Issue #332

8 July 2022


Issue #332
Pointer.io
Friday 8th July issue is presented by PostHog


PostHog is the open-source product analytics suite you can self-host. Heatmaps, Recordings, Funnels, Feature Flags and more — all in a platform you can self-host and sync with your data warehouse!
 
 
#CareerAdvice #Management
 
tl;dr: "My general advice to folks would be to stay where you are as long as you’re reasonably happy day to day and feel like you’re learning at a good rate. Even if your effective compensation has declined a bit, it’s very hard to determine if the compensation at any other company will hold up either. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re unhappy for non-compensation reasons, then of course you should find another role." Will provides advice to both managers and ICs on navigating career decisions in the current climate. 
How We Built Infrastructure to Run User Forecasts At Spotify
- Molly Zhu
#Architecture #Spotify

tl;dr: "To enable fast iterations and facilitate model training, we built a system that allows user forecasts to run both on demand and automatically every week, with the heavy hyperparameter tuning part running on the weekend. The system creates visualizations and automated insights to surface information, and provides easy-to-use tools for manual interventions for both data scientists and business stakeholders."
Reflecting On YC, 2 Years On
- James Hawkins
#Management

tl;dr: "YC is seen as the world's best, and most prolific, three-month accelerator program. Upwards of 7,000 founders have taken part. Yet, no one really talks about what happens afterwards." James discusses the network, database of investor reviews, office hours, fundraising, and more.  

Promoted by PostHog
#RemoteWork #Salary
 
tl;dr: "The best-paying countries are the US, Israel, and several European countries. However, even within a country, there can be big differences, as developers in major cities tend to get better paid than developers living outside of urban areas." The 20 countries are list here. 

"You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything."

- Donald Knuth
 
Scaling Causal's Spreadsheet Engine From Thousands To Billions Of Cells: From Maps To Arrays
- Simon Hørup Eskildsen
#Scale

tl;dr: "How can we scale the calculation engine 100x, from millions to billions of cells? By moving from maps to arrays. That may seem like an awfully pedestrian observation, but it certainly wasn’t obvious to us at the outset that this was the crux of the problem!" 
Unit And Integration Tests
- Aleksey Kladov
#Tests

tl;dr: "In this post I argue that integration-vs-unit is a confused, and harmful, distinction. I provide a more useful two-dimensional mental model instead. The model is descriptive (it allows to think more clearly about any test), but I also include my personal prescriptions."
Improving On The GitHub Code Review Comment Experience
- Dylan Trotter
#CodeReview #UsefulTool

tl;dr: "There are a bunch of limitations with the conversation experience in GitHub that had always bothered us and we felt we could do better. Here are a few of the ways that the plz.review comment and conversation UX is a big improvement over GitHub."
Python 3.11 Is Up To 10 - 60% Faster Than Python 3.10
#Python #Performance

tl;dr: "CPython 3.11 is on average 25% faster than CPython 3.10 when measured with the pyperformance benchmark suite, and compiled with GCC on Ubuntu Linux. Depending on your workload, the speedup could be up to 10-60% faster. This project focuses on two major areas in Python: faster startup and faster runtime."
 
Notable GitHub Repos
Red Engine
Modern scheduling library for Python.
 
YouBit
YouTube as a free file hosting service.
 
Papers For Engineers
Curated list of papers for software engineers.
 
Bun
Fast JS runtime bundler, transpiler & package manager. 
 
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