Issue #515

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Issue #515


Friday 17th May’s issue is presented by Swarmia

Actionable Software Development Benchmarks From Swarmia


Most engineering benchmarks suffer from two issues:


1) They cast a ridiculously wide net of metrics, and

2) They suggest setting unrealistic (and often irrelevant) targets.


That’s why our new engineering benchmarks only consist of 5 foundational metrics and don’t encourage hyper-optimization when you’re already doing well enough.

Delegating Gets Easier When You Get Better At Explaining Your Ideas

— Wes Kao


tl;dr: Wes developed the framework below when explaining projects to direct reports, dotted-line reports, vendors, agencies, contractors, recruiters, and anyone she’s managing formally or informally. Here are five areas to cover: (1) Increase comprehension: Am I explaining in a way that’s easy to understand? (2) Increase buy-in: Am I getting the person excited? (3) Derisk: Am I addressing obvious risks? (4) Confirm alignment: Am I giving them a chance to speak up? (5) Feedback loop: Am I creating the shortest feedback loop possible? 


Leadership Management

How Should You Adopt LLMs?

— Will Larson


tl;dr: “That context makes LLM adoption a great topic for a strategy case study. This document is an engineering strategy document determining how a hypothetical company, Theoretical Ride Sharing, could adopt LLMs.”


Leadership Management

Sensible Benchmarks For Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Your Engineering Organization

— Rebecca Murphey


tl;dr: A lot of engineering leaders are looking for benchmarks to understand what “good” looks like. The problem is, most benchmarks out there offer a long list of metrics and encourage spending time on areas that are already going well. In this blog post, you’ll learn how we landed on the five fundamental metrics in our benchmarks and how you should use them to drive meaningful change in your engineering organization.


Promoted by Swarmia

Leadership Management

A Useful Productivity Measure?

— James Shore


tl;dr: James is using value-add capacity i.e. the % of time on value-add work, as a productivity proxy for the eng organization. While this number is easily prone to gaming, it shifted the conversation from constantly pressuring the eng team to deliver more, to helping it reduce the time engineers spend on non-value-adding activities. 


Leadership Management


“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”


— Douglas Adams


Use Abstraction To Improve Function Readability

— Mark Manley, Palak Bansal


tl;dr: The team at Google compares two functions and highlights how one is easier to follow due to its consistent level of abstraction, providing a top-down narrative of the code’s logic. createPizza is a high-level function that delegates the preparing, baking, and boxing steps to lower-level specialized functions with intuitive names. Those functions, in turn, delegate to their own lower-level specialized functions (e.g., heatOven) until they reach a function that handles implementation details without needing to call other functions.


BestPractices

Improving Shopify App’s Performance

— Talha Naqvi


tl;dr: “At the beginning of 2023, we noticed that our app's performance had decreased since we started migrating to React Native. Recognizing this, we embarked on a dedicated journey to improve the app's performance by the end of the year... In this blog post, we’re sharing how we did it and hope others use it as inspiration to make their apps faster.”


Performance Mobile

Machine Unlearning In 2024

— Ken Liu


tl;dr: “As our ML models today become larger and their (pre-)training sets grow to inscrutable sizes, people are increasingly interested in the concept of machine unlearning to edit away undesired things like private data, stale knowledge, copyrighted materials, toxic / unsafe content, dangerous capabilities, and misinformation, without retraining models from scratch.” Ken provides us with an introduction. 


ML

Data Fetching Patterns In Single-Page Applications

— Juntao Qiu


tl;dr: “When a single-page application needs to fetch data from a remote source, it needs to do so while remaining responsive and providing feedback to the user during an often slow query. Five patterns help with this. Asynchronous State Handler wraps these queries with meta-queries for the state of the query. Parallel Data Fetching minimizes wait time. Fallback Markup specifies fallback displays in markup. Code Splitting loads only code that's needed. Prefetching gathers data before it may needed to reduce latency when it is.”


Data

Most Popular From Last Issue

Notable Links


Fooocus: Focus on prompting and generating.


Glance: Dashboard that puts your feeds in one place.


Phidata: Build AI Assistants with memory, knowledge and tools.


Quary: Business intelligence for engineers.


Stirling-PDF: Perform various operations on PDF files. 


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