Issue #344

19 August 2022


Issue #344
Pointer.io
Friday 19th August issue is presented by Vanta

 
In order to close major customers, startups must prove their products are secure. But preparing for and obtaining the most sought-after security compliance standards can be time-consuming — and expensive. Unless you use Vanta.
 
How Do I Make Sure My Work Is Visible?
- James Stanier
#CareerAdvice #Management

tl;dr: James covers: (1) The difficulty of remembering what you’re working on in a fast-paced environment when every week feels like a blur. (2) Brag documents, a great way to tackle the above problem. (3) The process James uses to write one, an iterative process throughout each week. (4) An evolution of brag documents into internal newsletters.
The Product Culture Shift
- Camille Fournier
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: "Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surprise me to see so many people struggling to make it work... It’s easy for people who have spent their whole career building infrastructure to misunderstand what product and platform really mean. So I thought I’d share the secret to making this work."
Understanding The Value Of SOC 2 Compliance For Your Company
#Leadership #Management #Security

tl;dr: Being asked to prove your company’s security is a common blocker in getting your sales deals moving. But with the right perspective, this obstacle can be turned into a competitive advantage. Read the blog to learn more!

Promoted by Vanta
#Testing
 
tl;dr: "The difference is that I treat it as a useful technique, one of many, while the very strongest advocates consider it transformational... I practice “weak TDD”, which just means “writing tests before code, in short feedback cycles”. Hillel explains why he holds complicated feelings for TDD. 

“Engineering is a profession that can do the job of almost all other professions.”

― Amit Kalantri
 
How I Hacked My Car
#Hacking

tl;dr: "The IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) in the car, like many things these days, is just a computer. My goal was to hack the IVI to get root access and hopefully be able to run my own software on it. Of course, the first step in hacking a device like this is research." 
How Do One-Time Passwords Work?
- Serge Zaitsev
#Algos

tl;dr: "That’s just 16 lines of code! If you call totp() function passing it your secret key – you should get a 6-digit number that matches the one in the Google Authenticator"
#Latency
 
tl;dr: "What we'd described with our requirement was essentially a write-through cache, with GCP's Local SSDs as the cache and Persistent Disks as the storage layer. We run Ubuntu on our database servers, so we were fortunate to find that the Linux kernel is able to cache data at the disk level in a variety of ways, providing modules such as dm-cache lvm-cache, and bcache."
Janet Jackson Had The Power To Crash Laptop Computers
- Raymond Chen
#Entertaining

tl;dr: "A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops."
Notable GitHub Repos
System Design Course
Design systems at scale and prepare for design interviews.
 
Zellij
A terminal workspace with batteries included.
 
Stable Diffusion
A latent text-to-image diffusion model.
 
Immich
High performance self-hosted photo & video backup solution.
 
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