Issue #485

Friday 2nd February’s issue is presented by LinearB

Engineering Leader's Guide: Goals And Reporting

Engineering leaders have a dual mandate to:

1. Deliver operational excellence

2. Drive business impact.

In this free guide, you will learn how to leverage metrics program data, resource allocation visibility, and workflow automation to set and meet improvement goals that achieve the results you need.

Get The Guide

Useful Tradeoffs Are Multi-Dimensional

— Will Larson

tl;dr: Tradeoff decisions often result in disappointment e.g. you can’t deploy software quickly and test it thoroughly, you have to sacrifice usability due to safety features. Will believes the key is to introduce a new dimension to the decision making process. His approach: (1) Believe and socialize that there is a new dimension to discover. (2) Get specific on stakeholder requirements. (3) Seeing dimensions is the same as seeing layers of context. Expand your contextual awareness or pull in a team with knowledge. (4) Test new dimensions for usefulness quickly. Don’t go too deep. (5) Ask those who’ve solved similar tradeoffs. (6) Only add a dimension if it provides significantly better outcomes.

Leadership Management

Becoming an Engineering Manager — Is It For You?

— Anton Zaides

tl;dr: Anton provides us with a short quiz where you generate a score to determine if management is a good fit for you, with the following questions: (1) Do you like to code? (2) How do you deal with focus changes? (3) How do you deal with focus changes? (4) How do you deal with focus changes? (5) Can you be decisive and stand your ground?

CareerAdvice Management

How To Measure The Impact Of Generative AI Code

— Ben Lloyd Pearson

tl;dr: What’s the ROI of your GenAI code? By the end of 2024, GenAI is projected to generate 20% of all code – or 1 in every 5 lines. Learn how to use PR labels to get telemetry on GenAI code, allowing metric tracking that compares AI-generated code against unlabeled PRs. With this free automation, you can track the ROI of your GenAI investments and identify potential security and compliance risks.

Promoted by LinearB

Management AI

Etsy Engineering Career Ladder

tl;dr: How core competencies map against engineering levels from beginner to expert. Competencies are: (1) Delivery e.g. scoping and prioritization, testing and monitoring, shipping. (2) Domain Expertise e.g. language, tools, business and product sense. (3) Problem Solving e.g. architecture & design patterns, critical thinking. (4) Communication e.g. collaboration, relationship-building. (5) Leadership e.g. accountability, responsibility, mentorship.

CareerAdvice Management

"The only thing that grows faster than computer performance is human expectation"

— Bjarne Stroustrup

How Hard Is It To Cheat In Technical Interviews With ChatGPT? We Ran An Experiment

— Michael Mroczka

tl;dr: "Does ChatGPT make it easy to cheat in technical interviews? To find out, we ran an experiment where we instructed interviewees on our platform to use ChatGPT in their interviews, unbeknownst to their interviewers. The results were surprising, but as a preview, know this: companies need to change the types of interview questions they are asking — immediately."

Hiring InterviewAdvice

5 Lessons Design Systems Teams Can Learn From Open-Source Maintainers

— Nick Moore

tl;dr: Design system teams constantly balance the evangelism of their standards and components while maintaining and evolving them. Turns out, the same is true of open source maintainers. This post suggests 5 ways enterprise design system teams can learn from open source to better demonstrate their value, improve the end-user experience, and reclaim time spent on maintenance for evolving and improving the system as a whole.

Promoted by StackBlitz

SystemDesign

Dealing With Diverged Git Branches

— Julia Evans

tl;dr: "One of the most common problems I see folks struggling with in Git is when a local branch (like "main") and a remote branch (maybe also called "main") have diverged. There are two things that make this hard: (1) If you’re not used to interpreting git’s error messages, it’s nontrivial to realize that your main has diverged from the remote. (2) There's no single clear way to handle it - it depends on the situation and your git workflow." Julia discusses what to do.

Git

Meta's Serverless Platform Processes Trillions Of Function Calls A Day

— Leonardo Creed

tl;dr: Meta’s XFaaS is their serverless platform that processes trillions of function calls per day on more than 100,000 servers spread across tens of datacenter regions. XFaaS is Meta’s internal version of public Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) options, such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions. Leonardo shares his high-level takeaways and lessons and then a more detailed walkthrough about the architecture behind XFaaS. 

Meta Scale

Making A PDF That’s Larger Than Germany

— Alex Chan

tl;dr: “We’re meant to just accept that a single PDF can only cover about half the area of Germany, and we’re not given any reason why 381 kilometres is the magic limit. I started wondering: has anybody made a PDF this big? How hard would it be? Can you make a PDF that’s even bigger?”

PDF Entertaining

Notable Links

Fabric: OS framework for augmenting humans using AI.

Htmx: High power tools for HTML.

Moondream: Tiny vision language model.

OpenVoice: Instant voice cloning.

Tree-sitter: Incremental parsing system for programming tools.

Click the below and shoot me an email!

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