Good morning! The tech industry continues to experience a rollercoaster of hiring and layoffs, with thousands of new jobs created alongside significant job cuts in April. Stripe has implemented an innovative "idempotent API" to prevent double payments, ensuring reliable online transactions. Apple has unveiled "Pathways," a new self-paced learning resource to help developers prepare for WWDC24 and build skills across its ecosystem.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

How many jobs are available in technology in the US?

The tech job market has been a total rollercoaster ride lately. On one hand, the big dogs like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google made huge waves by announcing massive layoffs over the past year. But there's actually still an insane demand.

In April alone, tech companies went on a hiring frenzy, scooping up 18,795 new workers. That's the biggest uptick since way back in August 2022. But, tech jobs across all industries took a major nosedive that same month, with 99,000 positions slashed.

The unemployment rate for tech employees inched up to 2.3%. Not too shabby though, considering the overall national rate sits at 3.4%. Over 300,000 tech job openings were posted in April alone. The most important job openings for employers:

• Software developers

• IT support

• Data scientists

• Cybersecurity

And of course - around 20% of those openings are for artificial intelligence (AI).

So yeah, despite those headline-making layoffs, there's still a lot of things happening. Tons of companies are clamoring to hire tech talent, especially people with skills in AI, machine learning, and data analytics. They want that “innovative edge”.

See a Full Breakdown Here

How Stripe Prevents Double Payment Using Idempotent API

Stripe has come up with a clever way to avoid accidentally double-charging customers for the same purchase. It's all about implementing what's called an "idempotent API" - basically using special codes to identify each payment request.

Each request includes a randomly generated key that acts like a fingerprint for that specific request. Stripe stores these keys in a temporary database on their servers. If a new key comes in, the payment request gets processed normally. But if the key already exists in the database, that means the request succeeded before. In that case, Stripe just resends the previous response instead of redoing the charge.

A few more details:

• They delete the keys from the database after 24 hours to save space and allow those codes to get reused later on.

• When a payment initially fails, customer devices will retry sending the request. But they use this "backoff" pattern with incremental delays to avoid overloading Stripe's systems with too many retries at once.

So in essence, this idempotent API approach, combined with other safeguards like ACID transaction rollbacks, serves a crucial purpose: It ensures each valid payment request only gets processed once, no more and no less. That prevents those annoying duplicate charges that can happen if there are client/network hiccups causing retries.

The end result?: Reliable online payment processing that gives customers peace of mind their transactions are going through properly. A key bit of engineering to power Stripe's massive payment volume.

Read More Here

“Hello Developer: May 2024”

With WWDC24 right around the corner, Apple unveiled a fresh new learning resource called Pathways to help developers get ready for building across their ecosystem.

So what exactly are Pathways? Basically, they're collections of videos, documentation, and other resources curated for specific topics. We're talking stuff like:

• Swift

• SwiftUI

• Design

• Games

• visionOS

• App distribution

• Getting started as an Apple developer

The cool thing is Pathways are self-paced and self-directed. You can just explore them at your own speed. Whether you're brand new or a seasoned pro, they've got options to kickstart your journey or level up existing skills. And each Pathway covers all the key knowledge for its focus area in one convenient package.

Oh, and Apple also gave us some other doc updates too:

• A new framework for turning Pages, Numbers, Keynote files into PDFs to show previews in browsers

• Fresh guidance on writing ARM64 code

• Enhanced human interface guidelines for new tech like virtual hands in visionOS and other visionOS stuff

So as WWDC24 is approaching, Pathways seem like a chill, accessible way for developers to prepare and build up skills for creating awesome apps and experiences across Apple's whole ecosystem. No better time to check them out.

Read More Here

🔥 More Notes

• Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)

• Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT

• The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

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