Tuesday 4th February’s issue is presented by Knock |
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Building product notifications gets complicated fast. Knock abstracts away the complexity and gives you: |
A single api to send multi-channel notifications (email, slack, in-app, etc). |
Embeddable UIs to ship in-app feeds and inboxes quickly while keeping your design on brand. |
Observability and analytics about message and user behavior, delivered to any tool of your choice (Datadog, etc). |
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— Wes Kao |
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tl;dr: “When you notice a small mistake or miscommunication, your urge might be to correct your colleague—because you are technically right. But this can derail the main point and cause a distraction. I have to remind myself: Keep the bigger picture in mind. I want to share an example of how this can creep into your work, with email drafts I almost sent vs what I actually sent.” |
CareerAdvice |
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— Kent Beck |
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tl;dr: “Can we use data to figure out who among a large team contributes most? No, if what we are looking for is a reliable, definitive answer. Data, however, may give us hints of pockets of certain kinds of impact resulting from certain kinds of behavior.” |
Leadership Management |
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— Chris Bell |
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tl;dr: “If you opened this blog post, you’re probably about to wade into the complicated ecosystem of notification and customer engagement tooling. It can feel like a daunting task. Not to fear, in this post we’re here to walk you through the basics of notification systems and the ecosystem of tools, frameworks, and vendors that surround them.” |
Promoted by Knock |
Management Guide |
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— David Loftesness |
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tl;dr: David Loftesness - engineering leader at Amazon, Twitter and Eero - wants to remind managers itching to get back to the technical trenches that this option is on the table — and it’s not a step backward. But there will be organizational, communication, and even psychological hurdles ahead, from navigating resistance from your manager to dusting off the cobwebs on your coding skills, especially with how rapidly the tech landscape is changing lately. |
Leadership Management |
“One of the true tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.” | | | | – Arnold Glasow |
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— Grant Slatton |
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tl;dr: “Think of a design document like a proof in mathematics. The goal of a proof is to convince the reader that the theorem is true. The goal of a design document is to convince the reader the design is optimal given the situation. The most important person to convince is the author. The act of writing a design document helps to add rigor to what are otherwise vague intuitions. Writing reveals how sloppy your thinking was.” |
Design BestPractices |
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— Ian Vanagas |
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tl;dr: As I’ll reveal shortly, badly managed flags have caused huge outages, a mountain of tech debt and, on one infamous occasion, almost bankrupted a company. Typically, this happens because: (1) Complexity creates confusion. Embedded and interlinked flags create many potential states that can quickly become untestable and unpredictable. (2) Poor maintainability creates tech debt. Old “zombie” flags get reused in unintended ways, or negatively react with new changes. Ian shares how you can avoid these problems. |
Promoted by PostHog |
BestPractices |
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— Nelson Elhage |
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tl;dr: “This experience has shifted a bunch of my thinking about the role of LLMs in software engineering and in my own work. These thoughts are still unfolding, but this piece is an attempt to capture my experience, and to think aloud as I ponder how to update my behaviors and beliefs and expectations.” |
AI |
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— Moncef Abboud |
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tl;dr: “This post is me indulging in a rabbit hole. I somehow found myself thinking about images, probably after my recent exploration of some compression schemes. It’s common knowledge that images are either grayscale or RGB, that mixing red, green, and blue creates new colors. But there’s certainly more to storing an image than just aligning three-byte RGB values. Something about that idea piqued my curiosity, so this blog post is my attempt to scratch that itch and answer the question: how are images really stored?” |
Images |
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— Jeff Schnitzer |
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tl;dr: "In my career, I have consumed hundreds of REST APIs and produced dozens. Since I often see the same mistakes repeated in API design, I thought it might be nice to write down a set of best practices. And poke fun at a couple widely-used APIs. Much of this may be "duh", but there might be a few rules you haven't considered yet." |
BestPractices API |
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Most Popular From Last Issue |
Database Design For Google Calendar: A Tutorial — Alexey Makhotkin |
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Notable Links |
Awesome Speaking: Resources about public speaking. |
Greenmask: Dump anonymization and synthetic data generation tool. |
Page Assist: Sidebar and web UI for local AI model. |
Stats: MacOS system monitor in your menu bar. |
Sniffet: Monitor your internet traffic. |
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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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