Friday 18th October’s issue is presented by Knock |
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Building product notifications gets complicated fast. Knock abstracts away the complexity and gives you: |
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— Will Larson |
tl;dr: Will reflect on his shift from a 'company, team, self' framework to an eventual ‘quid pro quo' approach during his management tenure at Uber. His ‘quid pro quo' approach is: (1) Generally, prioritize company and team priorities over your own. (2) If you are getting de-energized, artificially prioritize some energizing work. Increase the quantity until equilibrium is restored. (3) If the long-term balance between energy and proper priorities can’t be balanced for more than a year, stop everything else and work on solving this issue e.g. change your role or quit. Will emphasizes the importance of remaining flexible and curious. |
CarerAdvice Leadership Management |
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— Gergely Orosz |
tl;dr: Gergely asked several software engineers and engineering leaders why they left the lure of big tech. He covers: (1) How big tech is less stable than it was. (2) Professional growth in a startup environment vs big tech. (3) Closed career paths. (4) Employees being forced out due to politics. (5) Scaleups becoming “too Big Tech.” (6) Steep compensation drops. (7) Raw feedback.” |
CarerAdvice |
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— Sam Seely |
tl;dr: A complete guide to evaluating a build vs. buy decision for products transactional notification system. This piece covers the challenges faced by teams evaluating whether to build or buy a notification system, what notification systems look like at scale and the requirements they share, how to use a framework to assess any build vs buy decision, how to apply that framework against the build decision for a notification system. |
Promoted by Knock |
Guide Management |
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— Dario Amodei |
tl;dr: From the CEO of Anthropic: “The list of positive applications of powerful AI is extremely long, but I’m going to focus on a small number of areas that seem to me to have the greatest potential to directly improve the quality of human life. The five categories I am most excited about are: (1) Biology and physical health. (2) Neuroscience and mental health. (3) Economic development and poverty. (4) Peace and governance. (5) Work and meaning. |
ThoughtPiece |
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” | | | | — Karl Marx |
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— Adam Bender |
tl;dr: “The test pyramid is the canonical heuristic for guiding test suite evolution. It conveys a simple message - prefer more unit tests than integration tests, and prefer more integration tests than end-to-end tests. While useful, the test pyramid lacks the details you need as your test suite grows and you face challenging trade-offs. To scale your test suite, go beyond the test pyramid. The SMURF mnemonic is an easy way to remember the tradeoffs to consider when balancing your test suite.” |
Tests |
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tl;dr: BlueOptima's study of 200,000+ enterprise developers uncovered surprising insights on the reality of Generative AI: (1) Only 12% of developers commit GenAI code without modification, suggesting limited real-world integration. (2) Modest productivity gains of only 4%, indicating marketing claims are premature. (3) A decline in quality with high AI usage. |
Promoted by BlueOptima |
Management Productivity AI |
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— Thorsten Ball |
tl;dr: “How I use git is based on the last 12 years of working in companies with smallish (less than 50) engineering teams. In every team, we used git and GitHub exclusively; changes were made in branches, proposed as pull requests, and then merged into the main branch. In the last few years, after GitHub introduced squash-merging, we used that.” |
Git |
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tl;dr: Netflix developed the TimeSeries Abstraction — a versatile and scalable solution designed to efficiently store and query large volumes of temporal event data with low millisecond latencies, all in a cost-effective manner across various use cases. “In this post, we will delve into the architecture, design principles, and real-world applications of the TimeSeries Abstraction, demonstrating how it enhances our platform’s ability to manage temporal data at scale.” |
TimeData Architecture |
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— Fernando Hurtado |
tl;dr: “If you've ever worked on refactoring or improving performance in a software system, you've probably run into a particular frustration: abstraction-heavy codebases. What looks like neatly organized and modularized code often reveals itself as a labyrinth, with layers upon layers of indirection. The performance is sluggish, debugging is a nightmare... This leads us to an important realization: not all abstractions are created equal. In fact, many are not abstractions at all—they're just thin veneers, layers of indirection that add complexity without adding real value.” |
SoftwareDesign |
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Notable Reading |
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Workspaces is a free weekly newsletter that gives a behind-the-scenes tour of interesting and productive desk setups. |
Join 14,000 other readers from companies like Meta, Snap, TechCrunch, Instagram, The New York Times, and more. |
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Most Popular From Last Issue |
The Senior Shortcut — Camille Fournier |
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Notable Links |
Clipscreen: Virtual monitor that mirrors a portion of your screen. |
Friday Deploys: Apparel and accessories for work and leisure. |
Ladybird: Truly independent web browser. |
Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos. |
Siyuan: OS personal knowledge management software. |
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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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