Friday 10th January’s issue is presented by Svix

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“Looks Good To Me” Is A Lazy Default: Why Managers Should Give Feedback On Work Output

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: Managers typically say “looks good” for one of two reasons: (1) You care about quality, but it’s faster to fix the work yourself. (2) You don’t prioritize quality, so you think the work is fine as is. This approach normalizes mediocrity in the name of efficiency. Wes prompts us to ask the following: Do I really think this looks good? What would make this excellent? What did they do well, and what could they improve? What’s one piece of feedback that will make the biggest impact in improving this? What’s something I’m noticing, that I can point out so my direct report learns to see what I’m seeing?

Leadership Management

What Makes Strong Engineers Strong?

— Sean Goedecke

tl;dr: “What defines a strong engineer is the ability to do tasks that weaker engineers can’t, even with near-unlimited time. But what are the concrete skills or traits that make up that ability? What is it about strong engineers that makes them able to do a much wider range of tasks? In order of importance, I think it’s self-belief, pragmatism, speed, and technical ability.” Sean elaborates on these qualities.

CareerAdvice

Webhooks Are Harder Than They Seem

— Tom Hacohen

tl;dr: Webhooks seem simple, after all, they are just an HTTP POST request to a URL provided by the customer. But like so many seemingly small technical challenges, webhooks have layers of complexity that reveal themselves as soon as you try to scale them, maintain them, or get them production ready.

Promoted by Svix

Guide

Arrange Your Code To Communicate Data Flow

— Sebastian Dörner

tl;dr: “We often read code linearly, from one line to the next. To make code easier to understand and to reduce cognitive load for your readers, make sure that adjacent lines of code are coherent. One way to achieve this is to order your lines of code to match the data flow inside your method.”

Tests

How To Choose The Right Database In A System Design Interview

— Ashish Pratap Singh

tl;dr: “In system design interviews, the quality of your design and its ability to scale depends heavily on the database you choose. Choosing the wrong database can lead to high latency, data loss, or even system downtime. In this article, we will cover the 9 most common use cases that come up often in system design interviews and explore the best databases for each scenario.”

SystemDesign InterviewAdvice

Building A React Login Page Template

— Brian Morrison

tl;dr: “In this article, we'll be exploring how to implement a basic authentication system using Express as well as a signup and login form in React.js. You'll learn the difference between the JWT- and session-based authentication and some associated best practices. You'll then learn how to implement session authentication step by step using a real-world demo that's before getting access to a ready-to-use React login page template based on the steps outlined in this guide.”

Promoted by Clerk

ReactJS Guide

Things We Learned About LLMs In 2024

— Simon Willison

tl;dr: “A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments.”

Trends LLM

The Foundations Of Canva’s Continuous Data Platform With Snowpipe Streaming

— Jack Caperon

tl;dr: “Over the past 5 years, Canva’s monthly active users have more than tripled from 60 million active users to over 200 million. In that time, Canva has also grown to over 4500 employees. As a result, the multiplicative effect of more questions from more internal customers with our user base generating bigger answers has driven us to find ways of scaling our product analytics platform for the future.”

Architecture Platform

Static Search Trees: 40x Faster Than Binary Search

— Ragnar Groot Koerkamp

tl;dr: “In this post, we will implement a static search tree for high-throughput searching of sorted data. We’ll mostly take the code presented there as a starting point, and optimize it to its limits.”

Search

Most Popular From Last Issue

Systems Ideas That Sound Good But Almost Never Work — Steven Sinofsky

Notable Links

Awrit: Web rendering in terminal.

Himalaya: CLI to manage emails.

Stagehand: AI web browsing framework.

Storm: LLM-powered knowledge curation system.

Zasper: Supercharged IDE for data science.