Issue #380

13 January 2023


Issue #380
Pointer.io
Friday 13th January's issue is presented by PostHog

PostHog's open source suite of product tools includes session recording, so grab the popcorn and play back individual user sessions to watch how users interact with your product. Now featuring console logs recording!
 

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#CareerAdvice
 
tl;dr: Paolo discusses hesitating due to one's imposter syndrome: "How can we create the conditions to just start? How can we feel the fear… and do it anyway?" (1) Create a process… and then trust in it. (2) Use the Procrastination Pomodoro. (3) 80% is good enough. (4) Feed your own feedback loop. (5) Don’t seek to make the right decision. Make the decision right.
What If Writing Tests Was A Joyful Experience?
- James Somers
#Testing

tl;dr: "At Jane Street we use a pattern / library called “expect tests” that makes test-writing feel like a REPL session, or like exploratory programming in a Jupyter notebook - with feedback cycles so fast and joyful that it feels almost tactile. Having used them for some time now this is the only way I’d ever want to write tests."
What Is A Product Engineer (And Why They're Awesome)
- Ian Vanagas
#Management #Leadership

tl;dr: "In this post, we define the role of a product engineer, break down the characteristics of the role, go over their skills, and finally figure out why they matter. We base this information on industry research, and job posts from top startups hiring product engineers, which we quote throughout."

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McDonald’s Event-Driven Architecture: The Data Journey And How It Works
- Vamshi Krishna Komuravalli, Damian Sullivan
#Architecture #Data #SystemDesign

tl;dr: Here is a typical data flow of how events are reliably produced and consumed from the platform: (1) Initially, an event schema is defined and registered in the schema registry. (2) Applications that need to produce events leverage producer SDK to publish events. (3) When an application starts up, an event schema is cached in the producing application for high performance. The authors continue to discuss how data flows through the system.
 
“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”

- Henry Ford
 
#Architecture #Management
 
tl;dr: "Architecture code can be versioned with the code which implements it. We can write algorithms to check our architecture. I’d like to see more tools available to describe architecture as part of code, allowing us to generate as many diagrams as we want, for accurate and easy communication."
HTTP/3 Prioritization Demystified
- Robin Marx
#HTTP

tl;dr: "What exactly does prioritization mean? How does it work under the hood? Why is it important to have some control over it? and, crucially, do all browsers agree on which resources are most important?"
What Happens When A CPU Starts
#Hardware

tl;dr: "Generally, when a CPU chip first receives power, it must be reset by receiving a pulse on its RESET (or RST) pin. This is because when the power supply is first powering up, even if it only takes a second or two, the CPU has already received "dirty" power, because the power supply was building up a steady stream of electricity."
The Ugliest Pattern In React
- Sebastian Carlos
#ReactJS #Antipattern 

tl;dr: "Maybe the ugliness is a virtue, since it encourages us to completely change the code to enable some of the better alternatives mentioned above — After all, “adjusting state in response to rendering” will always result in code that’s difficult to understand."
 
Recommended Reading
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Notable GitHub Repos
Conc
Better structured concurrency for Go.
 
GPT Index
Organize external information and answer queries.
 
Adrenaline
An AI-powered debugger.
 
Data Engineering Zoomcamp
Free Data Engineering course. 
 
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