Issue #356

4 October 2022


Issue #356
Pointer.io
Tuesday 4th October's issue is presented by Posthog

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Software Engineering Practices
- Simon Willison
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: Simon outlines 7 recommended “software engineering practices” for development teams, including: (1) Documentation in the same repo as the code. (2) Mechanisms for creating test data. (3) Rock solid database migrations. (4) Templates for new projects and components. (5) Automated code formatting. And more. 
Why Some Feedback Hurts (and What To Do About It)
- Ed Batista
#Go

tl;dr: Ed highlights the physiological impact of negative feedback and social threat it creates. "Research shows that reframing can reduce stress levels and increase our abilities to manage negative emotions." When receiving feedback, remind yourself that your perception that feedback is threatening is rooted in well-understood neurological dynamics. Ed also shows us how to respond to such feedback.
What We Learned About Hiring From Our First Five Employees
- Andy Vandervell
#Leadership #Management #Hiring

tl;dr: The company founder shares the profiles of the first 5 company employees and key takeaway from each hire, including: (1) Test people out with paid work before you hire them full time. (2) Define your culture and your "ideal hires" from the start. (3) Go looking for great people in different places. And more. 

Promoted by PostHog.
#Leadership #Management
 
tl;dr: "One of the classic failure modes of management is the empire-builder — the managers who measure their own status, rank or value by the number of teams and people “under” them." Charity argues the case for the opposite i.e. managing with a small denominator, or set of resources, and delivering outsized results. 

"Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming."

– John Carmack
 
How We Reduced Our Annual Server Costs By 80% — From $1M To $200k — By Moving Away From AWS
- Trey Huffine
#Migration

tl;dr: Prerender saved $800k by removing their reliance on AWS and building in-house infrastructure to handle traffic and cached data. This post discusses the 3 phased approach to tackle the migration - testing, technical set-up, implementation and scaling. 
6 Best Practices To Manage Pull Request Creation And Feedback
- Jenna Kiyasu
#BestPractice

tl;dr: From the engineering team at DoorDash: (1) Write descriptive and consistent names. (2) Create a clear PR title and description. (3) Keep PRs short. (4) Manage PR disagreements through direct communication. (5) Avoid rewrites by getting feedback early. (6) Request additional reviewers to create dialogue. 
HTML Tips
- Marko Denic
#HTML #Tips

tl;dr: Marko shares 18 tips, including: (1) The `loading=lazy` attribute. (2) Email, call, and SMS links. (3) Ordered lists `start` attribute. (4) The `meter` element. (5) HTML Native Search. (6) Fieldset Element. (7) Window.opener.
#Entertaining
 
tl;dr: "So I previewed the document and it was scary. It was a document intended for someone to have a cheat sheet for an interview on how to act as me." Connor plays investigator to understand how this spam works. 
 
Notable GitHub Repos
Iced
A cross-platform GUI library for Rust, inspired by Elm.
 
Havoc
Modern post-exploitation command and control framework. 
 
GoogleTest
Google Testing and Mocking Framework
 
GitUI
Blazing fast terminal-ui for git written in Rust. 
 
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