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Friday 22nd March’s issue is presented by WorkOS |
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The Modern Identity Platform For B2B SaaS
WorkOS provides easy-to-use APIs for auth, user identity, and enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free.
It's perfect for B2B SaaS companies frustrated with high costs, opaque pricing, and lack of enterprise capabilities supported by legacy auth vendors. |
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Tracking Engineering Time — Jacob Kaplan-Moss
tl;dr: How should a manager discover what their team is working on and figure out if time is being allocated correctly? Jacob shares his playbook: (1) Measure the time engineers are spending using story point, ticket counts. This doesn’t need to be super-precise. (2) Split that time into “buckets” that map activities that influence output. Jacob starts with 3 buckets: features i.e. time spent developing new things, debt and toil i.e. time spent on routine tasks. (3) Agree on the appropriate ratios for each bucket, and then adjust over time to influence the outputs you care about.
Leadership Management |
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Managing Up: 11 Ways To Get Better Feedback — Wes Kao
tl;dr: (1) Make it insanely easy for your manager to give you feedback i.e. ask for specific prompts. (2) The word “feedback” might feel loaded. Ask what to do differently and what worked well e.g. “What’s missing? Could you mark which parts of this memo are confusing?” (3) Give them permission to rip your work apart and encourage them to be direct.
CareerAdvice |
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The Developer’s Guide to Directory Sync (SCIM) — Robert Curlee
tl;dr: SCIM is an open source protocol for implementing Directory Sync, which is crucial for user lifecycle management (user provisioning / deprovisioning). When selling to enterprises, this is a highly requested feature that can determine whether the deal goes through. However, when choosing to implement this yourself there are a number of pitfalls and implementation details to consider.
Promoted by WorkOS Guide Management |
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Friction Isn't Velocity — Will Larson
tl;dr: “It remains the most common category of reasoning error that I see stressed executives make. If you’re not sure how to make progress, then emotionally it feels a lot better to substitute motion for lack of progress, but in practice you’re worse off.” Will highlights this with examples.
Leadership Management |
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Editor’s Note
We’re looking for feedback on Pointer... What are we doing well? Not so well? What do you want more of? What are you working on or thinking about?
Click reply and let us know! |
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Architecture Of An Early Stage SAAS — Giuseppe La Torre
tl;dr: In this article I describe a simple architecture for an early stage SAAS. As a solo founder, I report some choices made to launch Feelback, a small-scale SAAS for collecting users signals about any content. Some questions you will find answers to: How to design a low-maintenance architecture? Which hosting and providers to choose and what configurations to use? How to deploy to production with ease? How to manage a monorepo with all service systems and components?
Architecture |
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Top 5 Challenges of Designing Your Data Warehouse for Multi-Tenant Analytics
tl;dr: Data warehouses are built to store large volumes of data from numerous sources, not for SaaS platforms working with multi-tenant analytics where data security is vital. This guide helps you avoid the headaches that come with that architecture mismatch featuring solutions from our analytics experts.
Promoted by Qrvey Data Analytics |
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Designing APIs For Humans: Error Messages — Paul Asjes
tl;dr: A valuable error message should: (1) Use the correct HTTP status code. (2) Wrap the error in an “error” object. (3) Be helpful by providing the error code. (4) The error type. (5) A link to the relevant docs. (6) The API version used in this request. (7) A suggestion on how to fix the issue. Paul shares an example by Stripe.
BestPractices API |
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DuckDB As The New Jq — Paul Gross
tl;dr: “Recently, I’ve been interested in the DuckDB project. And one of the amazing features is that it has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies. This means it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table, among many other formats.” Paul discusses how this has impacted his work.
Database DuckDB |
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What I Learned From Looking At 900 Most Popular Open Source AI Tools — Chip Huyen
tl;dr: I think of the AI stack as consisting of 4 layers: (1) Infrastructure: Toolings for serving, vector search and database. (2) Model development: Toolings for developing models and anything that involves changing a model’s weights. (3) Application development with readily available models. This is the layer that has seen the most actions in the last 2 years and is still rapidly evolving. (4) Applications: Most popular types of applications are coding, workflow automation, information aggregation.
AI Trends |
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Most Popular From Last Issue |
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Jnv: Interactive JSON filter using jq.
Garnet: Remote cache-store from Microsoft.
GritQL: Language for searching and modifying source code.
Open-Sora: Video production for all.
Supervision: Reusable computer vision tools.
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