interactionBootcamp loses $23.5M after Reddit moderation attack👨🏻‍💻 Coding TipWhat on earth is “rendez-vous” cachingTime-to-digest: 5 minutesBig thanks to our partners for keeping this newsletter free.If you have a second, clicking the ad below helps us a ton—and who knows, you might find something you love. 💚Cut Costs. Not Corners. 🤖Economic pressure is rising,  and doing more with less has become the new reality. But surviving a downturn isn’t about stretching yourself thinner; it’s about protecting what matters most. BELAY matches leaders with fractional, cost-effective support — exceptional Executive Assistants, Accounting Professionals, and Marketing Assistants — tailored to your unique needs. When you’re buried in low-level tasks, you lose the focus, energy, and strategy it takes to lead through challenging times. BELAY helps you stay ready for whatever comes next. Download the guide free How Netflix Made Their Workflow Engine 100X Faster 🤌🏻Netflix’s data platform team recently supercharged their Maestro workflow orchestrator, reducing processing overhead from seconds to milliseconds. This massive performance gain enables faster development cycles and real-time processing for Netflix’s evolving needs in Live, Ads, and Games.The challenge: Redesign a distributed workflow engine to achieve sub-second latency while maintaining reliability and scalability across millions of daily executions.Implementation highlights:Stateful actor model: Replaced polling-based workers with in-memory state management using Java 21 virtual threadsSmart partitioning: Introduced flow groups to maintain scalability while keeping related workflows on same nodesOptimized queues: Replaced distributed queues with internal ones providing exactly-once publishing guaranteesGeneration IDs: Implemented versioning to prevent race conditions and ensure workflow consistencyParallel infrastructure: Enabled smooth migration by running old and new engines simultaneouslyResults and learnings:Dramatic speedup: Reduced step launch overhead from 5s to 50msInfrastructure gains: Deleted 40TB of obsolete tables and reduced DB queries by 90%Zero-downtime migration: Successfully migrated 60,000+ workflows with minimal user impactNetflix’s journey shows that sometimes the best performance gains come from simplifying architecture rather than adding complexity. Remember: if you want your workflow engine to be fast, keep your state close and your dependencies closer! Own Your Onboarding: The First 90 Days That Define Your Career A practical guide to shipping fast and making an impact from day one. (6 Min) System Design Interview Question: Design Spotify #93: System Design Interview (13 Minutes) How does gradient descent work? Node.js Performance: Processing 14GB Files 78% Faster with Buffer Optimization Learn how to optimize Node.js for processing large files: 14GB of data processed 78% faster using buffer streaming, byte-level parsing, and hash-based lookups. Complete guide with benchmarks, profiling insights, and code examples for handling 1 billion rows efficiently. A complete guide to HTTP caching Despite being so fundamental, caching is one of the most misunderstood aspects of web performance. Code Review with AI: Best Practices Practical tips to use the best AI-powered code review assistant ESSENTIAL (big tech wisdom)Scaling Engineering Teams: Lessons from Google, Facebook, and NetflixARTICLE (data team detective)7 Questions Every Data Team Should Ask the BusinessESSENTIAL (markdown magic)Spec-driven development: Using Markdown as a programming language when building with AIARTICLE (hack-o-scope)I’m Building a Browser for Reverse EngineersESSENTIAL (spot the difference)Diff algorithmsARTICLE (readme or readyou?)How to actually test your readmeARTICLE (claude’s secret sauce)You’re Only Using 20% of Claude Code – Here’s How to Unlock the RestARTICLE (elm-ental wisdom)The Discipline of Constraints: What Elm Taught Me About React’s useReducerARTICLE (python signals go ping)Why Reactive Programming Hasn’t Taken Off in PythonWant to reach 190,000+ engineers? Let’s work together! Whether it’s your product, service, or event, we’d love to help you connect with this awesome community. WORK WITH US 🔄 React Foundation Launches as New Independent Home for React & React Native (4 min)Brief: Meta transitions React and React Native to the Linux Foundation-backed React Foundation with a $3M commitment, bringing together industry giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Vercel to govern the future of the popular open-source framework.🤖 Google Launches Gemini 2.5 Computer Use Model for UI-Interacting AI Agents (3 min)Brief: Google unveils new Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model that enables AI agents to interact with user interfaces, outperforming competitors with lower latency and available through Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.🌐 Internet Archive Hits Historic 1 Trillion Archived Web Pages Milestone (2 min)Brief: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine reaches 1 trillion preserved web pages, celebrating with global events throughout October 2025 and showcasing how digital preservation has impacted research, journalism, and personal histories since 1996.🎯 Reddit Mod’s 2-Year Campaign Leads to 80% Revenue Drop at $23.5M Bootcamp (5 min)Brief: A competitor’s Reddit moderator position was used to launch a systematic attack on Codesmith bootcamp through relentless negative posts, leading to a $9.4M revenue loss and forcing its founder to step down, highlighting the vulnerability of companies to reputation attacks via social media.⚡ Python 3.14 Shows Major Speed Gains and GIL-Free Improvements (2 min)Brief: Latest Python 3.14 benchmarks reveal 27% speed boost over 3.13, with its free-threading variant achieving up to 3x performance in multi-threaded tasks, while the new JIT compiler shows minimal impact.This week’s coding challenge: Build Your Own Redis Real-world proficiency projects designed for experienced engineers. Develop software craftsmanship by recreating popular devtools from scratch. This week’s tip:Implement rendezvous hashing (highest random weight) for consistent load balancing that minimizes disruption during node changes. Unlike standard consistent hashing with virtual nodes, rendezvous hashing provides optimal load distribution without hotspots and simpler rebalancing.Wen?Cache clusters with heterogeneous hardware: Assign weights based on node capacity (CPU/memory) while maintaining consistency, avoiding the complexity of virtual node tuning in ring-based approaches.Stateful service sharding: Distribute user sessions or database shards where minimal disruption during scaling is critical, as only affected keys get reassigned to new nodes.Multi-region load balancing: Route requests to regions based on consistent hashing of user IDs, ensuring users hit the same region for session affinity while gracefully handling region failures.Imagination is more important than knowledge.Albert EinsteinThat’s it for today! ☀️Enjoyed this issue? 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