Issue #430

Friday 14th July’s issue is presented by Prolific

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Embracing Failure

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: "Frame failures like a video game, and you'll not only iterate more and learn faster but also sweeten the taste of subsequent successes." Mike discusses how reframing failure as a learning opportunity and decoupling it from professional evaluations, businesses can foster an environment of boldness and innovation.

Leadership Management

Gelling Your Engineering Leadership Team

— Will Larson

tl;dr: Will discusses: (1) Debugging the engineering leadership team after stepping into a new role. (2) Gelling your leadership into an effective team. (3) What to expect from your direct reports in that leadership team. (4) Diagnosing conflict within your team.

Leadership Management

Five Reasons To Trust Prolific Participants With Your AI Training Tasks

— George Denison

tl;dr: Finding engaged and reliable participants for your AI training tasks can be a challenge. Here are five reasons why you can trust Prolific participants with your AI training tasks. Prolific participants are: (1) Engaged. (2) Diverse. (3) Treated fairly and ethically. (4) Understand their crucial role. (5) Satisfied.

Promoted by Prolific

Management AI

Names Should Be As Short As Possible While Still Being Clear

— Ben Hoyt

tl;dr: “Some developers do use names that are too short. However, I think the more common mistake is using names that are overly long.”

Ben illustrates this point, and the importance of naming in context, using examples.

Naming

“Debugging is anticipated with distaste, performed with reluctance, and bragged about forever.”

— Anonymous

Readability: Google's Temple To Engineering Excellence

— Brian Kihoon Lee

tl;dr: Brian shares his experience as a readability mentor at Google and reflects on its cultural significance within the company. While he doesn't recommend implementing Google's version of readability in other companies, he proposes a variant called "Readability Lite" that focuses on consensus on readability standards, mentorship programs, and non-blocking mechanisms to encourage engineers to strive for mastery.

Leadership Management

Monitoring Is A Pain

— Mat Duggan

tl;dr: “I have a confession. Despite having been hired multiple times in part due to my experience with monitoring platforms, I have come to hate monitoring. Monitoring and observability tools commit the cardinal sin of tricking people into thinking this is an easy problem. It is very simple to monitor a small application or service. Almost none of those approaches scale.” The article suggests several recommendations for improving the monitoring process.

ThoughtPiece

Building a SaaS API? Don't Forget Your Terraform Provider

tl;dr: The article highlights the importance of Terraform providers for SaaS platforms. It explains how providers simplify infrastructure management, promote consistency, aid scalability, automate tasks, and enable auditing. It also mentions examples of Terraform providers for SaaS platforms and discusses the benefits and traits of good candidates for Terraform integration.

Promoted by Speakeasy

Management UsefulTool

Meta Developer Tools: Working At Scale

— Neil Mitchell

tl;dr: “Every day, thousands of developers at Meta are working in repositories with millions of files. Those developers need tools that help them at every stage of the workflow while working at extreme scale. In this article we’ll go through a few of the tools in the development process. And, as an added bonus, those we talk about below are open source so you can try them yourself.”

Scale DevTools

Create An Advanced Search Engine With PostgreSQL

— Tudor Golubenco

tl;dr: “The Postgres approach to full-text search offers building blocks that you can combine to create your own search engine. This is quite flexible but it also means it generally feels lower-level compared to search engines like Elasticsearch, Typesense, or Mellisearch.” The article covers: (1) The tsvector and tsquery data types. (2) The match operator @@ to check if a tsquery matches a tsvector. (3) Functions to rank each match (ts_rank, ts_rank_cd). (4) The GIN index type, an inverted index to efficiently query tsvector.

Search PostgreSQL

Notable GitHub Repos

Danswer: Ask questions and get answers backed by private sources.

Go Speed: High-speed downloader. 

GPT Prompt Engineer: Generate, test and rank a multitude of prompts.

Htmx: High power tools for HTML.

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