/Management

Making Software With 4,999 Other People

- Brandon Willett tl;dr: Brandon shares what he learned from his time at Datadog, broken into 3 sections: software, projects and people. Takeaways include: (1) Keeping the development cycle near-instantaneous with features like microservices and feature flags is both productive and enjoyable. (2) Take advantage of recency bias to solve problems right after incidents. (3) Prefer projects with small organizational scopes to avoid communication breakdowns and motivate the team.

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Frameworks

- Mike Fisher tl;dr: The user shared three frameworks to understand growth phases of companies: Kent Beck's 3X (Explore, Expand, Extract), Wardley's PST (Pioneer, Settler, Town Planner), and Thiel's Zero to One. They found these useful for identifying their personal fit within a company's growth journey, thriving best in the scaling phase. Understanding one's optimal growth phase can guide career choices.

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A Software Engineer's Guide To A/B Testing

- Lior Neu-ner tl;dr: This guide provides an introduction to A/B testing for software engineers. It explains the basics of A/B testing, including how to devise, implement, monitor and analyze tests, and answers common questions about A/B testing. The guide also lists conditions under which you may want to avoid A/B testing, such as lack of traffic, high implementation costs, and ethical considerations. The post concludes with a launch checklist for A/B tests.

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On Becoming A VP Of Engineering: Doing The Job

- Emily Nakashima tl;dr: “I said at the beginning of this post that the most important thing I deliver is alignment. It’s not the hardest thing I have to deliver though: that is focus.“ Emily also discusses what a VP’s day to day looks like, unlearning, compensation, giving yourself more slack time, and more.

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Briefly: The Value Of Meetings, And Some Alternatives

- Kellan Elliot-McCrea tl;dr: Shopify's meeting cost calculator stirs debate; are meetings wasted time or vital? Alternatives emerge such as Dropbox's "Core Collaboration Hours" and Frame.io's "Huddle Days", which foster spontaneous discussions, encouraging productive work and respecting individual work rhythms.

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Best Practices To Build IoT Analytics 

- Zoe Steinkamp tl;dr: Best practices for building IoT analytics include storing data in a time series database, using efficient ingestion methods, cleaning data before storage, downsampling for easier analysis, monitoring data in real time, and storing historical data in cold storage or a data lake for analysis. Choosing the right tools from the start will save time and improve efficiency.

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How Platform Teams Get Stuff Done

- Pete Hodgson tl;dr: “Platform teams have a unique reliance on other teams to ensure adoption of their platform - getting code changes into other teams' codebase is critical to their success. There are a variety of patterns for that cross-team collaboration, and selecting the right ones depends on both the phase of platform adoption and the ability of both teams and codebases to accept external influence.”

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Interesting Learnings From Outages

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: The article discusses the importance of investigating and learning from outages in the industry. It explores the different types of postmortems, including internal, customer-only, and public postmortems. The article dives into 3 case studies: (1) Adevinta experienced a significant impact due to a DNS outage, (2) GitHub experienced an outage due to a network configuration issue at their secondary site, (3) Reddit experienced an issue with a Kubernetes cluster upgrade gone wrong."

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Building a SaaS API? Don't Forget Your Terraform Provider

tl;dr: The article highlights the importance of Terraform providers for SaaS platforms and how providers simplify infrastructure management, promote consistency, aid scalability, automate tasks, and enable auditing. It also mentions examples of Terraform providers for SaaS platforms and discusses the benefits and traits of good candidates for Terraform integration.

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More Software Projects Need Defenses Of Design

- Hillel Wayne tl;dr: Hillel argues why a well-documented "Defense of Design" is an invaluable resource for understanding a project's history, design decisions, and constraints that shaped it. It provides insights into the thought process of the creators, developers, and maintainers, thus fostering a greater level of understanding and appreciation for the software.

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