Issue #401

Tuesday 28th March's issue is presented by Retool

Join our product & engineering leaders for a first look at what's new with Retool. We'll be diving deep into new GPT-powered features, Python support, and a brand-new way to rapidly deploy databases.

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Numbers To Know For Managing (Software Teams)

#Leadership #Management

“Based on philosophy, experience, and analysis; we hope they’ll be of some use.” The authors cover topics such as: (1) Minimum number of direct reports anyone should ever have. (2) Minimum number of candidates you should interview before making a decision. (3) Number of days before a new hire should have merged a pull request, (4) Number of days before a small support issue becomes a large support issue. And more.

Pull The Andon Cord

- Taylor Pearson

#Leadership #Management

The Andon Cord was a rope that hung in Toyota factories that instantly could stop all work on the assembly line, which workers were encouraged to pull when they saw an issue. Once pulled, a manager came down to look the issue but the worker who pulled the rope was the one that came up with the solution. This process had 2 benefits: (1) It made workers feel trusted and part of the company’s output. (2) It dramatically increased quality as workers had a lot of tacit knowledge that managers didn’t.

Retool Developer Day

#Leadership #Management

Join our product and engineering leaders for a first look at what's new with Retool. We'll be diving deep into new GPT-powered features, Python support, and a brand-new way to rapidly deploy databases.

Promoted by Retool

Automating Safe, Hands-Off Deployments

- Clare Liguori

#Scale #Architecture #Process

“In this article, we walk through the steps a code change goes through in a pipeline at Amazon on its way to production. A typical continuous delivery pipeline has four major phases - source, build, test, and production. We’ll dive into the details of what happens in each of these pipeline phases for a typical AWS service, and provide you with an example of how a typical AWS service team might set up one of their pipelines.”

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”

- W. Edwards Deming

What Complex Systems Can Teach Us About Building Software

- Kevin Sookocheff

#CareerAdvice

To build successful complex software systems: (1) Define a set of quality architecture principles that the organization believes in and that are systematically enforced. (2) Develop quality information aggregation systems that allow leaders to determine which components of the system are following the rules. (2) Experiment widely and encourage diversity in how we build teams and how we build software. Kevin explains how he arrives at these conclusions.

Database Sharding Explained

- Mahdi Yusuf

#Databases #Scale

Mahdi discusses when to use it, how it can be set up, why we shard data stores and various options you have before sharding.

Common Pitfalls Of GitHub Actions

- Ashish Bhatia

#GitHub

When you create Actions via GitHub’s UI, it provides templates for setting up the build. Ashish believes the template is broken. There is no: (1) Dependency caching (2) Cancelation of stale executions. (3) Path filtering. (4) Timeouts. He gives solutions for each.

Zig And Rust

- Alex Kladov

#Zig #Rust

I now find myself writing Zig full-time, after more than seven years of Rust. This post is a hand-wavy answer to the “why?” question. It is emphatically not a balanced and thorough comparison of the two languages.

Notable GitHub Repos

• HOTScript: A library of composable functions for the type-level.

• Web Stable Diffusion: Everything runs inside the browser with no server support.

• Cursor: An editor made for programming with AI.

• DragonFly: A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached.

  
  

  
  

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