Issue #389

Tuesday 14th February's issue is presented by WorkOS

WorkOS is a developer platform to make your app Enterprise Ready. With a few simple APIs, you can add enterprise features like Single Sign-On (SAML), SCIM user provisioning, Audit Logs, and more.

Make Your App Enterprise Ready

Writing An Engineering Strategy

- Will Larson

#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: Will discusses: (1) An example of an engineering strategy. (2) Richard Rumelt’s definition of strategy: diagnosis, guiding policies, and coherent actions. (3) How and when to write your engineering strategy. (4) Dealing with undocumented strategies in other functions. (5) Structuring your guiding policies around resource allocation, fundamental rules, how decision are made. (6) Maintaining the right altitude in your strategy by ensuring guiding principles are applicable, enforced, and create leverage. (7) The most common kinds of coherent actions in engineering strategies. (8) Whether strategy should be executive-lead.

Saving Millions On Logging: Finding Relevant Savings

- Rich Marscher

#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: "At HubSpot, our relatively new Backend Performance team is tasked with improving the runtime and cost performance of our backend software. In this two-part blog series, we will look at a structured method we use for approaching cost savings work and demonstrating how we apply it at HubSpot to save millions on the storage costs of our application logs.”

The Developer’s Guide To SSO

#Management #Guide

tl;dr: Single Sign-On via SAML or OAuth is often one of the first features an engineering team needs to build as a product gains traction among larger customers. We explore how it works, how to add it to your app, and best practices for implementation.

Promoted by WorkOS

DevEx Principles: Minimize Switching Contexts
- Kathy Korevec

#Leadership #Management #DevEx

tl;dr: Over the past 15 years shipping products for Heroku, GitHub, and now Vercel, I've learned a lot about what developers need to succeed: (1) Minimize switching contexts. (2) Remember, you are a chef cooking for chefs: Respect the craft. (3) Automate anything that can be automated. (4) Optimize for time to code. (5) Be mindful of breaking changes. People’s services depend on your services. (6) Don’t bury the lede.

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How Levels.fyi Scaled To Millions Of Users With Google Sheets As A Backend
- Dushyant Sabharwal

#Hack

tl;dr: Through this blog post we will be sharing our strategy and learnings on building a dynamic site without a database and an API server." The team at Levels.fyi guide us on how they achieved product market fit before moving to more robust solutions.

GPT In 60 Lines Of NumPy
- Jay Mody

#Python #GPT

tl;dr: "In this post, we'll implement a GPT from scratch in just 60 lines of numpy. We'll then load the trained GPT-2 model weights released by OpenAI into our implementation and generate some text.”

How A Single Line Of Code Brought Down A Half-Billion Euro Rocket Launch
- Michael Stroe

#Debugging

tl;dr: "So what was the ultimate cause of this very short, very expensive and catastrophic flight? A line of code converting a 64-bit floating point to a signed integer, which led to an overflow passed directly to the main computer, that interpreted it as real data.”

The Evolution Of Facebook’s iOS App Architecture

#iOS #Architecture

tl;dr: After years of iteration, the Facebook codebase does not resemble a typical iOS codebase… The app’s codebase reflects 10 years of evolution, spurred by technical decisions necessary to support the growing number of engineers working on the app, its stability, and, above all, the user experience.

Whether you've been affected by a layoff, or you're looking to see what's out there, check out some of the companies hiring. Only VC backed companies can hire from our collective:

• Clipboard Health, Series C, backed by Sequoia: Hiring mid / senior engineers. Remote (US).

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• Brilliant, Series C, backed by Union Square Ventures: Hiring Engineering Managers in SF.

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