Issue #484

Tuesday 30th 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.

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Trifectas Go All The Way Up

— James Stanier

tl;dr: Trifectas are a group of three people from different disciplines i.e. engineering, product and UX, who work together to achieve a goal. They are often smaller teams lower down the org. James advocates and explains how and why trifectas should exist throughout the org - in senior leadership and middle management too. They ensure that the leadership team is aligned with the long-term strategy of the organization, allows for clear accountability, creates positive tension between disciplines and enables issues to be resolved quickly.

Leadership Management

Manage Like An Engineer

— Ben Balter

tl;dr: Engineer-inspired “how we work” management principles: (1) Make work visible: Proactively share to the widest extent practical. (2) Write things down, especially the why and how. Ensure that everything has a URL. (3) Over communicate: Use a durable, searchable, and discoverable medium. Let others opt-in to context and subscribe to updates. (4) Bias for shipping: ship early, ship often. (5) Streamline and automate: Never force a human to do what a robot can. (6) Embrace collaboration: How we work is as important as what we work on. (7) Asynchronous first: Reserve higher-fidelity mediums for conversations that require them. (8) Practicality beats purity.  

Management

Keep Your Secrets From Leaking

— 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

My Diverse Hiring Playbook

— Jacob Kaplan-Moss

tl;dr: (1) Adopt a “Rooney Rule”, which requires teams to interview at least one ethnic minority candidate for senior roles. (2) Use opportunistic hires strategically. (3) Focus outbound recruiting on underrepresented candidates. (4) Focus outbound recruiting on underrepresented candidates. (5) Cultivate a network of “connectors”. (6) Be explicit that you’re looking to build diverse teams. 

Diversity Hiring Management

"If you never fail, your aren't trying hard enough"

— Bjarne Stroustrup

Inside .git

— Julia Evans

tl;dr: Julia provides a short explanation of each part of your .git directory helps develop your mental model and better understanding: (1) How merges and rebases work and how they can go wrong. (2) How exactly your colleagues are using git, and what guidelines you should be following to work with them successfully. (3) How pushing / pulling code from other repositories works. (4) how to handle merge conflicts. 

Git

The Art Of Good Code Review

— Phil Booth

tl;dr: What does a good code review look like? Phil outlines 5 things you want to get right as a reviewer: (1) The description: “Is there one? Does it make sense? Does it include all of the information required to understand the code?” (2) The code: Build a mental model of the code, then ask yourself: "Am I happy to maintain this?" (3) The tests: Compare the tests and code side-by-side. Look for things that seem missing or out of place. Ask questions about anything that doesn't match your expectations. (4) Commenting: Be considerate, honest and open-minded. (5) Approval: Withhold approval until you're confident that you fully understand the change.

CodeReview

The Hacker News Top 40 Books Of 2023

tl;dr: “I enjoy reading Hacker News and I love buying books, and I also love data, so what better than doing some processing of data about books to find some interesting results?! It also gives me the opportunity to write about books that I find interesting. Here are the top 40 books recommended by HN readers in 2023.”  

BookRecommendation

In Loving Memory Of Square Checkbox

— Nikita Prokopov

tl;dr: "But despite all this chaos and temptation, operating system vendors knew better. To this day, they follow The convention: checkboxes are square, radio buttons are round. Maybe it was part of their internal training. Maybe they had experienced art directors. Maybe it was just luck. I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter but somehow they managed to stick to the convention. Until this day."

Design

Recommended Reading

The System Design Newsletter simplifies complex system design case studies through intuitive storytelling.

Deep dive into why WhatsApp supported 50 Billion messages a day with only 32 engineers, How Uber finds nearby drivers at 1 million requests per second, and more.

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Notable Links

Build LLMs: Implementing a ChatGPT-like LLM step by step.

OpenGFW: OS implementation of GFW on Linux.

Speaking To Hackers: How to keep a roomful of programmers entertained.

ViroReact: Rapidly build AR and VR experiences.

Zed: Multiplayer code editor.

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