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Friday 19th January’s issue is presented by Clerk |
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The Most Comprehensive User Management Platform
Need more than just a sign-in box? Clerk is a complete suite of embeddable UIs, flexible APIs, and admin dashboards to authenticate and manage your users. Seamless SDKs for modern frameworks. |
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Measuring Developer Productivity: Real-World Examples — Gergely Orosz, Abi Noda
tl;dr: In this issue, Abi outlines the developer productivity metrics used at 17 tech companies, such as Amplitude, Etsy, DoorDash. He then dives deep into several companoes of varying size, notably Google & LinkedIn, Peloton, scaleups and smaller companies. Abi’s advice on how to choose your metrics: start with the problem you want to solve. Is it shipping frictionless, retaining developers by keeping them happy and satisfied, raising the quality of software shipped, or something else? Then work backwards from there.
Leadership Management Productivity |
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Unit Of Work — Andrew Bosworth
tl;dr: The environment you are working in has a rate of change (entropy) e.g. competitors, regulators, consumer behavior. The relationship between this rate and the unit of work you undertaking is critical to understand: (1) If the unit of work is bigger than the rate of change, then you will fall behind. (2) If your unit of work is smaller than the rate of change you are likely driving change for others. Sometimes you have an irreducibly large bit of work that doesn’t fit inside the entropy window e.g. a re-architecture. The likely outcome is that midway through the very expensive program you’ll find yourself having to start it over because the environment you are building for continues to evolve.
Leadership Management |
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Learning From A Strategy Project — Anna Shipman
tl;dr: “I was leading one of a number of engineering groups within a larger organization; each group had its own priorities, but most of them required delivery through my team; and we had our own priorities. So we ended up slowing each other down.” Anna looked to her managers to solve this before deciding to create the strategy herself. Here’s are some of the things she learned: (1) Even if you think you know the desired end state, take a smaller chunk and make some tangible steps. (2) Overcommunicate the goal and your progress towards it. (3) Focus more on bringing people with you than on getting a perfect answer.
BestPractices Management |
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Demystifying Project Estimation — Nicolla Ballotta, Jordan Cutler
tl;dr: “Estimating a project or the latest feature you aim to deliver holds incredible value, not only for the business your team serves but also for you and your team. In fact, estimations bring clarity and alignment, which are crucial for delivering quickly and with minimal stress.” The article covers the purposes and challenges of estimation, and gives practical examples and tips.
CareerAdvice |
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“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
— Pablo Picasso |
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Slashing Data Transfer Costs In AWS By 99% — Daniel Kleinstein
tl;dr: “AWS replicates S3 data between availability zones for you - whatever this might cost AWS is hidden away in the storage costs you pay for your data. So at its most fundamental level, this method is unlocking free cross-AZ costs - because you’ve effectively already paid for the cross-AZ cost when you uploaded your data to S3! Indeed, if you were to leave your data stored in S3, you’d end up paying significantly more than the cross-AZ cost - but by deleting it immediately after transferring it, you unlock the 99% savings we were going for.”
Pricing AWS |
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Turing Completeness — Vijay Ramamurthy
tl;dr: Polar, a language designed for permissions, is not Turing complete. That's a good thing because you need your permissions queries to be low latency and not run forever. Read our proof on why Polar isn't Turing complete and why that's a good thing.
Promoted by Oso LanguageDesign |
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Why Lowercase Letters Save Data
tl;dr: “I took the front page of Hacker News and rewrote the title of each article in sentence case instead of title case. Each html file had the exact same number of characters — but when compressed into zip files the title case file was 5,992 bytes and the sentence case file was 5,961 bytes. Saving 31 bytes!” For each site visit to Hacker News would save 0.00001059642g of carbon if written in sentence case. Assuming it gets about 10 million visits a day changing to sentence case would result in the prevention of 105g of carbon daily.”
Compression |
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Let's Talk About Joins — Crystal Lewis
tl;dr: “In general, there are two ways to link our data, horizontally or vertically. When linking or joining data horizontally we are matching rows by one or more variables (i.e., keys), making a wider dataset. When joining vertically, column names are matched and datasets are stacked on top of each other, making a longer dataset. Joins can be done in many different programs (e.g., SQL, R, Stata, SAS). Most of this post will be applicable to any language, but examples in R will be provided.”
Database |
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Audiocraft: Library for audio processing and generation.
CrewAI: Orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents.
QAnything: Local knowledge base question-answering system.
Tantivy: Full-text search engine library.
Tinybench: Lightweight benchmarking library.
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