Issue #511
pointer.io


Friday 3rd May’s issue is presented by Kinde

Kinde: Enterprise Ready, Without The Enterprise Bulls**t


Powerful authentication for modern applications. Loved by over 25,000 developers, including teams at Datadog, ROKT, Atlassian and Figma.


Built from the ground up using best-in-class security protocols. SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO27001. 


Serve enterprise customers with SSO, SAML, MFA, and more.


Before May 31st, enterprise customers with more than 100,000 MAU, or 3,000 MAO, get 6 months free after migration.

Cognitive Load In Software Development

— Artem Zakirullin


tl;dr: “There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It's not a fancy imaginary concept, it can't be misleading - cognitive load is there, and we can feel it.” 


CareerAdvice

Finding Stuck Energy

— Paulo André


tl;dr: Everyone has a switch. Your job is to find it. If you don’t, all the latent energy this person has will remain untapped. To find that switch, you have to temporarily forget the work and focus on the human. Build a relationship. It’s never wasted time. “What is something you found really interesting recently? Teach me all about it.” is a good question to see what lights them up — and, if you pay attention, you’ll likely hear in the answer important clues that might help you change something at work.


Leadership Management

An Open Letter To Auth Providers


tl;dr: The first job of any auth company is to protect its customers – before anything else. Somewhere along the way it feels like a lot of auth providers lost sight of the thing that matters: You, their customers.


Promoted by Kinde

Management

Software Friction

— Hillel Wayne


tl;dr: Friction is everywhere in software development: bugs, security alerts, dependency upgrade breaks something, etc.. Hillel believes the way to mitigate this is (1) Smaller scopes and shorter iterations. (2) Giving teams more autonomy. (3) Building in redundancy. (4) Better upfront planning. (5) Automation (6) Experience. (7) Gaming exercises. (8) Checklists and runbooks. 


Management


“A program that has not been tested does not work.”


— Bjarne Stroustrup


Common DB Schema Change Mistakes

— Nikolay Samokhvalov


tl;dr: Nikolay covers 18 mistakes, categorized into three big categories of DB schema migration mistakes: "(1) Concurrency-related mistakes. (2) Mistakes related to the correctness of steps. (3) Miscellaneous – mistakes related to the implementation of some specific database feature or the configuration of a particular database." 


Database Antipattern

An Engineer’s Guide To Talking To Users

— Ian Vanagas


tl;dr: (1) How to prepare for a user interview. (2) How to find the right users to talk to. (3) What to ask during user interviews. (4) Mistakes to avoid. (5) What to do after an interview. 


Promoted by PostHog

Product

What Can LLMs Never Do?

— Rohit Krishnan


tl;dr: “Over the past few weeks I have been obsessed by trying to figure out the failure modes of LLMs. This started off as an exploration of what I found. It is admittedly a little wonky but I think it is interesting. The failures of AI can teach us a lot more about what it can do than the successes.”


LLM

How An Empty S3 Bucket Can Make Your AWS Bill Explode

— Maciej Poćwierz


tl;dr: “I created a single S3 bucket in the eu-west-1 region and uploaded some files there for testing. Two days later, I checked my AWS billing page, primarily to make sure that what I was doing was well within the free-tier limits. Apparently, it wasn’t. My bill was over $1,300, with the billing console showing nearly 100,000,000 S3 PUT requests executed within just one day!” 


AWS

Speeding Up C++ Build Times

— Isabel Ren, Kunal Desai


tl;dr: “When we learned that engineers were losing hours building our C++ codebase, we jumped into investigating the root cause. Here’s how we cut build times in half and shipped a solution for scale.”


C++

Most Popular From Last Issue

Notable Links


Borgo: Statically typed language that compiles to Go.


Databonsai: Clean & curate your data with LLMs.


Dokploy: OS alternative to Vercel, Netlify and Heroku.


Hurl: Hurl, run and test HTTP requests with plain text.


Perplexica: AI-powered search engine.


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1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it


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