Issue #348

2 September 2022


Issue #348
Pointer.io
Friday 2nd September's issue is presented by Stream

 
Developing an activity feed in-house can take years. But by leveraging Stream's APIs & SDKs, developers can still create a custom solution while also enjoying the supreme scalability, security, and reliability of a ready-made solution that can launch in record time.
 
Real-World Engineering Challenges #5
- Gergely Orosz
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: "A series in which I interpret interesting software engineering or engineering management case studies from tech companies. You might learn something new in these articles, as we dive into the concepts they contain." Includes: (1) Resilient payments systems learnings from Shopify. (2) Designing a solution to store and access millions of records by Grab. (3) The challenges of the analytics infrastructure platform team at Yelp. And more. 
#Leadership #Management #Hiring
 
tl;dr: Will discusses pros and cons of each. His "default advice" on the topic of increasing quality of organizational hiring is: (1) Introduce structured approval when you introduce your second hiring manager in a function. (2) Wait until organization trust grows sufficiently weak that there’s significant skepticism about hiring quality across teams, then introduce a hiring committee. (3) Avoid introducing bar raising unless you have a clear thesis on why the other approaches won’t work out.
How to Optimize the Remote Employee Experience in 2022
#Leadership #Management #RemoteWork

tl;dr: (1) Invest in Tools for Easier Team Collaboration. (2) Improve Internal Communication. (3) Establish a Meeting Protocol. (4) Allocate Time for Team Bonding. (5) Introduce Company Culture from the Start, so new employees feel integrated. And more. 

Promoted by Stream
Developer Experience Infrastructure (DXI)
- Kenneth Auchenberg
#DevEx

tl;dr: Kenneth defines DX as "the holistic experience offered to developers throughout the lifecycle they interact with your product or service" and lists the "table stakes" experience for developers in 2022, such as having documentation and content, great attention to detail on error messages, API references, baseline API infrastructure, debugging tools, and more. He discussed the cost of poor DX and the transition from DX to DXI as an emerging trend. 
 
"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”

- Tom Cargill
 
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Email
#Antipattern 

tl;dr: Includes: (1) Everyone has an email address. (2) Everyone has exactly one email address. (3) An email address never changes. (4) Whenever an address does change, it’s under that user’s control. (5) Whenever an address does change, it’s because the user specifically requested it to happen. (6) Whenever an address does change, the old address will continue to work or exist. And more. 
Modern Web Debugging In Chrome DevTools
- Bramus Van Damme, Victor Porof
#Debugging #DeveloperTools #Chrome

tl;dr: "As an author, you want to see and debug the code that you wrote, not the deployed code. To make up for it, you can now have the tree show the authored code instead. This makes the tree more closely resemble source files you get to see in your IDE, and these files are now separated from the deployed code." The authors discuss how this works and other additions to Chrome's DevTools. 
Git’s Database Internals I: Packed Object Store
- Derrick Stolee
#Git

tl;dr: Some basic concepts that Git shares with application DBs: (1) Data is persisted to disk. (2) Queries allow users to request information based on that data. (3) The data storage is optimized for these queries. (4) The query algorithms are optimized to take advantage of these structures. (5) Distributed nodes need to synchronize and agree on some common state.
Software Mimicry
- Hillel Wayne
#LanguageDesign
 
tl;dr: "Mimicry is when software X reimplements at a higher level a core feature of software Y. The produced facsimile has some, but not all, of the same properties, enough to “look like” it’s the same thing but missing many of the nuances. This exists in every kind of software. One language can mimic another, a library can mimic a language, a database engine can mimic a product, etc."
 
Notable GitHub Repos
Sliver
OS cross-platform framework to perform security testing. 
 
Poetry
Python dependency management and packaging made easy.
 
EasyMocap
Make human motion capture easier.
 
Dragonfly
A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached.
 
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