Issue #388

10 February 2023


Issue #388
Pointer.io
Friday 10th February's issue is presented by DailyBot

Modernize your team’s daily stand-ups and agile practices with DailyBot. This chat assistant helps you run best practices for async work and it’s fully integrated into your work chat.

Pointer readers get 20% off any plan, forever, using POINTER23 at checkout.
Real-world Engineering Challenges #8: Breaking Up A Monolith
- Gergely Orosz
#Leadership #Management #Monolith

tl;dr: "We’re diving into a massive migration project by Khan Academy, involving moving one million lines of Python code and splitting them across more than 40 services, mostly in Go, as part of a migration that took 3.5 years and involved around 100 software engineers."
Focus
- Andrew Bosworth
#Leadership #Management
 
tl;dr: From the CTO at Meta... "One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing." Andrew discusses the value and nostalgia of focus he experienced.
Async Standup Reports For Fewer Status Meetings

#Standups #Management #Productivity
 
tl;dr: Automated team progress updates via Slack or any chat you use. Make sure less time is spent on meetings and more on building.

Promoted by DailyBot
The Technology Behind GitHub’s New Code Search
- Timothy Clem
#Search #DeepDive #GitHub

tl;dr: "We were motivated to create our own solution by three things: (1) We’ve got a vision for an entirely new user experience that’s about being able to ask questions of code and get answers through iteratively searching, browsing, navigating, and reading code. (2) We understand that code search is uniquely different from general text search. (3) GitHub’s scale is truly a unique challenge... north of 200 million repositories.
 
“Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”

— Linus Torvalds
How To Find Your Blind Spots
- Charlie Andrews
#CareerAdvice

tl;dr: "Reaching the next level” in a skill usually means adding one or two new minigames to your arsenal while making only modest improvements in minigames that you’re already aware of." Charles discusses how to improve your engineering skills with shorter feedback cycles.
Password Strength Explained
- Wladimir Palant
#Security

tl;dr: From security expert Wladimir Palant: "There is lots of confusion about what constitutes a strong password however. How strong is my current password? Also, how strong is strong enough? These questions don’t have easy answers. I’ll try my best to explain however."
Why Does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?
- Julia Evans
#Testing
 
tl;dr: "This is roughly how floating point addition works: (1) Add together the numbers with extra precision (2) Round the result to the nearest floating point number... So let’s use these rules to calculate 0.1 + 0.2. I just learned how floating point addition works yesterday so it’s possible I’ve made some mistakes in this post, but I did get the answers I expected at the end."
#Python
 
tl;dr: "Wow. Somehow the simple expression x/(1−x−x2) contains’ the entire Fibonacci sequence..." Orson explains how.
 
Recommended Reading
Recommended Reading: Quastor

Quastor is a free newsletter that sends summaries of big tech engineering blog posts. Learn about the strategies and technologies companies use to scale up to serve millions of users. Past articles include How WhatsApp scaled to 1 billion users with only 50 engineers and How PayPal prevents fraud with Graph Databases.

Join 30,000 developers who read Quastor. It's Free!
Notable GitHub Repos
DriftDB
Real-time data backend for browser-based applications.
 
Nango
Get OAuth tokens for APIs - fast & secure.
 
LAVIS
Library for language-vision intelligence.
 
GraphGPT
Extrapolating knowledge graphs from unstructured text.
 
How did you like this issue of Pointer?
1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it

1     2     3     4     5
 
Pointer.io
Pointer is emailed twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays @ 9am EST.

Unsubscribe // Sponsorship // Archives