Issue #274

7 December 2021


Issue #274
Pointer.io


Tuesday 7th December's issue is presented by Vanta
Making Engineering Team Communication Clearer, Faster, Better
- Derek Parham
#Leadership #Management
 
tl;dr: Derek shares his design review process, starting with the design doc (he shares his template) through to the in-person meeting, where he outlines specifics around planning, moderation and process. This review process helps with org-wide comms, understanding of technical infrastructure, knowledge of legacy work & current projects, better design, and saves time.
Software Development Pushes Us To Get Better As People
- Jessica Kerr
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: Jessica discusses "participatory sense-making." In software, this is developing a shared mental model of the software we're developing, what it’s going to be, how it works. In humanity, participatory sense-making is our shared reality of made-up concepts i.e. money, economy, justice, etc... "When we’re good at participatory sense-making, we can build conscientiously, instead of reducing everything to numbers."
ISO 27001 For Startups: What You Need To Know
#Management #Leadership #Startup

tl;dr: Managing your startup has many challenges, including understanding your compliance needs. If you use secure data and you want to do business with any customers or partners outside the US, ISO 27001 certification will be among them. Consider this to be your introductory guide to ISO 27001 for startups.

Promoted by Vanta.
OOPS Writeups
- Lorin Hochstein
#BestPractice #Netflix
 
tl;dr: Operational Surprises (OOPS) is when something unexpected happened in operations and presents an opportunity to discover how the observed system behavior deviated from the mental model of how the system is supposed to behave. The template shared in this post is based on the template used at Netflix.

A Note From Vanta

Vanta is the easy way to get SOC 2, HIPAA, or ISO 27001 compliant. 1000+ companies trust Vanta to automate their security monitoring, and get ready for security audits in weeks instead of months.
 
#BestPractices
 
tl;dr: 8 best practices shared including: (1) Alerts are treated as code i.e. go through code reviews, generated from existing modules. (2) Use percentiles over averages to get a higher quality signal. (3) Use playbooks to document each alert so there is corresponding documentation that explains what is broken and how to investigate and fix it. 
#DeveloperTools #Tips
 
tl;dr: (1) Console is more than log() - it's console.log(width), console.error(), console.trace(), etc... (2) You can log without source access. (3) You can log outside the browser i.e. in the VS Code debugger. (4) You can inject code into any site. And more.
Don't Make My Mistakes: Common Infrastructure Errors I've Made
- Mathew Duggan
#Devops #Infrastructure

tl;dr: "Allow me a moment to go back through some of the most disastrous decisions or projects I ever agreed to (or even fought to do, sometimes):" (1) Don't migrate an application from the datacenter to the cloud. (2) Don't write your own secrets system. (3) Don't run your own Kubernetes cluster. Mathew runs through 6 decisions in total, and provides what should have been done for each. 
Five Books that Changed My Career as a Software Engineer
- Juliano Lima
#BookRecommendation

tl;dr: Juliano discusses how each of the following five books helped him in his career: (1) The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development. (2) The Pragmatic Programmer. (3) Unwritten Laws of Engineering. (4) Remote: Office Not Required. (5) Explain the Cloud Like I’m 10.
Notable GitHub Repos
Awesome Selfhosted
A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers.
 
Zinc
A lightweight alternative to elasticsearch that requires minimal resources, written in Go.
 
FerretDB
A truly Open Source MongoDB alternative.
 
AppFlowy
An open-source alternative to Notion. 
 
Pointer.io
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