Issue #416

Tuesday 23rd May’s issue is presented by PostHog

PostHog's open source suite of product tools now includes performance monitoring in session recordings - see not only what your users are doing, but also how long each action takes!

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Kicking The Can Down The Road (On Hard Decisions)

— Ed Batista

tl;dr: “How can you stop kicking the can down the road? A first step is simply being mindful of the factors above and asking whether any of them apply to you. And despite the wide range of possible scenarios, note a theme that runs through all of them: emotions. Fear of the costs. Excessive optimism. Guilt about the past. Overwhelm. Distrust.” The key is identifying your full range of feelings, labeling them accurately, determining which ones are preventing you from making a decision, and asking whether that response is truly justified.

Leadership Management

Architecture Principles: An Approach To Effective Decision Making In Software Architecture

— Patrick Roos

tl;dr: “Are you a software architect and often find it difficult to make architecture decisions in your team? This article shows you how to use architecture principles to make effective decisions in your team.”

Management Architecture

8 Annoying A/B Testing Mistakes Every Engineer Should Know

— Lior Neu-ner

tl;dr: (1) Including unaffected users in your experiment. (2) Only viewing results in aggregate (aka Simpson's paradox). (3) Conducting an experiment without a predetermined duration. Lior discusses these and 5 more anti-patterns.

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Management Testing BestPractices

Alignment Gets Expensive. Don’t Skimp On It

— Jessica Kerr

tl;dr: “Alignment gives us the context to make good decisions in our scope. It also lets us question decisions outside our scope, constructively, because we can notice when we learn something inconsistent with our expectations. That catches discrepancies early, and gets us back on track together.”

Leadership Management

“Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Lehman’s Laws Of Software Evolution

— Bart Wullems

tl;dr: Lehman's Laws of Software Evolution provide a valuable framework for understanding how software systems evolve over time. By recognizing the continuous nature of software development and the role of people, architecture, and feedback in shaping software evolution, developers can create more robust and adaptable software systems.

CareerAdvice

The Simple Joys Of Scaling Up

— Jordan Tigani

tl;dr: “After such a dramatic increase in hardware capability, we should ask ourselves, “Do the conditions that drove our scaling challenges in 2003 still exist?” After all, we’ve made our systems far more complex and added a lot of overhead. Is it all still necessary? If you can do the job on a single machine, isn’t that going to be a better alternative?” This post digs into why scale-out became so dominant, take a look at whether those rationales still hold, and then explore some advantages of such architecture.

Architecture Scale

Understanding Database Indexes In PostgreSQL

— Pawel Dąbrowski

tl;dr: “This article will help you organize your knowledge and remind you about good practices. SQL is a declarative language meaning it tells the database what we want to do but not how to achieve it. The database engine decides how to pull data. We can help the query planner by using indexes.”

PostgreSQL

Writing Python Like It's Rust

— Jakub Beránek

tl;dr: “Eventually, I started adopting some concepts from Rust in my Python programs. It basically boils down to two things - using type hints as much as possible, and upholding the good ol’ making illegal states unrepresentable principle. I try to do this both for programs that will be maintained for a while, but also for oneshot utility scripts.”

Rust Python

Recommended Reading

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Notable GitHub Repos

Airbnb JS Style Guide: A reasonable approach to JS.

ChatHub: All-in-one chatbot client.

Dub: OS link shortener with analytics & custom domains.

Flowise: Drag & drop UI to build your customized LLM flow.

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