Issue #415

Friday 19th May’s issue is presented by Swimm

Code documentation makes sense when it’s part of your development flow. Share knowledge about code with Swimm’s documentation platform - now available for VS Code and JetBrains.

Create and edit internal documentation that appears next to the relevant code and trust Swimm to keep them up to date.

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10 Years Of Tech Debt Research

— Abi Noda

tl;dr: Abi recommends to better communicate and manage tech debt by: (1) Moving away from using the phrase “technical debt.” (2) Defining what the problem really is. He explains why in this post.

Leadership Management

A New Way To Measure Developer Productivity – From The Creators Of DORA And SPACE

— Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: The new framework is a “developer-centric approach to developer productivity” illustrating that DevEx is comprised of 3 pillars - flow state, feedback loops and cognitive load. Gergely interviews the team behind this framework presenting their approach and implementation.

Leadership Management

Code Documentation In The IDE

— Eden Hermelin

tl;dr: Documenting your codebase doesn’t have to suck. Forget code comments or “self-documenting code”. IDE integrated documentation is slowly becoming one of the most convenient ways to manage knowledge about your codebase and this article explains why. 

Promoted by Swimm

Management Guide

Abstract Vs Concrete Parameters

— Kent Beck

tl;dr: “Easy-to-test software is "controllable". Testers can cheaply and accurately simulate the contexts in which the software needs to run. Two contradictory patterns help achieve controllability: making parameters more concrete and more abstract. This apparent contradiction resolves when looked at from a broader perspective.”

CareerAdvice

“Small tests lead to code quality. Medium and large tests lead to product quality.”

— James Whittaker

Migrating Critical Traffic At Scale With No Downtime

tl;dr: From the team at Netflix: “when undertaking system migrations, one of the main challenges is establishing confidence and seamlessly transitioning the traffic to the upgraded architecture without adversely impacting the customer experience. This blog series will examine the tools, techniques, and strategies we utilized to achieve this goal.”

Scale Migration

Bloom Filters Explained

tl;dr: This article explains the inner workings of a Bloom Filter by designing a data structure with the following characteristics: (1) constant time complexity to test membership. (2) A small amount of memory to test membership. (3) Insert and query operations that are parallelizable. (4) Test membership that can yield approximate results.

Architecture

How Faros AI Makes My Job Easier: A Developer Story

— Natalie Casey

tl;dr: As an engineer at an early-stage startup you need to wear a lot of different hats. Some days it's about focusing on coding; on others, it could be about focusing on designing features and defining the work for contractors. Read this post to learn more about how a developer leverages Faros AI to make their job easier.

Promoted by Faros AI

Management UsefulTool

Numbers Every LLM Developer Should Know

tl;dr: (1) 40 -90% is the Amount saved by appending “be concise” to your prompt. (2) 1.3:1 is the average tokens per word. (3) ~50:1 is the cost ratio of GPT-4 to 3.5. And more.

AI LLM

Inside GitHub: Working With The LLMs Behind GitHub Copilot

— Sara Verdi

tl;dr: “Due to the growing interest in LLMs and generative AI models, we decided to speak to the researchers and engineers at GitHub who helped build the early versions of GitHub Copilot and talk through what it was like to work with different LLMs from OpenAI, and how model improvements have helped evolve GitHub Copilot to where it is today—and beyond.”

AI GitHub

Notable GitHub Repos

Guidance: Language for controlling LLMs.

Playwright: Framework for web testing and automation.

Quivr: Your second brain in the cloud.

Smol Developer: Your own personal junior developer.

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