Issue #335

19 July 2022


Issue #335
Pointer.io
Tuesday 19th July issue is presented by Retool

Retool is the fastest way for developers to build internal software. Allbirds uses Retool to measure billboard efficacy. Amazon uses retool to handle GDPR requests. Thousands of startups build customizable admin panels, dashboards, and CRUD apps in Retool.

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Good Goals
- Michael Siliski
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: Post covers: (1) Why set goals (2) Characteristics of good goals: focused, concise, comprehensible, objectively assessable, challenging but possible, user oriented, states not activities. (3) Heuristics for testing goals e.g. reframing actions as outcomes. 
Limiting Work In Progress As A Manager
- Erik Wiffin
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: "The demands on a manager’s time are endless and sometimes it feels like you’re being pulled in every direction at once. These demands can make it hard to focus, they make it hard to move from reacting to problems to anticipating them. In this article, I’d like to talk about how I’ve limited demands on my time, counterintuitively doing more with less."
The State Of Internal Tools 2022
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: Since 2020, we’ve surveyed developers for our State of Internal Tools report. We set out to find how companies build internal tools, who uses them, and how teams measure their impact on the business. Discover our highlights from this year’s State Of Internal Tools here.

Promoted by Retool
You Will Always Have More Problems Than Engineers
- Matt Schellhas
#Management

tl;dr: "Yet as companies far and wide try to use technology to solve the world’s ills, they grapple with an inviolable truth: there always will be more problems than engineers... that has consequences," which Matt discusses here.

“Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems”

― Scott Adams
 
The Slow March Of Progress in Programming Language Tooling
- Adam Gordon Bell
#IndustryTrend

tl;dr: "My thesis is that the tooling and developer experience for programming languages is improving over time, but mainly in new languages. It goes like this: Tooling innovation happens, new languages adopt and standardize on it, and end up incrementally better than existing languages. If you add up enough of these increments, the older languages, which may have pioneered some of these innovations, seem painful and antiquated."
#Architecture
 
tl;dr: "In many organizations, once the work has been done to integrate a new system into the mainframe, it becomes much easier to interact with that system via the mainframe rather than repeat the integration each time." this leads to a "legacy system becoming the single point of integration for multiple systems, and hence also becoming a key upstream data source for any business processes needing that data."
#SystemDesign #Scale
 
tl;dr: "Visa, Mastercard, and American Express act as card networks for clearing and settling funds. The card acquiring bank and the card issuing bank can be – and often are – different. If banks were to settle transactions one by one without an intermediary, each bank would have to settle the transactions with all the other banks. This is quite inefficient."
Remote Development At Slack
- Sylvestor George
#Management #DevEx

tl;dr: In this article, “remote development environments” refer to AWS EC2 instances where engineers make code changes and can see a running Slack application with those changes.
 
Notable GitHub Repos
Algorithm Visualizer
Visualize algorithms from code.
 
GPU Puzzles
Solve puzzles. Learn CUDA.
 
Vite
Next-gen frontend tooling.
 
Fresh
Next-gen web framework.
 
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