Issue #456

Friday 13th October’s issue is presented by Cast AI

Engineers, Reduce Your Kubernetes Costs By Half

CAST AI is an all-in-one Kubernetes cost optimization and automation platform that achieves over 60% average compute cost savings without months of onboarding. You get lightning-fast autoscaling, downscaling, spot VMs support, and more with no hit to performance.

See The Magic - First Cluster Optimization Is Absolutely Free!

Ask Vs Guess Culture

— Jean Hsu

tl;dr: Jean discusses the contrasting dynamics of "ask culture" and "guess culture." While "ask culture" promotes direct requests and clear communication, "guess culture" relies on subtle hints and indirect cues,  often gauging the likelihood of a positive response before making a request. Jean provides examples to illustrate these, emphasizing the potential for misunderstandings and frustrations. She offers advice for guess-culture individuals: (1) Seek help when feeling stuck, without fearing inconvenience to others. (2) Express interest in opportunities e.g publishing on the company blog. (3) Cultivate comfort with receiving "no" as an answer. If people aren't occasionally declining, one might still be operating within guess culture. (4) Use the thought exercise "If I could have my way..." to bypass others' needs and focus on personal desires, which can then be turned into requests.

CareerAdvice

10,000 Hours With Reid Hoffman: What I Learned

— Ben Casnocha

tl;dr: (1) People are complicated and flawed. Root for their better angels. (2) The best way to get a busy person’s attention: Help them. (3) Keep it simple and move fast when conceiving strategies and making decisions. (4) Every weakness has a corresponding strength. (5) The values that actually shape a culture have both upside and downside. (6)
Understand someone’s “alpha” tendencies and how that drives them. (7) Self-deception watch: even those who say they don’t need or want flattery, sometimes still need it. (8) Be clear on your specific level of engagement on a project. (9) Sketch three possible outcomes for a project: the likely upside, likely ‘regular’, and likely downside scenarios. (10) A key to making good partnerships great: Identify and emphasize any misaligned incentives.

Leadership Management

The Rise And Fall Of Spot Instance Pricing In 2023

— Phil Andrews

tl;dr: Dive into our latest deep-dive on spot instance pricing trends over the past year. Azure's prices skyrocketed by 108%, while GCP surprised everyone with a 26% drop. AWS? Somewhere in between. Discover the regions and instance types that saw the most dramatic shifts and learn how our game-changing "scheduled rebalancing" tool can save you big bucks in this ever-evolving cloud pricing arena. Don't miss out on these crucial insights – perfect for refining your cloud strategy.

Management Cloud Trend

7 Strategies To Cope With The Stress Of Career Uncertainty

— Bryan Robinson

tl;dr: (1) Focus on what you can control: concentrate on actionable tasks. (2) Exercise self-care: prioritize mental and physical health. (3) Look for the opportunity in the difficulty: view uncertainty as beneficial for cognitive growth. (4) Keep a curious mind: embrace an open mindset. (5) Cultivate optimism: stay positive for better career outcomes. (6) Turn unknowns into adventures: see challenges as opportunities. (7) Take chances: venture outside the comfort zone for career growth.

CareerAdvice

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

– Oscar Wilde

Unified Session For Analytical Events

tl;dr: Uber's post delves into the challenges and solutions surrounding the implementation of a "Unified Session" for analytical events. Historically, Uber utilized multiple session definitions, leading to fragmented data and limiting cross-domain analytics. The article introduces the "Unified Session" concept, which aims to bridge frontend and backend signals under a single session definition. Key strategies include: (1) Extensible session definition: adapting to various marketplace signals across different lines of business. (2) Scalable system design: handling Uber-scale traffic and efficiently propagating session IDs. (3) Mobile call flow: reducing backend calls by utilizing session cookies. (4) Migration of data lake: a two-phase approach ensuring seamless transition to the new session definition. (5) Resilient recovery: ensuring data consistency and system reliability.

Analytics

A Student Asked How I Keep Us Innovative. I Don't.

— Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya

tl;dr: Nicole discusses the balance between innovation and using proven technology. The central argument is that while innovation is enticing, it's often more practical and efficient to use established technologies. The author notes, "Most of the time, the problems you run into while doing your work are mundane." Proven technologies offer benefits like robust documentation, established ecosystems, and familiar concepts. However, Nicole also acknowledges situations where innovative tech is necessary, stating, "With the bleeding edge, you are going to get cut, but sometimes that's necessary."

ThoughtPiece

Git Commit And Commit Message Best Practices

— Justin Joyce

tl;dr: Justin shares best practices for git commits and commit messages. Commit best practices include: (1) Commit often: Save work at incremental steps. (2) Keep commits self-contained: Ensure each commit represents a distinct piece of work. (3) Keep commits small: Commit frequently to maintain smaller changes. For commit messages: (1) Keep messages short: Aim for a one-liner, ideally under 70 characters. (2) Be descriptive yet concise: Summarize the commit's essence succinctly. (3) Be specific: Clearly indicate the nature and location of the change.The author emphasizes clarity and specificity over strict adherence to tense or voice in messages.

BestPractices Git

How I Made A Heap Overflow in Curl

— Daniel Stenberg

tl;dr: Daniel discusses a significant security flaw in curl, which he describes as the "worst security problem found in curl in a long time." The vulnerability stems from a heap overflow issue related to how curl handles SOCKS5 proxy connections with overly long hostnames. Daniel explains the technical intricacies of the flaw, its origins, and the subsequent fix.

Libcurl Security

Notable Links

Bypass Paywalls: Extension to bypass paywalls for selected sites.

GPT Pilot: Creates apps while dev oversees implementation.

IGL: Cross-platform library that commands the GPU.

Supervision: Reusable computer vision tools.

Viselect: Visual dom-selection library.

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