Issue #488

Tuesday 13th February’s issue is presented by Knock

Knock: Frictionless Notification Infrastructure

Building notifications gets complicated fast.

Knock abstracts away the complexity of notification infrastructure by giving you a single API for managing channels like email, in-app, Slack, push, and SMS.

You also get full observability and analytics about your message and user behavior, letting engineering and product teams analyze, test, and iterate quickly.

Try For Free

Mastering Programming

— Kent Beck

tl;dr: “From years of watching master programmers, I have observed certain common patterns in their workflows. From years of coaching skilled journeyman programmers, I have observed the absence of those patterns. I have seen what a difference introducing the patterns can make. Here are ways effective programmers get the most out of their precious 3e9 seconds on the planet. The theme here is scaling your brain.” 

CareerAdvice

How To Hire Low Experience, High Potential People

— Tara Seshan

tl;dr: “After 1000+ hours of interviewing candidates, making many mistakes in hiring and firing, and closely imitating the best possible behaviors of my “hiring savant” managers, this is what I’ve learned about separating the wheat from the chaff in order to find amazing yet unconventional people.” Tara provides a guide for finding such folks. 

Management Hiring

A Guide For Notification Systems

— Sam Seely

tl;dr: A complete guide for what to consider if you're evaluating whether to build your own notification system or use a third-party vendor.

Promoted by Knock

Management Guide

Accelerating Code Reviews With Nudges

— Abi Noda

tl;dr: In 2020, the code review team at Meta discovered that 85% of developers were satisfied with the code review process in general. They were less satisfied with the speed with which their code was reviewed. This inspired a core hypothesis that the NudgeBot could decrease code review time in 3 ways: (1) The time a diff waits in the ‘needs review’ status. (2) The number of diffs that take over 3 days to close, this timeframe was chosen because they were only nudging diffs after 24 hours. (3) The time to first action. 

Management CodeReview

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

— Hans Hofmann

Lessons From Our 8 Years Of Kubernetes In Production

— Anders Jönsson

tl;dr: “Having run Kubernetes for over eight years in production (separate cluster for each environment), we’ve made a mix of good and not-so-good decisions. Some mistakes were simply a result of “otur när vi tänkte” (bad luck in our decision-making), while others originated from us not entirely (or not even partly) understanding the underlying technology itself. Kubernetes is powerful, but it also has layers of complexity.”

Kubernetes

How To Simplify User Management

tl;dr: Clerk is the easiest way to add authentication and user management to your app. Their quickstart guide streamlines integration with ready-to-use components, hooks, and helpers, ensuring a smooth authentication and user management experience that just works. Get Started with Clerk for Free.

Promoted by Clerk

UsefulTool

What It Was Like Working For GitLab

— Yorick Peterse

tl;dr: Yorick suffered from burnout after leaving Gitlab in 2021 and recently found the energy to discuss what he’s learned: “(1) Scalability needs to be part of a company's culture. (2) Make teams more data and developer driven. (3) You can't determine what is "minimal viable" without data. (4) SaaS and self-hosting don't go well together. (5) More people doesn't equal better results. (6) I'm conflicted on the use of Ruby on Rails. (7) The time it takes to deploy code is vital to the success of an organization. (8) Location based salaries are discriminatory.”

Culture

(Almost) Every Infrastructure Decision I Endorse Or Regret After 4 Years Running Infrastructure At A Startup

tl;dr: “I’ve led infrastructure at a startup for the past 4 years that has had to scale quickly. From the beginning I made some core decisions that the company has had to stick to, for better or worse, these past four years. This post will list some of the major decisions made and if I endorse them for your startup, or if I regret them and advise you to pick something else.”

Infrastructure

Strings Do Too Many Things

— Hillel Wayne

tl;dr: Hillel describes strings as “the most powerful and terrible of all basis types... When you see a string in code, you want to know what kind of string it is. We use these strings for different purposes and we want to do different things to them. We might want to upcase or downcase identifiers for normalization purposes, but we don't split or find substrings in them. But you can do those operations anyway because all operations are available to all strings. It's like how if you store user ids as integers, you can take the average of two ids. The burden of using strings properly is on the developer.” 

ThoughtPiece

Notable Links

Hurl: Hurl, run and test HTTP requests with plain text.

Jujutsu: Git-compatible version control system.

LLRT: JavaScript runtime for serverless applications.

Phidata: AI Assistants using function calling.

Toolong: Terminal app to view, tail, merge, and search log files.

Click the below and shoot me an email!

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