Issue #483

Friday 26th January’s issue is presented by Sonar

Write Clean Code In The Age Of Generative AI

SonarLint, in tandem with SonarQube or SonarCloud, transforms your code review process, ensuring both human and AI-generated code is clean and secure by design.

By seamlessly integrating into your development workflow, Sonar solutions proactively identify and assist in rectifying code quality and security issues in real time.

The Sonar suite is the most trustworthy solution to effectively navigate and mitigate the risks inherent in AI code generation.

Learn More

How To Fix Broken Teams

tl;dr: “If you get to a place where you see a team like this, take a deep breath - things are going to be tough for a while.” The author shares the following steps a new manager needs to undertake: (1) Fix process and run them well. (2) Manage out cynical culture carriers. (3) Get in the weeds and learn the system. (4) Hire at least some new teammates. (5) Make sure the mission is good. 

Leadership Management

The Skill That Gets You Fired Or Promoted: Managing Up

— Leah Tharin

tl;dr: I always thought about "Managing up” like a funnel. It’s a skill to manage a funnel where you start with promises, and at the end of that funnel, there is a really bad outcome. Leah discusses managing each of the following steps in the funnel to prevent this from happening: (1) The # of promises you commit to. (2) The # of important promises. (3) The # of promises with a deadline. (4) Realistic time management, buffer. (5) Not letting important become urgent. (6) Regular, open communication. (8) Honest crisis management.  

Management

Keep Your Secrets From Leaking With Sonar

— Alexandre Gigleux

tl;dr: Secrets in your source code, when leaked, expose you to a security vulnerability due to illicit access to your private data. Sonar can find secrets in source code in your IDE using SonarLint and also detect them in your CI/CD pipeline using SonarQube and SonarCloud.

Promoted by Sonar

Security Management

Those Five Spare Hours Each Week

— Will Larson

tl;dr: Will hypothesizes, if we had five free hours each week, how would he spend them? He sees four valid options to build his career, as follows: (1) Write code or engage in detailed work within the engineering org. (2) Build broader context: expand your context outside the engineering org. Understand your peers work, goals and obstacles e.g. talk with customers. (3) Improve current systems: Work on your strategy or planning process. (4) Build relationships: Expand your internal or industry networks. 

Management

“The cost of adding a feature isn’t just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. The trick is to pick the features that don’t fight each other.”

— John Carmack

Bottleneck #06: Onboarding

— Tim Cochran, Premanand Chandrasekaran

tl;dr: Signs that your company is bottlenecked by an ineffective onboarding process, and best practice solutions: (1) New people cannot access tools and systems. (2) New developers cannot make a production deployment. (3) Newcomers feel orphaned. (4) Too much focus on individual work. (5) Not enough openness to change. (6) Seemingly simple things take too long. (7) Fast turnover. (8) Documentation can't answer questions from new hires. 

Process Management

How Apple Accidentally Broke My Spotify Client

— Roberto Frenna

tl;dr: “I turned on my work laptop and started catching up on everything that happened during my absence. Music makes this process more enjoyable, so I started up Spotify and started playing some tunes. I was very surprised (and mildly pissed) when playback abruptly stopped and Spotify seemingly went offline.” Roberto dives deep to understand the issue. 

Networks DeepDive

How DoorDash Used A Service Mesh To Manage Data Transfer, Reducing Hops And Cloud Spend

— Levon Stepanian, Hochuen Wong

tl;dr: There have been many benefits gained through DoorDash’s evolution from a monolithic application architecture to one based on microservices. The new architecture has reduced the time required for development, test, and deployment and at improved scalability and resiliency. DoorDash observed an uptick in data transfer costs, which prompted the engineering team to investigate alternative ways to provide the same level of service more efficiently.  

Microservices Data

Looking Back At Postgres

— Murat Demirbas

tl;dr: The Postgres origin story: “Riding on the success of Ingres project at Berkeley, Stonebraker began working on database support for data types beyond the traditional rows and columns in the early 1980s. A motivating example was to provide database support for CAD tools for the microelectronics industry, including "new data types such as polygons, rectangles, text strings, etc...””

PostgreSQL

Notable Links

Behavioral Interviews: Tips & resources for behavioral interviews.

Depth Anything: Depth estimation model. 

LLM Course: Course with roadmaps and colab notebooks.

TypeSpec: Core language primitives to describe service APIs.

Vanna: Chat with your SQL database.

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