Issue #374

13 December 2022


Issue #374
Pointer.io
Tuesday 13th December's issue is presented by Hightouch

Ready to uplevel your data skills and career? In an effort to spread some holiday cheer, Hightouch and Snowflake are offering $8,000 worth of scholarships to CoRise, the premiere data and analytics online learning platform.

We're offering 20 scholarships across all experience levels. Want to increase your chances of winning? Post on social media about why you want to take a CoRise course and tag Hightouch & Snowflake. Winners announced 12/19/22. Apply today!
 

Apply To Win A CoRise Scholarship
Writing Docs Well: Why Should A Software Engineer Care?
- Lorin Hochstein
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: Lorin recently gave a lecture in a graduate software engineering course on the value of technical writing for software engineers. There are 3 goals when writing: (1) Building shared understanding. (2) A tool for your own thinking. (3) Influence in a larger org when you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy. Lorin also advises on how to improve technical writing. 
Deduping And Storing Images At Uber Eats
#Architecture #Uber

tl;dr: "The Uber Eats system handles several hundred million product images and millions of image updates are performed every hour. We have implemented a content-addressable caching layer that very effectively detects duplicates and thereby reduces download times, processing times, and storage costs."
How To Measure The Impact Of Your Data Team
- Mary MacCarthy
#Leadership #Management #Data

tl;dr: At your company, how do you measure the success of your data team? If you can’t provide hard-and-fast answers, don’t worry–you’re far from alone. Learn why you should stop focusing on metrics and why you should start tracking outcomes to measure the impact of your data team.

Promoted by Hightouch
#GitHub #Productivity
 
tl;dr: Senior Solutions Engineer at GitHub conducted an experiment to understand tradeoffs between productivity and hardware. "When you ask a developer whether they’d prefer more or less powerful hardware, the answer is almost always more powerful hardware. More powerful hardware means less time waiting on builds - and that means more time to build the next feature or fix a bug. But even if the upfront cost is higher for higher-powered hardware, what’s the actual cost when you consider the impact on productivity?"
 
 “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.”

- Winston Churchill
 
#ThoughtPiece
 
tl;dr: The CTO at Amazon elaborates on the following: (1) Cloud technologies will redefine sports as we know them. (2) Simulated worlds will reinvent the way we experiment. (3) A surge of innovation in smart energy. (4) The upcoming supply chain transformation. (5) Custom silicon goes mainstream.
Taming Names In Software Development
- Joseph Glass
#Naming

tl;dr: "Balancing these opposing principles is what makes good naming so hard. The amount of knowledge conveyed in a single word is what makes good naming so powerful. The exact balance will depend on the size of the codebase and developer team, the domain complexity, frequency of use and many other factors."
Six Findings We Rely On When Managing PostgreSQL Indexes
- Billy Ceskavich
#PostgreSQL

tl;dr: "A rough guide on how to think through indexing strategy in most Postgres databases: (1) Every index has a read and write cost. Postgres considers these costs for each query to determine which indexes to use. (2) The more selective your index, the more efficient it becomes to read data from the table itself. But, more selective indexes (multicolumn indexes, sorted indexes, partial indexes) require specific query patterns to maximize this efficiency." And more.
Tips For Analyzing Logs
- Julia Evans
#Tips #BestPractice #Debugging

tl;dr: 14 useful tips including the following: (1) Search for the request’s ID - often log lines will include a request ID and searching for the request ID of a failed request will show all the log lines for that request. (2) Build a timeline - keeping all of the information straight in your head can get confusing, so keeping a debugging document where I copy and paste bits of information.
Notable GitHub Repos
Glow
Render markdown on the CLI, with pizzazz.
 
Codon
Zero-overhead, extensible Python compiler using LLVM.
 
GHunt
An offensive Google framework.
 
Clash
A rule-based tunnel in Go.
 
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