Weekend Reading #72

Weekend Reading: A weekly roundup of interesting Software Architecture and Programming articles from tech companies. Find fresh ideas and insights every weekend.

This week: .NET unit testing antipatterns, Uber’s open-source uForwarder Kafka proxy, Pinterest’s real-time ingestion platform, and Allegro’s Lynx JS battle test.

Top 10 Unit Testing Antipatterns in .NET

👉 Handy if you want cleaner tests that are easier to maintain and debug.

A practical list of the most common mistakes developers make in .NET unit tests, such as over-mocking, large fixtures, and brittle assertions, with advice on how to avoid them.

Uber: Introducing uForwarder

👉 Worth reading if you build large Kafka consumer fleets and want simpler scaling patterns.

Uber engineers open-source uForwarder, a Kafka consumer proxy that simplifies async queuing, reduces head-of-line blocking, and boosts hardware efficiency while supporting gRPC interfaces.  

Pinterest: Next Generation DB Ingestion

👉 Great for teams building real-time ingestion architectures with change-data-capture.

Pinterest shares how it evolved its ingestion layer from slow batch dumps to a unified CDC-based framework using Kafka, Flink, Spark, and Iceberg. This improves latency, reduces costs, and enables broader analytics use cases.  

Allegro: Battle-Testing Lynx JS

👉 Helpful if you’re considering modern cross-platform frameworks for mobile and web.

Allegro engineers evaluated Lynx, an open-source, cross-platform server-driven UI framework, and compared it with their legacy solution. They found performance and code-reuse benefits but also limitations around SSR, platform integration, and maintenance.