Friday 25th October’s issue is presented by QA Wolf |
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If slow QA processes bottleneck you or your software engineering team and you’re releasing slower because of it — you need to check out QA Wolf. |
They get engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and help them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes. |
See how they have helped Drata’s team of 80+ engineers achieve 4x more test cases and 86% faster QA cycles. |
🛒 Available on AWS, GCP, and Azure marketplaces. |
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— Andrew Bosworth |
tl;dr: “Imagine a simple scenario. Your manager is proposing changes to your roadmap. Those changes would negate months of work by your team. You lead the team and don’t agree with the new direction. Following a robust discussion your manager makes the change over your objections. How do you proceed?” |
Leadership Management |
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— Wes Kao |
tl;dr: “The truth is, it can hurt to ask. Asking when you shouldn’t is expensive: (1) Asking can use your social capital. (2) Asking can make someone question your sense of judgment. (3) Asking can be off-putting and create awkwardness. (4) Asking can put a strain on a relationship. (5) Asking can change the nature of a relationship going forward (and be hard to undo). You can ask—but don’t just “put it out there” without a strategy. Think about whether what you’re asking a specific person makes sense given your level of trust.” |
CareerAdvice |
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tl;dr: Just like athletes need more than one drill to win a competition, AI agents require consistent training based on real-world performance metrics to excel in their role. At QA Wolf, we’ve developed weighted “gym scenarios” to simulate real-world challenges and track their progress over time. How does our AI use these metrics to continuously improve our accuracy? Watch our latest webinar to learn more. |
Promoted by QA Wolf |
Performance AI |
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— Kevin Li |
tl;dr: “In the past 3 years, I’ve run over 300 interviews... I especially like capping interviews with an open-ended question that really lets great candidates shine. One of my favorite now-retired questions is: “What’s something you’ve learned that you believe gives you an edge - something that you’re almost surprised more people don’t know about?” |
Leadership Management Hiring |
“The art of communication is the language of leadership.” | | | | – James Humes |
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— Daniel Bryant |
tl;dr: “There’s typically a lot of agreement within the team around the best platform engineering books, but the ranking can be controversial! We’ve pooled together our collective top five recommendations for this blog post.” |
Books |
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tl;dr: Budibase saves engineers 100s of hours building internal tools and automating workflows. It's open source, connects to any data source, offers free SSO, and is loved by over 200,000 engineers worldwide. Transform your workflows with Budibase. |
Promoted by Budibase |
InternalTools |
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tl;dr: “By rethinking our architecture, we shifted to vertical microfrontends, leading to a simpler development experience and over a 40% improvement in preview build times and local development compilation. Streamlined dependencies by removing code for the other microfrontends also reduced page weight and boosted end-user performance, with gains in Core Web Vitals like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP).” |
Architecture Microservices |
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tl;dr: “As one of the foundational teams at Spotify focused on understanding and enriching the core content in our catalogs, we leverage ML in many of our products. For example, we use ML to detect content relations so a new track or album will be automatically placed on the right Artist Page. We also use it to analyze podcast audio, video, and metadata to identify platform policy violations. To power such experiences, we need to build several ML models that cover entire content catalogs — hundreds of millions of tracks and podcast episodes.” |
LLM |
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— Yi-Shu Tai |
tl;dr: “Last year, we introduced the latest iteration to Robinhood: By leveraging proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controllers, Robinhood can now more quickly and effectively manage load imbalances. This has not only improved the reliability of our infrastructure, but yielded significant hardware cost savings. And with an increase in AI workloads that power our latest intelligent features, effectively managing demands on our GPU resources is more critical to the business than ever.” |
LoadBalancer |
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Notable Reading |
Quastor is a free newsletter that’s read by over 60,000 engineering leaders. |
They send out weekly deep dives on the latest tech around databases, authentication, testing, AI and much more. |
Learn about the exact strategies, technologies and APIs that companies are using to launch, iterate quickly and scale up. |
Subscriber For Free! |
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Most Popular From Last Issue |
My Top 10 Favorite Leadership And Management Books — Dennis Nerush |
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Notable Links |
API Hub: Learn and master API interaction. |
Civet: Modern way to write TypeScript. |
Debugging Stories: Collection of links to various debugging stories. |
Quartz: Tools to publish your digital garden. |
Tech Interview Handbook: Curated interview preparation materials. |
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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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