Issue #300

18 March 2022


Issue #300
Pointer.io
Friday 18th March's issue is presented by Knock

 
Knock is notification infrastructure for developers. Use our APIs and SDKs to power real-time in-app feeds, cross-channel notifications, and complex behavior such as batching and preferences. We built product notifications so you don’t have to.
 
#CareerAdvice

tl;dr: 5 step process outlining how Mitchell approaches a complex project: (1) Become a user of the project. (2) Learn how to build it. (3) Learn the hot-path internals using “trace down, learn up.” Trace down starts with a feature and trace the codepath that the feature follows. Learn up is about understanding how the various mapped subsystems work. (4) Read and reimplement recent commits. (5) Make a bite-sized change.
Hard To Work With
- Will Larson
#Leadership #Management
 
tl;dr: "I’ve seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization’s management is willing to enforce." When this issue is escalated, "the manager transforms the performance issue into a relationship issue." Will discusses his approach to resolve the issue. 
5 Ways To Move Fast, Ship Customer Value, And Promote Developer Autonomy
- Chris Bell
#Leadership #Management #Productivity
 
tl;dr: Knock’s co-founder and CTO Chris Bell outlines the five principles they’ve used at Knock to ship value to customers every week and to create a culture of autonomy and ownership.

Promoted by Knock.
Rapid Event Notification System at Netflix
- Ankush Gulati, David Gevorkyan
#Architecture #Netflix
 
tl;dr: "In this blog post, we will give an overview of the Rapid Event Notification System at Netflix and share some of the learnings we gained along the way." Authors cover design decisions, architecture, observability and more. 

"Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out.”

- Chris Pine
 
How To Pay Professional Maintainers
- Filippo Valsorda
#Management #CodeReview

tl;dr: To successfully fund an OS project, a company needs to: (1) Pay the maintainers, not people external to the project. (2) Pay "real money" i.e. what they could make as senior engineers. (3) Pay for maintenance, not features or support. (4) Keep paying and assess performance at contract renewal time.
Dumb Things You Can Sometimes Do With Hard Links
#Security

tl;dr: "Here's a very old and stupid trick you could do with some filesystems in some situations back in the day... and might still be able to do in a few places today."
C Isn't A Programming Language Anymore
- Aria Beingessner
#ThoughtPiece #C

tl;dr: "My problem is that C was elevated to a role of prestige and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has completely distorted the way we speak to each other. Rust and Swift cannot simply speak their native and comfortable tongues..."
Go 1.18 Is Released!
#Go

tl;dr: "Go 1.18 is a massive release that includes new features, performance improvements, and our biggest change ever to the language." New additions include (1) Generics. (2) Fuzzing. (3) Workspaces. (4) 20% performance improvements.
Notable GitHub Repos
Type Challenge
Collection of TypeScript type challenges with online judge.
 
NewPipe
A libre lightweight streaming front-end for Android.
 
Excalidraw
Virtual board for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams.
 
CodeEdit
Elevate your code editing experience.
 
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