Issue #387

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Issue #387
Pointer.io
Friday 7rd February's issue is presented by Slite

 
Escape the chaos of information overload with a collaborative workspace for modern teams. Slite combines intuitive docs with async decision-making and enables teams to bring clarity to their work. Try the new AI assistant Ask that answers questions based on your team's docs. It helps to take the pain out of finding info and learning from the past.
 
Building A Great Relationship With Your Boss
- Paulo André
#CareerAdvice

tl;dr: "If I could pick one skill, and one skill only, this would be it - for any relationship, but especially so for the relationship with a manager. So many difficult conversations become a lot less difficult if only you get curious about the other person’s challenges and needs before getting into yours." Questions to ask are: What keeps my manager up at night? What is success for them now and in the long run? What pressures are they subject to? Where do they come from? What do they expect from me? And more. 
#Management #ThoughtPiece
 
tl;dr: "It is a real-world example of Goodhart’s Law, in that as soon as we began using uptime as a target, it stopped being a useful measure. So what is an ideal alternative? For me, as a naive engineer, I’d love to see the industry start viewing clear and transparent communication in past incidents as positive signal about a working relationship. After all, we know incidents are a fact of life, and it’s much better to be honest about them than hide."
 
GPT Is Only Half Of The AI Language Revolution
- Jason Phillips
#GPT3 #DeepDive

tl;dr: In this post, Slite Engineer Jason Phillips examines AI breakthroughs like GPT, exploring their potential for categorizing, filtering, and processing data. He suggests real-world applications rely more on processing than content generation.

Promoted by Slite
Cleaner Unit Tests With Custom Matchers
- Jamie King
#Testing
 
tl;dr: "When unit testing, it’s important to cover all your edge cases, but that can come at a cost. Covering edge cases often means making the same or similar assertions over and over again. While test names should clearly describe what is being tested, sometimes these assertions can be messy and have an unclear purpose. Using custom matchers in your tests can help make your assertions cleaner and less ambiguous."
 
“If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.”

— Linus Torvalds
 
I’m Now A Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer
- Filippo Valsorda
#CareerAdvice #ThoughtPiece

tl;dr: "I now have six amazing clients, and I’m making an amount of money equivalent to my Google total compensation package, which proves the thesis that it’s possible to be a professional maintainer earning rates competitive with the adjacent market for senior software engineers... I’m sharing details about my progress to hopefully popularize the model, and eventually help other maintainers adopt it, although I’m not quite ready to recommend anyone else drop everything to try this just yet."
#DeepDive
 
tl;dr: "But what data is inside the barcode of a mobile ticket, and how do they work? Could people who aren’t ticket inspectors get the data out of them? It turns out that the answer is a bit more interesting than I initially expected!" The author shows your ticket barcode, which is often written below the code in plain text, might let someone access a surprising amount of detailed tracking information as to where you are and what trains you’re taking.
Asynchronous Computing At Meta: Overview And Learnings
- Sayak Kundu, Artem Denisov
#Async #DeepDive

tl;dr: "We have built a platform for serverless asynchronous computing that is provided as a service for other engineering teams. They register asynchronous functions on the platform and then submit workloads for execution via our SDK. The platform executes these workloads in the background on a large fleet of workers and provides additional capabilities such as load balancing, rate limiting, quota management, downstream protection and many others."
SQL Should Be Your Default Choice For Data Engineering Pipelines
- Robin Linacre
#SQL #Data

tl;dr: "SQL should be the first option considered for new data engineering work. It’s robust, fast, future-proof and testable. With a bit of care, it’s clear and readable. A new SQL engine - DuckDB - makes SQL competitive with other high performance dataframe libraries, making SQL a good candidate for data of all sizes."
Notable GitHub Repos
Fluxsort
A branchless stable quicksort / mergesort hybrid.
 
Motion Canvas
Visualize complex ideas programmatically.
 
React Email
Build and send emails using React. 
 
Open-Assistant
Chat-based assistant that interacts w 3rd-parties. 
 
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