Issue #432

Friday 21st July’s issue is presented by Speakeasy

Speakeasy's managed SDK pipeline has been helping leading developer companies offer their users type-safe SDKs in 7+ languages.

And now with Speakeasy, you can extend beyond SDKs to create managed Terraform providers. All you need is an OpenAPI spec to get started.

Join The TF Beta

Fresh Work 80/15/5

— Kent Beck

tl;dr: “How do you balance risk, novelty, production, growth, short-term certainty, and long-term viability? I learned a simple rule that has been useful to me and is often cited by my students as a key lesson from coaching: (1) 80% of your time goes to low-risk / reasonable-reward work, (2) 15% of your time goes to related high-risk / high-reward work and (3) 5% of your time goes to satisfying your own curiosity with no thought of reward.

CareerAdvice

Interesting Learnings From Outages

— Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: The article discusses the importance of investigating and learning from outages in the industry. It explores the different types of postmortems, including internal, customer-only, and public postmortems. The article dives into 3 case studies: (1) Adevinta experienced a significant impact due to a DNS outage, (2) GitHub experienced an outage due to a network configuration issue at their secondary site, (3) Reddit experienced an issue with a Kubernetes cluster upgrade gone wrong."

Leadership Management

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

tl;dr: The article highlights the importance of Terraform providers for SaaS platforms and 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

More Software Projects Need Defenses Of Design

— Hillel Wayne

tl;dr: Hillel argues why a well-documented "Defense of Design" is an invaluable resource for understanding a project's history, design decisions, and constraints that shaped it. It provides insights into the thought process of the creators, developers, and maintainers, thus fostering a greater level of understanding and appreciation for the software.

Management Design

“Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.”

— John Carmack

Developer Workflow Tips No One Tells You About

— Justin Joyce

tl;dr: “These are the tools, tips and advice I wish I had internalized when I was just starting out. Many of the details below are specific to macOS, but similar tips and tricks apply on other systems. I've broken it down very roughly into the following categories: (1) Computer setup. (2) Command-line-related things. (3) Technical but non-CS advice. (4) Potpourri.

Tips

New Study Finds An Unstructured 5-Minute Break Can Help Restore Attention

— Paul Ginns

tl;dr: “Researchers found a 5-minute break from thinking is all you need to get your concentration back. There is no need for a walk along a river, or a lengthy video of bamboo forests swaying in the wind. A five-minute total break will do the trick.”

CareerAdvice

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Building AI Apps

— Vicki Boykis

tl;dr: Vicki shares her experience and pain points when building AI applications, highlighting several aspects often not discussed in conversations: (1) Slow iteration times, (2) Build times, (3) Docker images, and more.

AI LLM

Bfs 3.0: The Fastest Find Yet!

tl;dr: Bfs or Breadth-First Search is a custom tool for traversing and searching through a filesystem. Tavian highlights the new features introduced in version 3.0, specifically the implementation of asynchronous, parallel directory traversal.

UsefulTool

Notable GitHub Repos

Companion App: Stack to create and host your own AI companions.

Driver.js: JS engine to drive the user's focus across the page.  

Pop: Send emails from your terminal.

ShortGPT: AI framework for short video content creation.

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