Issue #476

Friday 29th December’s issue is presented by PostHog

A Free Newsletter Building Product Skills For Engineers

Product for Engineers is PostHog’s newsletter dedicated to helping engineers improve their product skills. Learn how to talk to users, build new features users love, and find product market fit. 

Subscribe for free to get curated advice on building great products, lessons (and mistakes) from building PostHog, and deep dives into the strategies of top startups.

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What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

— Sam Altman

tl;dr: 17 short, guiding statements including: (1) Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. (2) Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time. (3) It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people.

CareerAdvice

How to Write Great Tech Specs

— Nicolla Ballotta

tl;dr: Nicola covers: (1) What a tech specs document is, why it's important, and why it can sometimes be challenging to create one. (2) How to create outstanding tech specs. (3) A Notion system for creating tech specs. (4) Tips from both his own experience as well as the communities.

Leadership Management

How We Work Asynchronously

— Ian Vanagas

tl;dr: Besides being difficult to pronounce, being asynchronous means people can work autonomously and on their own schedule, even if other teams members aren’t immediately available. This post shares PostHog's not-so-secret strategies for working asynchronously across 11 countries.

Promoted by PostHog

Leadership Management

Practical Magic: Improving Productivity and Happiness for Software Development Teams

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Grant Jenks

tl;dr: "Today we are open-sourcing the LinkedIn Developer Productivity & Happiness Framework (DPH Framework) - a collection of documents that describe the systems, processes, metrics, and feedback systems we use to understand our developers and their needs internally at LinkedIn."

Productivity

“Celebrate endings — for they precede new beginnings.”

— Jonathan Lockwood Huie

uVitals – An Anomaly Detection & Alerting System

— Komal Raulkar, Venki Appiah

tl;dr: "Every day, millions of people rely on Uber to move from place to place and have food and groceries delivered. Uber depends on the reliability of its internal systems and the accuracy of data to power its platform. A glitch in its systems can result in a poor user experience and/or a loss in revenue. Major system issues that affect the reliability of our services are detected and mitigated quickly. However, there are several minor issues that take a longer time to detect and mitigate. Such minor issues can collectively result in poor user experiences and revenue loss over time. This is where uVitals comes in, as it surfaces these issues and anomalies when they begin to occur."

Architecture Scale

4 Billion If Statements

tl;dr: "So I went to work to explore this idea of checking if a number is odd or even by only using comparisons to see how well it works in a real world scenario. Since I’m a great believer in performant code I decided to implement this in the C programming language as it’s by far the fastest language on the planet to this day..."  

Performance Entertaining

Getting Started With Web Performance

— Alistair Shepherd

tl;dr: "We’ll be diving into the river of load times and exploring what web performance is, why it’s important, how to measure it and finally my click-baity “Ten Wild Web Performance Tips! You’ll be saving number 5 for later!”. If you already know your CLS’ from your FCPs, lab from field data, and are well familiar with Lighthouses (not the ones with big lights) then you can jump straight to the tips."

Performance

SQL As API

— Valentin Willscher

tl;dr: "I know what you are thinking: Exposing an API that accepts SQL is crazy. It's a terrible idea. Especially if the API is exposed on the internet. Doing that is insecure and will lead to SQL injection attacks, it is a nightmare to maintain and it will lock the backend implementation into a specific technology (some ANSI SQL database). But is that really true? Time to re-evaluate!"

SQL API

Notable Links

Apache Hudi: Upserts, deletes and incremental processing on big data.

DeskHop: Fast desktop switching.

GPT Pilot: AI developer that writes and debugs code.

Minimalist CV: Print-friendly, minimalist CV page.

Prompt Of The Year: Impactful prompts across various domains.

Click the below and shoot me an email!

1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it

1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5