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Friday 6rd October’s issue is presented by Dept® |
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We’re DEPT®/Digital Products — A Team Of Engineers, Designers, And Product Strategists
We love to build products, and want to help you do it too. We have experience leading the development of hundreds of products for companies across the globe. We're a little different than most agencies in that we like to partner with our clients to provide pragmatic, actionable solutions instead of handing you documents or simply taking orders. We ask "why?" a lot.
We offer strategy, design, development, cloud, data, and creative services. And we offer flexible ways of working, including dedicated teams, sprints, and staff augmentation. |
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Lessons From Bootstrapped Companies Founded By Software Engineers — Gergely Orosz
tl;dr: “Bootstrapped companies tends to get little coverage across the media. This can be by design, as many of these companies prefer to fly under the radar, and focus on building a sustainable, profitable business, and don’t seek a bigger profile.” Gergely profiles five companies, discussing: (1) Taking the leap to bootstrap a company. (2) Tech stack and engineering approaches. (3) Growing the company. (4) The contrast to working at a large company. (5) What works.
CareerAdvice |
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How DoorDash Defines Great Engineering Management
tl;dr: Doordash discuss their three management pillars and how they map to management roles: (1) Business Outcome: how managers set direction and drive impact based on our strategic goals. (2) Team: how managers support individuals, build team culture and partner with other teams. (3) Engineering Excellence: the quality of our products and systems, how fast we can move, and how efficiently our systems use resources.
Leadership Management |
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The Power Of Soft Skills: Insights From Engineering Leaders — Ben Ricker
tl;dr: “The tactic I’ve found to be the biggest indicator of success is being comfortable saying, “I don’t know. You can’t know everything, and pretending to do so often leads to wasted time, poor expectation settings, and frustration from clients and team members. Pairing “I don’t know” with the ability to ask great questions will help gain trust from all sides of a project and set the tone of working collaboratively.”
Promoted by Dept®
Leadership Management |
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So We Shipped An AI Product. Did it Work? — Phillip Carter
tl;dr: “Like many companies, earlier this year we saw an opportunity with LLMs and quickly but thoughtfully started building a capability. About a month later, we released Query Assistant to all customers as an experimental feature. We then iterated on it, using data from production to inform a multitude of additional enhancements, and ultimately took Query Assistant out of experimentation and turned it into a core product offering. However, getting Query Assistant from concept to feature diverted R&D and marketing resources, forcing the question: did investing in LLMs do what we wanted it to do?” LLM AI Observability |
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"Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day. Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime."
- Muhammad Waseem |
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An Interactive Intro To CRDTs — Jake Lazaroff
tl;dr: “CRDT stands for “Conflict-free Replicated Data Type”. That’s a long acronym, but the concept isn’t too complicated. It’s a kind of data structure that can be stored on different computers (peers). Each peer can update its own state instantly, without a network request to check with other peers. Peers may have different states at different points in time, but are guaranteed to eventually converge on a single agreed-upon state. That makes CRDTs great for building rich collaborative apps, like Google Docs and Figma — without requiring a central server to sync changes.”
DataStructure |
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10 Things We've Learned About A/B Testing For Startups — Ian Vanagas
tl;dr: “In this week’s issue, we explore the secrets of running truly successful A/B tests (and some pitfalls to avoid).” These include: (1) You need to embrace failure. (2) Good A/B tests have 5 traits. (3) Use the “right place, right time” rule. (4) Create a proposal system. (5) Understanding significance. And more.
Promoted by PostHog
Testing |
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How Pinterest Scaled To 11 million Users With Only 6 Engineers
tl;dr: In 2012, Pinterest reached 11.7 million monthly users with just six engineers. The article chronicles Pinterest's journey from its launch in 2010 with a single engineer to its rapid growth. Key lessons include using proven technologies, keeping architecture simple, and avoiding over-complication. Pinterest faced challenges like data corruption due to clustering and had to pivot to more reliable technologies like MySQL and Memcached. By January 2012, they simplified their stack, removing less-proven technologies and focusing on manual database sharding for scalability.
Scale Architecture |
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Hey, Computer, Make Me A Font — Sergey Tselovalnikov
tl;dr: “This is a story of my journey learning to build generative ML models from scratch and teaching a computer to create fonts in the process.” FontoGen is a generative ML model project that crafts type fonts based on user descriptions. The author delves into the complexities of text-to-SVG generation and the intricacies of maintaining stylistic uniformity across glyphs. Drawing inspiration from the IconShop paper, a sequence-to-sequence model was employed, using text embeddings from BERT and font embeddings from tokenized glyph shapes. Design Fonts ML |
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Where Does My Computer Get The Time From? — Tony Finch
tl;dr: “On Friday morning I gave a lightning talk called where does my computer get the time from? The RIPE meeting website has a copy of my slides and a video of the talk; this is a blogified low-res version of the slides with a rough and inexact transcript.”
Entertaining |
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Daktilo: Turn your keyboard into a typewriter.
FastStream: Event stream integration for your services
GitHub Readme Stats: Dynamically generated GitHub stats on READMEs.
Open Interpreter: LLMs run code on your computer.
Wasp: Rails-like framework for React & Node.
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