/Management

Building Your Own Feature Flag Platform Might Be A Mistake

- Mateusz Kwaśniewski tl;dr: Feature flags play a critical role in software development. And they should: They’re great for enabling developers to manage features in a way that’s controlled and targeted. A home-grown feature flag platform might work great at first, but that’s just the honeymoon phase. How do you decide when it’s no longer worth the effort?

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What Drives Adoption Of Internal Developer Tools?

- Abi Noda tl;dr: The highest priority adoption factor for 4 types of internal tools: (1) For build tools, it is whether the tool is highly configurable. (2) For continuous integration tools, it’s whether the tool is compatible with the technologies developers use. (3) For infrastructure as code tools, it’s how visible the usage of the tool is within the organization. (4) For version control tools, it’s whether the tool fits well with the way developers work.

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How To Make Difficult Technical Decisions You And Your Team Won't Regret

- Jordan Cutler tl;dr: (1) Write out all possible options. (2) Cross out what won’t work. (3) Write pros and cons, come up with a preference, and discuss with your team. If you’re still unsure, do any of the following: (a) Act as your end-user and critique each solution from that perspective. (b) Have 1:1 discussions with someone junior and more senior. (c) Consider how reversible the decision is, what the cost of each one being wrong is, and what room each one has for being extended in the future.

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Introducing HogQL: Direct SQL Access For PostHog

- Andy Vandervell Joe Martin tl;dr: “You can use HogQL expressions to, among other things, enhance insights, filter event lists, and write full queries to analyze data in any way you want.” The authors demonstrate the various things you can do with HogQL.

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How Canva Saves Millions Annually In Amazon S3 Costs

tl;dr: Canva saved millions annually in Amazon S3 costs by migrating their infrequently accessed user-generated data to the S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class. This storage class offered low-cost archival storage with fast retrieval times. By understanding their data and usage patterns and strategically transitioning data, Canva achieved a positive return on investment within a few months, resulting in significant cost savings of approximately $3.6 million per year.

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Linking Modular Architecture To Development Teams

- Matthew Foster tl;dr: “This article charts the journey of an enterprise who set out to shift their architecture to a more modular one in order to ease their growing pains. They found that modularity is a multifaceted solution that extends beyond architecture, into business lines of communication, team topologies and effective developer experience. By paying close attention to these factors, the enterprise was able to achieve significant uplifts in the delivery performance of their mobile applications.”

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Design + Build Any Chat Use Case

tl;dr: Build real-time chat messaging in less time. Rapidly ship in-app messaging with our highly reliable chat infrastructure and feature-rich SDKs. Improve your overall in-app conversion, engagement, and retention.

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Tindall On Software Delays

tl;dr: “Bill Tindall was instrumental to the Apollo missions and considered by many at Nasa and MIT to be an excellent leader. He authored over a thousand widely circulated memos, called Tindallgrams. I stumbled over one of these, which highlights the three perspectives needed for good engineering and management: (1) Trust the people doing the work. (2) See the problem for yourself and accept reality. (2) Attend to the big picture. (4) Work with interactions and trade-offs.”

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How Google Measures And Manages Tech Debt

- Abi Noda tl;dr: The first part describes the categories of tech debt and the second part explores how categories may be measured, providing insights on how to determine whether teams are struggling with technical debt and the types of tech debt they’re struggling with. The final part of this paper provides several tactics that may help reduce tech debt. 

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An Explosion In Software Engineers Using AI Coding Tools?

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: What do AI coding tools help the most with? The survey lists the top areas mentioned by developers: (1) Learn: develop coding language skills (57%). (2) Productivity: become more productive (53%). (3) Focus: spend more time building and creating, less on repetitive tasks (51%). Gergely dives how engineers are leveraging AI tools.

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