Gemini expands free tier 🎁, UC Berkeley lecturer AI advice 🦾, “normal” engineers 🔑

Google is offering several new Gemini features for free, including personalized responses based on users' Google Search history ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR  TLDR Web Dev 2025-03-14 🧑‍💻 Articles & Tutorials Beyond React.memo: Smarter Ways to Optimize Performance (6 minute read) Many React performance issues are from unnecessary re-renders caused by state changes propagating through the component tree. Instead of relying on React.memo, optimize component structure by moving state down and using composition patterns to prevent excessive re-renders. This requires devs to truly understand React's rendering model and use the `children` prop to pass components, as it prevents unnecessary re-renders because React compares element references. A Software Engineer's Guide to Reading Research Papers (11 minute read) A good way to properly read research papers is by using a multi-pass strategy. First, get the big picture by focusing on the Abstract, Introduction, Results, and Conclusion. Second, go deeper into the remaining sections, noting unfamiliar terms and references. Lastly, conduct background research and revisit the paper to connect the dots. HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere (17 minute read) Despite standardization and browser support, HTTP/3 adoption is uneven, which creates a divide between hyperscale and long-tail web users. Hyperscale companies are implementing HTTP/3 and QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) for performance gains, while standard libraries and open-source tools lack support. This fragmentation is partly due to OpenSSL's incompatible QUIC API. 🧠 Opinions & Advice Why "Normal" Engineers Are the Key to Great Teams (10 minute read) Focusing on individual brilliance, such as on mythical "10x engineers," distracts from building effective systems that allow "normal" engineers to contribute meaningfully. A great engineering organization empowers average engineers to consistently deliver value, make progress for the business, and eventually be world-class talent. As an engineer, I'd rather be called stupid than stay silent (8 minute read) Embracing vulnerability and asking "stupid" questions is necessary for growth in an engineering career. Staying silent out of fear can lead to miscommunication, delays, and suboptimal work, negatively impacting both individual performance and team efficiency. 🚀 Launches & Tools How well can you spot & fix vulnerabilities? (Sponsor) → Take the Secure Coding Knowledge Assessment (based on the OWASP Top 10 and CWE Top 25) to see how your expertise stacks up. → Read about how secure code training unlocks developer potential on the Security Journey blog Google is giving away Gemini's best paid features for free — here's the tools you can try now (5 minute read) Google is offering several new Gemini features for free, including personalized responses based on users' Google Search history. Deep Research, an AI research assistant that generates detailed reports, is also now free. Gemini can now connect with Google apps like Calendar, Notes, and Tasks, allowing for complex multi-app requests. It is expanding to Google Photos soon. Custom AI assistants called Gems are being rolled out for free. Avid (Website) Avid is an AI-powered platform that allows users to quickly and easily create mobile apps in Flutter with prompting. Carbon (GitHub Repo) The Carbon Design System is an open-source design system by IBM. This repository has working code, design tools, resources, and guidelines for building UIs. 🎁 Miscellaneous How Engineering Teams are Using AI (13 minute read) Current AI tools are optimized for greenfield development and single-player workflows, which don't translate well to complex codebases and team environments. Instead, teams use AI as "augmentation" tools that help human developers develop faster rather than replacing them. AI helps reduce toil in areas like testing and documentation. IO devices and latency (25 minute read) Non-volatile storage has evolved from tape drives to hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). While tape storage is cost-effective for large-scale archiving, HDDs and SSDs provide faster access speeds, with SSDs eliminating mechanical components for lower latency. Cloud computing introduced network-attached storage, which is scalable, but introduces latency and IOPS limitations compared to directly attached storage. PlanetScale Metal is a hybrid, using directly-attached NVMe SSDs in a replicated Vitess+MySQL cluster to overcome the shortcomings of network-attached storage. Everyone in AI is talking about Manus. We put it to the test (7 minute read) Manus is a general AI agent developed by Butterfly Effect that is gaining attention for its ability to autonomously tackle complex tasks by combining multiple AI models and agents. While still imperfect, it's great for tasks like research and analysis. It gives users a collaborative, transparent experience with the ability to intervene in its process. ⚡ Quick Links I'm teaching databases this semester at Berkeley (2 minute read) A UC Berkeley lecturer suspects students are excessively using ChatGPT for coding assignments, leading to a lack of debugging skills, lower exam scores, and ultimately jeopardizing their future careers by hurting their ability to handle complex, real-world problems that AI cannot solve. OpenAI Asks White House for Relief From State AI Rules (3 minute read) OpenAI is urging the Trump administration to offer AI companies relief from state regulations in exchange for voluntarily sharing their AI models with the federal government. Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Actually Failing (3 minute read) Teams that prioritize harmony over honest communication often fail because they avoid the productive conflict necessary for critical thinking and improvement. How The New York Times systematically migrated from Enzyme into React Testing Library (7 minute read) The New York Times migrated from Enzyme to React Testing Library using a piecemeal approach, starting with simple files and building momentum over time. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/d0af4569/3 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of web developers and engineering decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Priyam Mohanty, Jenny Xu & Ceora Ford Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR Web Dev isn't for you, please unsubscribe.