Issue #407

Friday 21st April's issue is presented by Redpanda

Redpanda is the streaming data platform for developers. It’s fully Kafka® API-compatible but proven to be 10x faster and 6x lower in total costs.

Deploying as a self-contained single binary, Redpanda is JVM-free, ZooKeeper®-free, Jepsen-tested and source available. With Redpanda, you can deploy in minutes and spin-up in seconds.

See Our Benchmarks

The Silent Killer Of Your Operating Practice: Fear

- Amanda Schwartz Ramirez

tl;dr: Amanda creates example scenarios and ways of mitigating 5 common fears: (1) Fear of failure. (2) Fear of losing control. (3) Fear of conflict. (4) Fear of losing credibility. (5) Fear of missing something.

Leadership Management CareerAdvice

90% Of My Skills Are Now Worth $0...But The Other 10% Are Worth 1000x

- Kent Beck

tl;dr: “In fact, I believe that our skills as software developers are more valuable than ever before. While AI tools like ChatGPT can certainly automate routine tasks and help us be more efficient, they can never replace the human creativity and expertise that is essential to delivering high-quality software products.” Kent expands on this.

CareerAdvice

You Don’t Have To Sacrifice Streaming Data Performance To Cut Cloud Costs

tl;dr: Redpanda is faster and more efficient than Apache Kafka… but how much faster exactly? We ran 200+ hours of benchmarks to find out how both platforms perform for various workloads and hardware configurations. Here’s our breakdown on how Redpanda achieves 10x the performance while cutting cloud spend by over $500k.

Promoted by Redpanda

Data Cloud Performance

An Example Of LLM Prompting For Programming

- Martin Fowler

tl;dr: Martin shows us how ChatGPT produces useful self-tested code. The initial prompt primes the LLM with an implementation strategy asking for an implementation plan rather than code. Once that plan is in place, it’s refined and the author uses it to generate useful sections of code.

Testing Productivity

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

— Bill Gates

Measuring Developer Productivity And Happiness At LinkedIn

- Viktoras Truchanovicius

tl;dr: We developed a new internal product called the Developer Insights Hub. It visualizes developer experience and happiness metrics describing key developer activities such code building, reviewing, publishing, as well as the sentiment towards the tools being used… this post provides an overview of how we approached metrics selection and design, system architecture and key product features.

Leadership Management Productivity

Tracing Notifications

- Suman Karumuri, George Luong

tl;dr: The engineering team at Slack embarked on a project to improve debugging notifications. “Debugging notification issues within our systems was difficult because each system had a different logging pipeline and data format, making it necessary to look at data with different formats and backends. This process required deep technical expertise and took several days to complete.”

Scale Architecture

I Finally Figured Out How To Take Notes!

- Sam Rose

tl;dr: “I had some requirements in mind: (1) I want to tag notes, track things like date, who was there, what the key topics were, and be able to search based on tags. (2) Create action items, and be able to ask “what action items have I not yet done?” (3) It has to be super easy. I want to be able to jump into a meeting and have my meeting notes ready to go.”

CareerAdvice Tips

The Inner Workings Of Distributed Databases

- Alex Pelagenko

tl;dr: “We analyze how several popular time-series / OLAP databases implement high availability to highlight the pros and cons of each approach.” Alex also reviews the fundamentals of distributed databases.

Database Architecture

Notable GitHub Repos

MiniGPT-4: Enhancing vision-language understanding.

Pretty TypeScript Errors: Prettier and human-readable errors.

DINOv2: Learning robust visual features without supervision.

Typst: New markup-based typesetting system.

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