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Friday 22nd December’s issue is presented by PostHog |
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Helping Engineers Build Product Skills
Product for Engineers is PostHog’s newsletter dedicated to helping engineers improve their product skills. Learn how to talk to users, build new features users love, and find product market fit.
Subscribe for free to get curated advice on building great products, lessons (and mistakes) from building PostHog, and deep dives into the strategies of top startups. |
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Look Back To Leap Ahead: 7 Questions For Your End of Year Reflection
tl;dr: A wide-ranging retro to set yourself up for success in the new year: (1) Evaluating projects to quit earlier. (2) Revamping regular meetings. (3) Using time wisely. (4) Alignment with manager’s goals. (5) Receiving and giving impactful feedback. (6) Changes in job role. (7) Readiness for career advancement.
Leadership Management CareerAdvice |
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Advice For New Software Devs Who've Read All Those Other Advice Essays — Hillel Wayne
tl;dr: “13 bits of advice for early-career programmers. Some of it is contradictory”: (1) Behind every best practice is a horror story. If you don't understand a best practice, look for the horror story that inspired it. It might make the best practice make sense. (2) Carefully think about any advice and evaluate how it applies to your situation. There is very little about software that's been scientifically studied, and most of the research is inconclusive. (3) Every tool has some form of hidden depth, from your programming language to git to JIRA. You don’t have to become an expert in every single one, but consider spending 5-10 minutes learning a bit more about what it can do.
CareerAdvice |
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How To Uncover Your Users' Real Problems — Ian Vanagas
tl;dr: Users are like kids at Christmas. They say they really want this one thing, but that one thing won’t keep them happy for long. Solving their unspoken problems will. And the best way to uncover them is to ask really good questions. This post covers what the best lessons PostHog has learned about asking user's questions.
Promoted by PostHog Management |
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End Of Year Pay Report 2023
tl;dr: Trends from 2023: (1) Median comp for technical roles. Software engineers comp was the same in 2022 as in 2023. Compensation rose in the second half of 2023. (2) Companies that paid the most across different levels were Jane Street, Databricks, OpenAI and Facebook. (3) US and European cities where software engineers earned the most were SF and Zurich.
Compensation |
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“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh |
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A Simple Programming Productivity Trick: Leave Work Unfinished To Reach Flow — Leonardo Creed
tl;dr: “Stop right before a “sticking point.” A sticking point is a task that’s part of a project where I know the steps to do to complete it, but I don’t know if there are hidden costs. For example, if my sticking point is deploying my ML model and HTTP server to a dev instance and verifying that it processes requests properly, then the hidden costs are deployment errors, authentication errors, resource constraints, etc... Write down the next steps extremely clearly. Writing down steps makes regaining context and the state of mind from the day before easier. Make them actionable and unambiguous.” Leonardo also shares 3 other productivity tips.
Productivity |
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How Meta Built The Infrastructure For Threads
tl;dr: The article give examples of two existing components that played an important architectural role in building Threads: (1) ZippyDB, a distributed key/value datastore that provides scalability and flexibility across data centers. (2) Async, an asynchronous serverless function platform that processes trillions of function calls daily across over 100,000 servers. Async defers computing to off-peak hours, reducing time from solution conception to production deployment by handling deployment complexities i.e. queueing, scheduling, scaling, and disaster recovery. This allowed developers to focus on business logic.
Architecture Scale Meta |
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The Day I Started Believing In Unit Tests — Benjamin Richner
tl;dr: “The test ran hundreds if not thousands of times successfully. What a waste of time... But then, one day, we started observing test failures. Not many, maybe three over the course of a few weeks. The test actually crashed with a Segmentation Fault, so it was clear that it was a severe error. Interestingly, none of the code under test had actually changed. Well, that's definitely something we had to investigate! I spare you the details of the search for the error, but eventually, I was able to reproduce the problem while a debugger was attached, so the entire context of the problem was handed to me on a silver platter.”
Tests |
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Building A Faster Hash Table For High Performance SQL Joins — Andrei Pechkurov
tl;dr: Andrei delves into QuestDB’s unique hash table, FastMap, designed to enhance SQL execution for JOIN and GROUP BY operations. FastMap employs open addressing and linear probing, optimized for high performance in database environments. It supports variable-size keys and fixed-size values, facilitating efficient data handling and updates. Notably, FastMap operates off-heap, reducing garbage collection pressure to improve performance.
Database Performance |
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Amphion: OS audio, music, and speech generation toolkit.
Codapi: Interactive code examples for documentation, education and fun.
Promptbase: All things prompt engineering.
Solid Queue: Database-backed active job backend.
Templ: Language for writing HTML user interfaces in Go.
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