Scaling Your App: Horizontal vs Vertical — A Lord of the Rings Quest

·2 views

The Quest Begins (The “Why”) Honestly, I remember the day our little side‑project started to feel like a dragon hoarding gold. We had a neat Express API that served JSON to a React frontend, and everything was smooth until our user base jumped from a few hundred to a few thousand requests per minute. The CPU on our single t2.medium instance spiked, latency crept up, and users started seeing those dreaded “502 Bad Gateway” pages. I felt like Frodo staring at Mount Doom, wondering if I had enough stamina to keep going. The obvious answer was “make the server bigger,” but I’d heard whispers about

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

Get European job postings from an API in Python in 5 minutes

Disclosure: I build JOA, the jobs API used below. Everything here works on its free plan, and I ran every snippet against the live API in early October 2026 before writing this. If you have ever needed European job postings as data (for a dashboard, a research project, a job board, or just to see what a market looks like), you know the usual options: scrape career pages yourself, or buy a feed that is a mix of aggregator copies. This post uses the Job Opportunities API (JOA), which serves postings taken from employers' own career sites and applicant-tracking systems. We will write a small Pyth

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

AI quiz generators need tests, too

A quiz generator can return valid JSON containing two answer keys, repeated options, or a confidently wrong answer. Put a small, testable validation step between generation and editorial review. The useful output is a list of specific findings. Separate broken data from questions that deserve a closer look. This tutorial builds that distinction into a dependency-free JavaScript linter.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Running a 180B-Parameter LLM on a Laptop Without a GPU: VIDRAFT's POCKET-Darwin-180B

Running a 180B-Parameter LLM on a Laptop Without a GPU: VIDRAFT's POCKET-Darwin-180B TL;DR: VIDRAFT has released POCKET-Darwin-180B, a 4-bit GGUF-quantized, llama.cpp-compatible build of their Darwin-180B-RSI frontier model that runs on consumer hardware — including CPU-only laptops and mini PCs — without requiring enterprise GPU clusters. It achieves this through sparse Mixture-of-Experts routing and graft quantization, shrinking a 360 GB BF16 model to 111 GB across just 4 files while maintaining identical MMLU-Pro scores. For engineers priced out of H100 clusters, this represents a meaningfu

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Two AI reviewers, one Fastify PR, and a 404 that quietly became a 414

I ran two AI code reviewers from different vendors over the same merged pull request. One of them found nothing. The other found a behavior change that is still in Fastify today, and it was wrong about one important detail. This is what happened, how I checked it, and what I changed in my own tool because of it. fastify#6716, "feat: add support of onMaxParamLength", merged in May and first released in v5.9.0.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community