Issue #371

2 December 2022


Issue #371
Pointer.io
Friday 2nd December's issue is presented by Stream
 

 
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Investing In Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide For Startups
- David Nunez
#Leadership #Management #Documentation

tl;dr: Nunez outlines specific steps for creating a culture of good internal documentation hygiene. "Pulling from his own playbooks as Uber’s first dedicated docs hire and the first-ever Head of Docs Content for Stripe, he shares ultra-tactical advice for each part of the process: from building the habit and incentivizing engineers to make the effort, to keeping things organized."
Real-World Engineering Challenges #7: Choosing Technologies
- Gergely Orosz
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: Gergely interprets the following software engineering or engineering management case studies from tech companies: (1) Trello choosing Kafka over RabbitMQ for messaging. (2) Why Birdie moved to Micro Frontends. (3) Why MetalBear settled on Rust. (4) Why Motive moved over to Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile.
Design + Build Any Chat Use Case
#UsefulTool #Management

tl;dr: Build real-time chat messaging in less time. Rapidly ship in-app messaging with our highly reliable chat infrastructure and feature-rich SDKs. Improve your overall in-app conversion, engagement, and retention.

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Strategies And Tools For Performing Migrations On Platform
- Mariana Ardoino, Raul Herbster
#Migrations #Spotify

tl;dr: The authors present the following challenges - or scenarios - faced during the project: (1) Defining the scope of the project. (2) Scaling up. (3) Competing priorities. Each scenarios comes with symptoms (“when”), what you should avoid when facing the situation (“Don’t”), and what we suggest that you do (“Do”)."
 
"Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail."

- Henry Petroski
 
8 Fallacies Of Distributed Systems
- Mahdi Yusuf
#DistributedSystem

tl;dr: "Fallacies of distributed systems are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make."
#DynamicTypes
 
tl;dr: "I think dynamic typing is itself really neat and potentially opens up of really powerful tooling. It’s just… I’m not actually seeing that tooling actually exist, which makes me question if it’s possible in the first place."
#Hardware
 
tl;dr: "Modern GPU drivers are split into two parts: a user space driver and a kernel driver. The user space part is in charge of compiling shader programs and translating API calls into the specific command lists that the command processor will use to render the scene. Meanwhile, the kernel part is in charge of managing the MMU and handling memory allocation/deallocation from different apps, as well as deciding how and when to send their commands to the command processor."
Advent Of Code
 - Eric Wastl
#Entertaining

tl;dr: An advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other.
Recommended Reading

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Notable GitHub Repos
Finch
Open source client for container development.
 
Engineering Management
Engineering management and leadership resources.
 
Score
Platform-agnostic, container-based workload specification.
 
Act
Run your GitHub Actions locally.
 
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