Issue #269

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Issue #269
Pointer.io


Tuesday 16th November's issue is presented by Stream
The Secret to a Great Planning Process - Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite
- Lenny Rachitsky
#Leadership #Management
 
tl;dr: The W framework is "intended to help the leaders of the company put a planning process in place across the entire org," comprised of 4 steps: (1) Context: Leadership shares a high-level strategy with teams. (2) Plans: teams respond with proposed plans. (3) Integration: leadership integrates into a single plan, and shares with teams. (4) Buy-in: Teams make final tweaks, confirm buy-in, and get rolling.
Symmathesies Follow A Power Law, Not A Bell Curve
- Jessica Kerr
#Management #Leadership

tl;dr: Jessica argues that software teams reflect a power law distribution, not a normal distribution. Power law distribution are "a learning system" where "every interaction feeds every future interaction," and team members adjust accordingly. Jessica discusses healthy signs of a team functioning in this manner.
Compose Chat Messaging Tutorial
#Guide 

tl;dr: Try Stream's brand new Chat SDK for Jetpack Compose today! The tutorial shows you how to add an in-app messaging feature with just a few lines of code, as well as the flexibility and customization options available for the components. All open-source, open for feedback and contributions.

Promoted by Stream.
Finding Your Swagger
- Kevin Yien
#CareerAdvice
 
tl;dr: "When you lose your swagger, you lose your self. When you lose your self, you need to spend time alone. When you spend time alone, you are left with nothing but yourself. And only from there can you find yourself, and your swagger, again." Kevin discusses his journey to re-discover his swagger. 
A Note From Stream

Free Activity Feeds & Chat APIs for Qualifying Teams. Stream’s scalable APIs & SDKs come with all the building blocks to ship a custom messaging or activity feed experience that rivals leading social platforms.
 
 
#OpenSource #Firmware
 
tl;dr: "Firmware is software that's just harder to get to." Bryan outlines major industry trends, the end of Moore's Law and introduces us to Wright's Law, which states that the more you manufacture something i.e. a CPU, the cheaper its cost, and the underlying impact this law will have on firmware. 
The Weirdest Bug I've Ever Encountered
- Benjamin Richner
#Debugging
 
tl;dr: Benjamin concludes with what he's learned from debugging: (1) No matter how battle-tested and old the code and how reputable the distributor - the code contains bugs. (2) Old bugs can manifest themselves seemingly out of nowhere, caused by subtle changes in timing or memory layout. (3) Whenever the file system is involved, there is a significant danger that bugs are caused by race conditions. And more. 
A Terrible Schema From A Clueless Programmer
#CareerAdvice

tl;dr: "I want to describe a truly bad database schema I encountered, and then tell you a little about what it did to the system performance." The author does so, concluding that one of the main reasons is that engineers still operate in a "vacuum with no mentorship, guidance, or reference points" compounded by an age bias - we tend to "chase off anyone who makes it to the age of 35."
Etsy’s Journey To TypeScript
- Salem Hilal
#Typescript

tl;dr: "This is why, hot on the heels of a migration to ES6, we started investigating a path to adopting TypeScript. This post is all about how we designed our approach, some of the fun technical challenges that resulted, and what it took to educate an Etsy-sized company in a new programming language."
Notable GitHub Repos
dstp
Run common networking tests against your site.
 
Taichi
Parallel programming for everyone.
 
Applied ML
Papers & tech blogs by companies sharing their work on data science & machine learning in production.
 
Datasets
The largest hub of ready-to-use datasets for ML models with fast, easy and efficient data manipulation tools.
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