Issue #405

Friday 14th April's issue is presented by Redpanda

Redpanda is the streaming data platform for developers. It’s fully Kafka® API-compatible but proven to be 10x faster and 6x lower in total costs.

Deploying as a self-contained single binary, Redpanda is JVM-free, ZooKeeper®-free, Jepsen-tested and source available. With Redpanda, you can deploy in minutes and spin-up in seconds.

See Our Benchmarks

The Best Managers Don’t Fix, They Coach — Four Tools To Add to Your Toolkit

tl;dr: How to coach - and not “fix” - team members through the following situations: (1) Outcome shift: when a team member is spinning on a problem and how to proceed. (2) Options exploration: you understand your team member’s challenge and what they would like to see happen. (3) Acknowledging strengths: a team member has imposter syndrome or lacks confidence. (4) A team member has unconscious assumptions that might be holding them back.

Leadership Management

Two Types Of Software Engineers

- Thorsten Ball

tl;dr: “Here's something I've been kicking around in my head for a few weeks… there are two types of engineers. Type 1, when presented with a problem, thinks: "easy, people can just do X.” Type 2, when presented with the same problem, thinks: "very hard, because it requires people to do X." Thorsten explains the importance of the subtle difference.

Leadership Management

You Don’t Have To Sacrifice Streaming Data Performance To Cut Cloud Costs

tl;dr: Redpanda is faster and more efficient than Apache Kafka… but how much faster exactly? We ran 200+ hours of benchmarks to find out how both platforms perform for various workloads and hardware configurations. Here’s our breakdown on how Redpanda achieves 10x the performance while cutting cloud spend by over $500k.

Promoted by Redpanda

Data Cloud Performance

Junior To Senior: An Action Plan For Engineering Career Success

- Jerome Hardaway

tl;dr: In this guide you’ll learn: (1) The key technical competencies that managers prioritize for career advancement. (2) The essential communication skills expected from senior developers. (3) How to approach code development with a focus on addressing business requirements.

CareerAdvice Guide

“Remember, code is your house, and you have to live in it.”

- Michael Feathers

Unit Testing Analytics Code

- Matt Kaye

tl;dr: “I face lots of pushback when it comes to unit testing. Usually the objections come in the form of either not knowing why you might test, since the code is just so simple and straightforward that nothing could go wrong, or not understanding the value added. In my opinion, both of these objections come from the same place.”

Testing DataScience

Taming The Nested Beast

- Eliran Turgeman

tl;dr: “I believe that the downsides of overly nested code are well known and covered, it mainly revolves around readability and maintainability, and I won’t go into more details in regards to that.

I’d like to focus on the techniques to flatten an overly nested code, but before doing so, you should keep in mind that flattening your code isn’t always the answer.”

BestPractices

The Free Software Foundation Is Dying

- Drew DeVault

tl;dr: “Their achievements are unmistakable: we must offer them our gratitude and admiration for decades of accomplishments in establishing and advancing our cause. The principles of software freedom are more important than ever, and the products of these institutions remain necessary and useful – the GPL license family, GCC, GNU coreutils, and so on. Nevertheless, the organizations behind this work are floundering.”

InternetHealth

6 CSS Snippets Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2023

- Adam Argyle

tl;dr: (1) A container query. (2) Scroll snap. (3) Grid pile (4) Quick circle. (5) Control variants with @layer. (6) Memorize less and reach more with logical properties.

CSS FrontEnd

Notable GitHub Repos

AgentGPT: Assemble, configure & deploy AI agents in the browser.

Wolverine: Give python scripts regenerative healing abilities.

DeepSpeed: Deep learning optimization library.

E2B: IDE powered by AI agents that do the work for you.

How did you like this issue of Pointer?

1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it

1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5