Issue #470

Tuesday 5th December’s issue is presented by Clerk

Authentication & User Management For The Modern Web

Clerk is the easiest way to add authentication and user management to your app.

With prebuilt UI components and feature-rich SDKs & APIs, Clerk is purpose-built for the React, Next.js, and the modern web, and designed to get developers up and running in minutes.

Explore Clerk’s New Pricing With 10,000 MAUs For Free

Getting Better Feedback On Your Work

— James Cook

tl;dr: James offers a simple technique on when to ask for feedback on a project: (1) When you’re 30% done with the project, ask your audience "are we on the right track?" Seek the following answers: if what you are doing makes sense, first impressions on the concept, if it meets relevant customer and business needs, suggestions for other people or teams to involve, etc… (2) When you're 90% done with the project, ask your audience: "is there anything we've missed?" In terms of input, seek: typos and shoddy grammar, jargon, complex, or excluding language, inappropriate tone and emotion, etc...

Leadership Management CareerAdvice

Leading Successful Product Teams

— Ariel Salminen

tl;dr: “We’ve been operating in a remote first culture so these rules apply in that context.” The first 5 rules are as follows: (1) Avoid meetings as much as possible. Instead of having them, communicate asynchronous to each other via tools such as Linear, GitHub, Figma, Slack, and similar. (2) Provide at least three days of focus time per week for designers and developers in the team. (3) Trust your team to make decisions, they’re the experts. (4) Default to openness. The team should be sharing what they’re doing whenever they can. (5) Define just the right amount of process. Too much process and it will slow down your team and their performance, while not enough will create inconsistency.

Leadership Management

Clerk Webhooks: Data Sync With Convex

tl;dr: “Composing an application out of multiple data sources can be challenging, and while Clerk’s Backend APIs work great for most use cases, Webhooks offer the next level of integration that enables you to take full advantage of your existing stack. This post will cover how to synchronize user data from Clerk into your own backend using Webhooks.”

Promoted by Clerk

UsefulTool Data

How Uber Computes ETA At Half A Million Requests Per Second

tl;dr: "A single trip usually takes around 1000 ETA requests.Yet computing ETA is a difficult problem. Because the distance between the source and destination is not a straight line. Instead it consists of complex street networks and highways." Engineers split a route into smaller partitions to find the shortest path amongst each partition, factoring in variables, such as traffic.

Algo Scale

"It's easy to win forgiveness for being wrong; being right is what gets you into real trouble."

— Bjarne Stroustrup

Reshaping The Tree: Rebuilding Organizations For AI

— Ethan Mollick

tl;dr: "AI is impacting organizations, and managers need to start taking an active role in shaping what that looks like. There is no central authority that can tell you the best ways to use AI - every organization will need to figure it out for themselves.” Ethan proposes some principles:" (1) Let teams develop their own methods. Given that AIs perform more like people than software, they are often best managed as additional team members. (2) Build for the oncoming future. It is clear that advanced models are coming fast. (3) Organizations that wait to experiment will fall behind very quickly. 

OrgDesign AI

Examples Of Great URL Design

— Jim Nielsen

tl;dr: Jim discusses the importance of thoughtful URL design, showcasing how URLs can be more than just web addresses. He highlights examples like StackOverflow, where URLs balance computer and human needs by combining a unique identifier with an optional human-readable slug. Jim also mentions Slack's marketing campaign, which cleverly integrated storytelling into URLs. He points out how GitHub and NPM use URLs that map to their domain semantics, providing intuitive navigation and shortcuts for users. 

Design URL

Parsing 8-Bit Integers Quickly

— Daniel Lemire

tl;dr: Daniel discusses efficient methods for parsing 8-bit integers from ASCII / UTF-8 strings. The post begins by describing a basic C function for parsing 8-bit integers. This function checks if each character in the string is a digit and then calculates the integer value. It works well for strings with predictable lengths but can be inefficient when the length varies due to branch misprediction in the processor. The post also discusses an alternative version, which is presented as potentially faster under some compilers.

Performance

Advent Of Code 2023

— Eric Wastl

tl;dr: Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other.

Entertaining

Notable Links

ComfyUI: Stable diffusion GUI and backend.

GQL: Git Query Language.

Highest Paying Companies: 500 companies based on median total comp.

Taipy: Turns Data and AI algorithms into apps.

Unsloth: 5X faster 50% less memory LLM finetuning.

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