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Tuesday 6th February’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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The Snow Melts At The Periphery — James Stanier
tl;dr: The initial signs of trouble in an organization are not at the center where engineering or management are situated, but at the edges. This is because people at the edges are the most exposed to the outside world i.e. where bad reviews are posted, where customers ask for help, and where social media complaints about unacceptable bugs are posted. As you become more senior in an organization, it is easy to become isolated from the outside world. James explains how to tackle this.
Leadership Management |
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Microsoft's New Future Of Work Report — Abi Noda
tl;dr: The report focusses on LLMs e.g. GitHub Copilot and its impact on software development, suggesting it has the potential to improve productivity and reduce cognitive load. However, its benefits are distributed unevenly across users and it introduces new challenges. Key takeaways: (1) Benefits of LLMs in software engineering depend on the specific task e.g. easier to start a project with an LLM but difficult to change generated code. (2) Issues arise with writing prompts and overreliance e.g. burdensome to inspect code, accepting incorrect code. (3) LLMs help the least experienced the most. (4) Adoption is influenced by how well AI tools fit within workflows. (5) Analyzing and integrating information become more important than generating code.
Leadership Management |
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Lessons Learned
tl;dr: “You learn a lot during thirty years. I tried to write about most of it in this blog… but some things are smaller and just don’t fit. Each one of these is rooted in at least one epic failure: (1) Always clean up right after a release. Everyone is tired, and cleanup work is boring. If you do not clean up then, you will never clean up and the mess will get worse, far worse. (2) Do the right thing when you start. Only take more shortcuts the closer you are to the deadline. If you take a shortcut, note it, and clean it up right away after the release.” And more.
CareerAdvice |
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Tips To Help Yourself Stand Out During A Tech Job Search
tl;dr: Sean, VP of Innovation at Microsoft, recently reviewed applications for a role and noticed more than one candidate doing these: (1) Don’t pad your resume with typical activities e.g. attended daily stand-ups. (2) Don’t claim outlandish results. Be honest. (3) Stay away from resume templates. Others use them too. (4) Link to external sites e.g GitHub. It’s less about the content or code. Shows you care about community. (5) Don’t use AI. (6) Find communities e.g. Twitter, Mastodon to submit applications as it’s a reference of places you participate.
JobSearch |
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“In programming, if someone tells you “you’re overcomplicating it,” they’re either 10 steps behind you or 10 steps ahead of you.”
— Andrew Clark |
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My Favourite Git Commit — David Thompson
tl;dr: “I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit. This commit is from my time at the Government Digital Service, working on GOV.UK. It has the rather unassuming name of “Convert template to US-ASCII to fix error.””
Git BestPractices |
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Authorization In Microservices
tl;dr: When you move from a monolith to a service-oriented architecture, you need to design your authorization accordingly. You'll need to share your Authorization data between your services, and there are many ways to do that. Each design and architecture decision you'll make has trade-offs that you'll need to understand. We'll show you each of those choices and their trade-offs. And, we'll provide you with heuristics that will help you make decisions about your service architecture.
Promoted by Oso Microservices Architecture |
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Data-Caching Techniques For 1.2 Billion Daily API Requests — Guillermo Pérez
tl;dr: The cache needs to achieve three things: (1) Low latency: It needs to be fast. If a cache server has issues, you can’t retry. (2) Up and warm: It needs to hold the majority of the critical data. If you lose it, it would surely bring down the backend systems with too much load. (3) Consistency: It should never hold stale or incorrect data. “A lot of the techniques mentioned in this article are supported by our open source meta-memcache cache client.”
Cache API Scale |
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Feature Flags Spaghetti // FFs Missing Features — Eliran Turgeman
tl;dr: “I feel like there are some key features missing that would make me switch vendors. I mainly have two problems with current solutions: (1) It can get tedious and messy to turn on/off a feature when multiple FFs were placed for it. (2) Your codebase becomes a FF graveyard if you don’t remember cleaning it, and you probably don’t…” Eli provides suggestions on how to address these.
Tests |
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The Pain Points Of Building A Copilot — Austin Henley
tl;dr: What are the pain points, and what are the opportunities for tools. ”We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 developers from a variety of companies that are working on copilots. We analyzed their responses to identify themes. Then we conducted two focus group sessions with tool builders that involved reviewing our interview findings and brainstorming possible solutions.” Austin shares the results here.
LLM |
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High Growth Engineer
High Growth Engineer provides concise, actionable advice to 45,000+ software engineers leveling up every week. All the advice is based on real-world experience and a TLDR is provided in each issue.
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Dep Tree: Visualize the entropy of a code base in 3D.
Dive: Exploring each layer in a docker image.
Pkl: Programming language for configuration.
Rawdog: Generate and execute Python scripts in the CL.
Stanchion: Column-oriented tables in SQLite.
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