Issue #460

Friday 27th October’s issue is presented by Aleo

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Developing Leadership Styles

— Will Larson

tl;dr: Will covers the following: (1) Why executive roles are particularly dependent on having multiple leadership styles. (2) How and when to use three primary styles: leading with policy, leading from consensus, and leading with conviction. (3) How lessons taught early in management careers about micromanagement discourage too many executives from leading with conviction. (4) How to develop leadership styles that you currently feel uncomfortable using. (5) How to balance across these styles, especially when you’re uncertain which is most appropriate for a given scenario. 

Leadership

Private Estimates, Public Progress

— Kent Beck

tl;dr: Kent presents a planning process he’s found valuable. On Monday morning the whole team - engineering, product, customers, testers, designers - ask and answer the same question: “What is most important for us to accomplish this week?” Then ask, “What can we actually accomplish this week?” On Friday afternoon get together & say, “How did we do? How did we react to surprises? Customers, how are you feeling? Engineers, how did the work flow? Product, how are customers acting in aggregate? Designers, how did your work flow & how are customers reacting?" Kent argues that this process creates energy amongst the team, a better sense of scope, collaboration, alignment and adaptation. 

Management

What Is Aleo, The Privacy-First Blockchain?

— Brenner Schlueter

tl;dr: Aleo's data security uses zero-knowledge tech to keep information safe while enabling seamless online services. It's a game-changer for developers.

Promoted by Aleo

Blockchain Security

Positioning Yourself Near The Opportunity

— Matt Rickard

tl;dr: From Jensen Huang, the co-founder of NVIDIA: "You want to position yourself near opportunities. You don’t have to be that perfect. You want to position yourself near the tree. Even if you don’t catch the apple before it hits the ground, so long as you’re the first one to pick it up. You want to position yourself close to the opportunities." Matt argues that this is true on a personal level when it comes to careers. 

CareerAdvice

“What you do has far greater impact than what you say.”

— Stephen Covey

Use Abstraction To Improve Function Readability

— Mark Manley, Palak Bansal

tl;dr: The team at Google compares two functions and highlights how one is easier to follow due to its consistent level of abstraction, providing a top-down narrative of the code’s logic - “createPizza is a high-level function that delegates the preparing, baking, and boxing steps to lower-level specialized functions with intuitive names. Those functions, in turn, delegate to their own lower-level specialized functions (e.g., heatOven) until they reach a function that handles implementation details without needing to call other functions.”

BestPractices

How I Implemented Type Inference For Request Validation

— Vijay Ramamurthy

tl;dr: Type inference is often used in programming languages to provide error-checking without needing much input from the developer. In this post, Vijay talks about how he used type inference in the API to check for errors in the data you load into Oso Cloud.

Promoted By Oso

Types

The Case Of A Curious SQL Query

— Justin Jaffray

tl;dr: Justin provides a deep dive into SQL's foundational aspects, highlighting the importance of a formalized approach to query behavior. Using the example of "predicate pushdown," Justin presents a SQL query that behaves differently across databases like DuckDB, SQLite, and CockroachDB. "I think it's a fun little mind bender that gives you some insight into the internals of these databases query engines without having to actually look at any code."

Database DeepDive SQL

Automating Dead Code Cleanup

tl;dr: From the engineering team at Meta: "SCARF contains a subsystem that automatically identifies dead code through a combination of static, runtime, and application analysis. It leverages this analysis to submit change requests to remove this code from our systems. This automated dead code removal improves the quality of our systems and also unblocks unused data removal in SCARF when the dead code includes references to data assets that prevent automated data cleanup. "

Infrastructure Scale

Maxjourney: Pushing Dicord's Limits With A Million+ Online Users In A Single Server

— Yuliy Pisetsky

tl;dr: "With that growth, those servers started slowing down and creeping ever closer to their throughput limits. As that’s happened, we’ve continued to find many improvements to keep making them faster and pushing the limits out further. In this post we’ll talk about some of the ways we’ve scaled individual Discord servers from tens of thousands of concurrent users to approaching two million concurrent users in the past few years."

Performance Scale Elixir

Notable Links

Black: Python code formatter.

Hono: Web framework for the Edges.

OpenAPI Devtools: Discover API behavior with a Chrome extension.

Pypipe: Python pipe command line tool.

Startup CTO Handbook: Leadership, management and technical topics.

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