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Friday 7th July’s issue is presented by PostHog |
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PostHog's open source suite of product tools now includes performance monitoring in session recordings - see not only what your users are doing, but also how long each action takes! |
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Building Personal And Organizational Prestige — Will Larson
tl;dr: Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were better known. In this post, Will discusses building engineering organizational and personal prestige. He covers: (1) The distinctions between building prestige, building brand, and building an audience. (2) Deciding whether it’s valuable to build your personal and engineering brands. (3) The playbook to manufacture prestige with a small quantity of high-quality content. (4) Pitfalls of measuring prestige, and what to measure instead.
CareerAdvice |
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How NASA Writes Space-Proof Code — Jason Kottke
tl;dr: The rules focus on testability, readability, and predictability: (1) Avoid complex flow constructs, such as goto and recursion. (2) All loops must have fixed bounds. This prevents runaway code. (3) Avoid heap memory allocation. (4) Restrict functions to a single printed page. (5) Use a minimum of two runtime assertions per function.
Leadership Management |
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Why We Test In Production (And You Should To) - Ian Vanagas
tl;dr: "Testing in production successfully is a multi-step process, and this post goes over what it is, why we do it, and how to do it well." Ian covers various types of production testing, such as usage tracking, feedback, monitoring, load testing, and integration testing.
Promoted by PostHog Testing |
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How To Make Hard Decisions: Even / Over Statements — Lara Hogan
tl;dr: The "even / over" statements tool involves filling in the blanks: "In order to [thing], I'm choosing [x important thing] even over [y important thing]." This helps when there are two equally important options, and making a decision feels challenging. By articulating the trade-off and choosing one over the other, individuals can gain clarity. This is tool is for the present or a specified period.
Leadership Management |
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“You’ll end up with a much better result if you consider multiple options for each major design decision.”
— John Ousterhout |
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The Rise Of The AI Engineer
tl;dr: “Every startup I know of has some kind of discuss-ai Slack channel. Those channels will turn from informal groups into formal teams, as Amplitude, Replit and Notion have done. The thousands of Software Engineers working on productionizing AI APIs and OSS models, whether on company time or on nights and weekends, in corporate Slacks or indie Discords, will professionalize and converge on a title - the AI Engineer. This will be the highest-demand eng job of the decade.”
ThoughtPiece Trend |
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Compensation Heuristics
tl;dr: It’s hard to answer your question without knowing more details about the situation. So I’ll propose some compensation heuristics that I think likely apply, and for each, a quick test of whether you’re on the right track strategically: (1) Compensation won’t make people happy on its own. (2) Compensation alone can make people very upset. (3) Compensation helps to create owners.
Compensation |
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Upscaling LinkedIn's Profile Datastore While Reducing Costs — Estella Pham, Guanlin Lu
tl;dr: LinkedIn introduced Couchbase as a centralized storage tier cache to address scaling concerns. Challenges arose due to the cache not being backed by primary storage. The blog post discusses the decision, challenges faced, and solutions employed to achieve high cache hit rate, reduced latencies, and cost savings.
Scale |
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The Massive Bug At The Heart Of The NPM Ecosystem — Darcy Clarke
tl;dr: A npm package's manifest is published independently from its tarball. Manifests are never fully validated against the tarball's contents. The ecosystem has broadly assumed the contents of the manifest & tarball are consistant. Any tools or insights using the public registry are succeptible to exploitation/likely inaccurate. Bad actors can hide malware & scripts in direct or transitive dependencies that go undetected.
News |
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Aider: GPT powered coding in your terminal.
GPT-Migrate: Easily migrate your codebase from one framework or language to another.
System Design Course: Learn how to design systems at scale and prepare for system design interviews.
TypeID: Type-safe, K-sortable, globally UUIDs inspired by Stripe IDs.
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How did you like this issue of Pointer?
1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it
1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 |
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