Issue #280

Issue #280
Pointer.io


Friday 7th January's issue is presented by WorkOS
This Is How Effective CTOs Embrace Change
- Evan Cooke
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: "A truly great leader is someone that can not only figure out the impact of a potential decision, they can fully understand the impact of that decision on all the people who will be touched by it.” Evan Cooke, former Twilio CTO, outlines the two significant issues faced by CTOs of later stage startups - (1) Not knowing fellow leaders well enough, (2) Misunderstanding the needs of the company - and how to navigate them.

#Leadership #Management
 
tl;dr: "Repeating the conclusion isn’t useful. The question that reached that conclusion is useful over and over." Yet, Jessica points to the fact that we tend to replicate team structures of successful companies without asking the right questions. Instead of “what do successful teams do?” ask “how did that team that worked well reach its way of working?”
The Developer's Guide To SCIM
#Management #Guide

tl;dr: Automatic user provisioning and deprovisioning via SCIM is often one of the second features, after single sign-on, that engineering teams need to build in order to sell to larger customers. Imagine how difficult it'd be for IT admins to manually add/delete access to your app for hundreds of employees when they join or leave the company. We explore how it works, how to add it to your app, and best practices for implementation.

Promoted by WorkOS.

#OrganizationalDesign 
 
tl;dr: "Engineering Enablement teams’ main goal is to reduce complexity and improve development velocity and time to market by providing self-service solutions, engineering standards, and best practices. The team aims to enable developers to focus on business logic and puts an emphasis on developer experience and product quality." Tal discusses this team's role in detail, who they are and their purpose. 

A Note From WorkOS

WorkOS is a developer platform to make your app enterprise-ready. With a few simple APIs, you can add enterprise features like Single Sign-On, SAML, SCIM user provisioning, and more.
 
How JPEG Compression Works
- Bilal Himite
#JPG
 
tl;dr: "Quantization reduces the number of bits required to store a number. In other words, it reduces the precision of the number. The basis behind it is to divide our number by a quantum and then round to the nearest integer." Bilal talks us through each step taken for JPEG compression to happen.
Programming In 1987 Versus Today
- Curtis Poe
#ThoughtPiece

tl;dr: "This quick ‘n dirty hack that I wrote in a couple of minutes replaced two weeks worth of work in 1987 and ran almost two million times faster." Curtis shows us the BASIC code he wrote 35 years ago and it's contemporary counterpart. 

Memory Leaks: The Forgotten Side Of Web Performance
- Nolan Lawson
#Performance
 
tl;dr: "If you speed up your website by 2 seconds, everyone agrees that that’s a good thing with a visible user impact. If you reduce your website’s memory leak by 2 MB, can we still agree it was worth it? Maybe not." Nolan discusses the unique characteristics of memory leaks: (1) Low-impact until critical. (2) Hard to diagnose. (3) Trivial to fix once diagnosed.
I Took A Job At Amazon, Only To Leave After 10 Months
- Ben Adam
#Amazon #CareerAdvice

tl;dr: "When you operate at this type of scale, centralization is the enemy of efficiency. This is a paradox. Being efficient on a macro level requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level." Ben discusses the implications of this in - documentation is essential, teams are fragile and suffer from churn, everything is urgent and takes forever, everything is built in house. 
 
Notable GitHub Repos
Dioxus
Library for building user interfaces for desktop, web, mobile and more.

 
Zx
A tool for writing better scripts.


 
Starship
The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell. 

 
Cypress
Fast, easy and reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser.

 
Pointer.io
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