Issue #420

Tuesday 6th June’s issue is presented by Airplane

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My Approach To Building Large Technical Projects

— Mitchell Hashimoto

tl;dr: “I've learned that when I break down my large tasks in chunks that result in seeing tangible forward progress, I tend to finish my work and retain my excitement throughout the project. People are all motivated and driven in different ways, so this may not work for you, but as a broad generalization I've not found an engineer who doesn't get excited by a good demo. And the goal is to always give yourself a good demo.”

CareerAdvice Management

On Wielding Influence

— Charity Majors

tl;dr: Charity answers two questions: (1) How to drive change when you have no power or influence? (2) How to drive change when you are a tech lead on a new team?

Leadership Management CareerAdvice

OpenAI’s Moat Is Stronger Than You Think

— Ravi Parikh

tl;dr: Ravi Parikh, CEO of Airplane, discusses his perspectives on why he thinks OpenAI will have a durable moat and why the usage of general-purpose AI models will be mostly limited to a few large companies in the future.

Promoted by Airplane

Management AI IndustryTrend

Promoted From Dev To Team Lead: 8 Things They Didn’t Tell Me

tl;dr: (1) Many of your skills don’t translate. (2) Keep your instincts. Change your behavior. (3) Communicate “why” more than “what” and “how.” (4) Culture is a real thing. And you’re responsible for it. And more.

Leadership Management CareerAdvice

“The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

The Growing Pains Of Database Architecture

— Tim Liang

tl;dr: “In 2020, Figma’s infrastructure hit some growing pains due to a combination of new features, preparing to launch a second product, and more users - database traffic grows approximately 3x annually.” Tim discusses the infrastructure changes the team implemented.

Architecture Infrastructure

Exploring the LZ77 Algorithm

— Andrés Correa Casablanca

tl;dr: “This article is the first in a series where we’ll delve into the fascinating world of compression algorithms, starting with LZ77 - a lossless data compression algorithm.”

Algo

The Best Tools For Python SDK Creation

tl;dr: Some of the most popular OSS options available for creating Python SDKs go head to head with Speakeasy's managed pipeline. Find out what the pros and cons of each approach are.

Promoted By PullApprove

UsefulTool Python

How Much Are GitHub Stars Worth To You?

— Yassin Eldeeb, Aleksandra Sikora

tl;dr: The authors show us how stars have become a commodity and how to  evaluate an open source project. “The best and most obvious way to judge an open-source project is to look at the code but this can be kind of tedious… so an alternative that we have all naturally developed on our own or have been advised to, is to see how many people have starred a project, and then pick the one with the most stars.”

GitHub OpenSource

Watch Transitions in Slow Motion in Chrome’s DevTools

— Jim Nielsen

tl;dr: “The animations panel lets you slow down the animations happening in the browser so you watch them play out at much slower speeds and troubleshoot the mechanics of the animation.”

FrontEnd Chrome DevTools

Notable GitHub Repos

InsightFace: 2D and 3D face analysis project.

Mojo: New language bridging the gap between research and production.

Spacedrive: Cross-platform file manager.

Tree Of Thoughts:  Deliberate problem solving with LLMs.

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