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The Daily Diff (tdd.cat): Newspaper-Style Engineering Digest, Optimized for Speed

2026-07-24engineering-digestnewsletter

The Daily Diff (tdd.cat): Newspaper-Style Engineering Digest, Optimized for Speed

Source: https://x.com/i/status/2080502866528342352

📌 The Daily Diff is Arpit Bhayani’s curated daily digest of AI, databases, and engineering stories in a newspaper-like layout. After rapid traction, he cut infographic weight ~18× and moved assets to CDN-backed storage with lazy loading to keep the experience fast.

📰 What it is

A high-signal daily site (tdd.cat) that hand-picks CS research, arXiv papers, and Hacker News threads so engineers can stay current without wading through noise.

☕ Why it exists

Built after Bhayani missed reading a physical newspaper—one always-open tab for AI and engineering while agents handle the rest of the workday. Initial launch took under three hours.

⚡ The performance win

Infographics were ~720 KB full-scale PNGs. Converting to JPEG at 90% quality and 560 px width dropped typical size to ~40 KB—about an 18× reduction.

🚀 How assets ship now

Images moved off the Vercel app deploy into object storage behind Bunny CDN, with viewport lazy loading so only on-screen images load until the user scrolls.

📌 What’s next

Relevance ranking and filters (e.g. Essential vs All) keep improving. Users already want progress, bookmarks, notes, an agent API, and search/chat on the feed.

Key facts

Fact Value
Product The Daily Diff (tdd.cat)
Creator Arpit Bhayani
Image size before ~720 KB full-scale PNG per infographic
Image size after ~40 KB JPEG (90% quality, 560 px width)
Delivery stack Object storage + Bunny CDN + viewport lazy loading
Early traction On the order of ~50 concurrent users; launched in under 3 hours

Details

The Daily Diff presents curated AI, database, and systems-engineering stories in a simple newspaper layout. It aggregates hand-picked research and discussion so readers get signal without drowning in feeds—built as the digital equivalent of a morning paper habit.

As regular use grew, performance took priority over new features. The paper-like infographics were the main cost: generative full-scale PNGs shipped from the app codebase on Vercel at roughly 720 KB each. Resizing to 560 px, re-encoding as JPEG at 90% quality, and moving assets to object storage behind Bunny CDN cut typical weight to about 40 KB, with lazy loading for off-screen images.

The result keeps the visual newspaper character while loading faster. Filters and ranking continue to be tuned, and early feature requests—reading progress, bookmarks, notes, agent APIs, and search/chat—suggest the core format is sticky enough to expand beyond a personal digest.

Sources