Derek Yu yuderekyu

Anti-hype LLM reading list

Goals: Add links that are reasonable and good explanations of how stuff works. No hype and no vendor content if possible. Practical first-hand accounts of models in prod eagerly sought.

Foundational Concepts

Pre-Transformer Models

Frontend Technical Interview Prep

EDIT: Well this has been linked now so just an FYI this is still TBD. Feel free to comment if you have suggestions for improvements. Also here is an unrolled Twitter thread of a lot of the tips I talk about on here.

I've been doing frontend for a while now and one thing that really gripes me is the interview. I think the breadth of knowledge of a "Frontend Engineer" has been so poorly defined that people really just expected you to know everything. Many companies have made this a hybrid role. The Web is massive and there are many MANY things to know. Some of these things are just facts that you learn and others are things you really have to understand.

Every time I interview, I go over the same stuff. I wanted to create a gist of the TL;DR things that would jog my memory and hopefully yours too.

Lots of these things are real things I've been asked that caught me off guard. It's nice to have something you ca

What forces layout / reflow

All of the below properties or methods, when requested/called in JavaScript, will trigger the browser to synchronously calculate the style and layout*. This is also called reflow or layout thrashing, and is common performance bottleneck.

Generally, all APIs that synchronously provide layout metrics will trigger forced reflow / layout. Read on for additional cases and details.

Element APIs

Getting box metrics

elem.offsetLeft, elem.offsetTop, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight, elem.offsetParent

OS X Screencast to animated GIF

This gist shows how to create a GIF screencast using only free OS X tools: QuickTime, ffmpeg, and gifsicle.

Instructions

To capture the video (filesize: 19MB), using the free "QuickTime Player" application:

	# This work with selenium

	from selenium.webdriver import Chrome
	from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
	from splinter.driver.webdriver import BaseWebDriver, WebDriverElement

	options = Options()
	options.add_experimental_option('prefs', {'intl.accept_languages': 'en,en_US'})

	browser = BaseWebDriver()

	node {
	echo 'Results included as an inline comment exactly how they are returned as of Jenkins 2.121, with $BUILD_NUMBER = 1'
	echo 'No quotes, pipeline command in single quotes'
	sh 'echo $BUILD_NUMBER' // 1
	echo 'Double quotes are silently dropped'
	sh 'echo "$BUILD_NUMBER"' // 1
	echo 'Even escaped with a single backslash they are dropped'
	sh 'echo \"$BUILD_NUMBER\"' // 1
	echo 'Using two backslashes, the quotes are preserved'
	sh 'echo \\"$BUILD_NUMBER\\"' // "1"

	brew tap homebrew/versions
	brew install v8-315

	gem install libv8 -v '3.16.14.13' -- --with-system-v8
	gem install therubyracer -- --with-v8-dir=/usr/local/opt/v8-315

	bundle install