|
Friday 20th October’s issue is presented by Flatfile |
 |
Imagine A World With Clean Imported Data
Onboarding customer data into your app is a frustrating and costly process. Enter Flaftile.
Flatfile gives your developers a simple and secure way to build a solution for importing CSV, Excel, and other data files. From data parsing and validation to transformation and egress, get the control of a homegrown import tool without having to build and maintain it yourself. |
|
|
Time Management — Andrew Bosworth
tl;dr: “Consider the next week of your life. How would you like to spend your time? Write down all the things you’d like to do and assign them rough percentages of how much of your time they should take. Account for your obligations first. With your remaining time try to give more weight to things that give you energy. Focus on tasks that play to your personal strengths. Now audit where you have actually been spending your time without judgement. Resist the temptation to explain the difference between your ideal and actual allocation. I have been doing this exercise every few months for a decade. I haven’t once found that my actual allocation matches my target. So I make corrections to my schedule.”
CareerAdvice |
 |
|
How Do I Progress To The Next Level In My Career? — James Stanier
tl;dr: James helps us: (1) Explore what careers may look like and what motivates us. These topics are well worth revisiting when you feel like you are getting frustrated or stuck, or are wondering what the future may hold for you. (2) Think about some practical ways in which you begin to take your progression into your own hands. Once you know what you’re after, how do you get there? James discusses his insights to both of these prompts.
CareerAdvice |
|
|
CSV Import Solutions: A Build Vs Buy Analysis
tl;dr: Users expect CSV import to just work, but building an importer isn’t easy. Flatfile surveyed companies to rank the effort required in order to build essential CSV import features such as parsing, validation, transformation, data I/O and security.
Promoted By Flatfile Guide Management |
|
|
Random Thoughts 15 years Into Software Engineering
tl;dr: A total of 10 random thoughts, the first 3 of which are: (1) Debuggability is highly underrated: When writing code, you have to think about how it will execute. Leave yourself audit trails, store data in human readable formats, and invest in admin tooling. (2) Projects are late, a lot. This is not unique to software. The reality is that time is constantly moving against us, and when unexpected things happen they can take an order of magnitude longer than we planned. (3) Aggressively manage scope: related to the above, protect your project’s scope. You don’t have to push back if you don’t want, but be transparent about how it will affect the project delivery and communicate it widely.
CareerAdvice |
|
|
|
“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others."
-Jack Welch
|
|
|
Improve Readability With Positive Booleans — Max Kanat-Alexander
tl;dr: (1) Name your flags and variables in such a way that they represent the positive check you wish to make - the presence of something, something being enabled, something being true - rather than the negative check you wish to make - the absence of something, something being disabled, something being false. (2) If your conditional looks like “if not … else …” then reverse it to put the positive case first.
Booleans BestPractices |
|
|
Authorization’s Spookiest Problem: Data
tl;dr: Between the dynamic nature of your application’s data model and the amount of application data needed to make authorization decisions, it’s no wonder data management is authorization’s spookiest problem. Join Oso's virtual event on October 31 where we'll share our best practices for building scalable and effective authorization systems, with a focus on storing, accessing and modeling the data.
Promoted By Oso
BestPractices Event |
|
|
Estimates Are About Time, So Let's Cut To The Chase — Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya
tl;dr: Nicole argues that software engineers, who often estimate tasks using abstract points, should instead estimate directly in units of time. "When we look at large pieces of a product roadmap, we typically need a ballpark understanding of the time and cost." Estimating in time offers clarity and avoids the indirectness of using points as a proxy for time. However, Nicole acknowledges potential pitfalls, such as misuse of time estimates by external parties.
ThoughtPiece |
|
|
How We Built A Streaming SQL Engine — Maor Kern
tl;dr: “So you probably wake up every morning asking yourself three of life’s most pertinent questions- how do I build a streaming SQL engine, what even is a streaming SQL engine, and can our Lord drop tables owned by another user. I too found myself asking these questions, sometimes even dreaming about them- often in the form of various SQL operators pointing and laughing at my incompetence as I beg them to answer me.” A streaming SQL engine keeps queries’ results up to date without ever having to recalculate them and Maor discusses topic like data ingestion, query optimization, and stream processing.
SQL |
|
|
How GitHub Indexes Code For Blazing Fast Search & Retrieval — Shivang Sarawagi
tl;dr: “The search engine supports global queries across 200 million repos and indexes code changes in repositories within minutes. The code search index is by far the largest cluster that GitHub runs, comprising 5184 vCPUs, 40TB of RAM, and 1.25PB of backing storage, supporting a query load of 200 requests per second on average and indexing over 53 billion source files.” Design Scale Infrastructure |
|
|
|
CogVLM: Visual language model.
Formbricks: OS survey & experience management solution.
MemGPT: Teach LLMs to manage their own memory.
Omnigres: Postgres as an application platform.
Payload: Build a modern backend + admin UI.
|
|
Click the below and shoot me an email!
1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it
1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 |
|
|
|