Issue #161

14 November 2019


Issue #161
Pointer.io
Weekly Reading For Technical Leaders
- Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb
#Remote
 
tl;dr: In the early stages of Charity's business when the founding team was still establishing the core business, bringing remote workers into brainstorming sessions didn't work. She learnt that remote workers require more structure & clear remits, which can only be provided once a business has a degree of focus. 
- Addy Osmani, Engineering Manager working at Google Chrome
- Ben Greenstein, Software Engineer at Google
- Bryan McQuade, Software Engineer at Google
#Performance #Chrome
 
tl;dr: The Chrome team are in development of "badging", a method of identifying sites that are built in "a way that makes them slow" by looking at historical load latencies. In the future, such information may be communicated to users. 
- Andy Pavlo, Associate Professor of Databaseology in the CS Department at Carnegie Mellon University
#Trends #DB
 
tl;dr: A look at the past, present and future of databases. The most fascinating prediction is that "the role of humans as database administrators will cease to exist." Future systems will be too complex and "DBMSs will be completely autonomous and self-healing."
- Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Software Developer, Co-creator of Django
#Python
 
tl;dr: Jacob runs through his ideal setup, which includes pyenv, poetry, and pipx. While some packages are still not fully stable and the setup may be more complex than unnecessary on his own accord, it does the job. 
Why Not Having A CS Degree Is Awesome
- Caitlyn Greffly, Full Stack Software Developer
#CareerAdvice
 
tl;dr: If CS degrees are not a criteria for hiring managers, they can hire engineers with more diverse skillsets. This has advantages - those who have worked in other fields bring in other hard to find skillsets that can compliment teams.  
- Nathan Davison, Software Engineer
#HTTP
 
tl;dr: Ways in which headers can be used to influence systems that use multiple caches before they hit the backend. 
 Thanks for reading. please complete these 3 questions to give me feedbackor just hit reply.
- Producer, Peter McManus & Elizabeth Ann Duffy, Researcher
#Wellness #Entertaining
 
tl;dr: Podcast episode about Terry Davis, a computer scientist who developed an entire operating system - as instructed by god - called Temple OS, while suffering from schizophrenia. 
- Tim Williams, Haskell Developer, Ex-physicist
#Haskell
 
tl;dr: Tim created a Haskell DSL. The aim was to "build a skeleton structure", and not do most of the repetitive parts of the construction, like walls, floor, roofs, etc. He runs through how in this post. 
 
- Writing For Developers
#Git
 
tl;dr: Guideline is "write a concise message, starting with a capitalized verb in the root form, explaining what you did to the code and what the code does to the software."
- Daragh Byrne, Founder of Coding Mindfully 
#Wellness
 
tl;dr: We tend to overload ourselves with work often resulting in us feeling overwhelmed. There are natural reasons for us to do this - many of us are people pleasers - but it's important to build up the ability to say "no". Daragh gives examples as to how.  
- Tim Anderson, Tech Journalist 
#Python
 
tl;dr: This is predominately because of Python's use in machine learning and data science. The article runs through some other trends from GitHub's "State of the Octoverse", which can be found here
- Russ Cox, Principal Engineer at Google
#Go
 
tl;dr: Go was initially developed for cloud software. 10 years on, many cloud  providers use. It's also become mainstream, with at least a million developers using it regularly.  
Notable Developer Conferences 2019
Microsoft Ignite 
Nov 4-8
Orlando, Florida, USA
dotJS 
Dec 5-6

Paris, France
React Day Berlin 
Dec 6
Berlin, Germany
DevTernity 
December 6-7

Riga, Latvia
Pointer.io