Issue #399

Tuesday 21st March's issue is presented by Swarmia

Improve Dev Productivity With Non-Toxic Metrics

Measuring the wrong things can destroy developer motivation and productivity. But avoiding metrics altogether forces you to fly blind. That’s why modern engineering organizations like Vercel and Outreach use Swarmia to continuously improve their focus, flow, collaboration, and quality with a combination of healthy metrics and automated feedback loops.

Try Swarmia For Free

Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery

- Charity Majors

#Leadership #Management

Charity’s core principle is that “only the people responsible for building software systems get to make decisions about how those systems get built.” Effectively, the presence of an architect can make decisions “someone else’s problem,” resulting in weaker engineers and poorer systems. Charity highlights how architects can often be misused by organizations and best practices of how to use them in your organization effectively.

Lessons From A Pessimist: Make Your Pessimism Productive

- Armin Ronacher

#CareerAdvice

Armin observes two forms of pessimism - a “pragmatic form” and what he’s coined as “destructive pessimism,” which he believes has become more common inside and outside of engineering. Pragmatic pessimism can be useful - you assume that things are more difficult than they actually are and are able to highlight pitfalls along the way. Destructive pessimism wants, or expects, things to fail. While both seem similar on the surface, the latter can be harmful.

Beyond Spreadsheets: Driving Developer Productivity Improvements Using Goals, Signals, And Metrics

- Rebecca Murphey

#Leadership #Management

So many developer productivity journeys start with a spreadsheet. But since such approaches rarely end well, we wrote this article to help you replace metrics-driven opportunity discovery with the goals, signals, and metrics framework.

Promoted by Swarmia

Keeping The Cloudflare API 'All Green' Using Python-Based Testing

- Elie Mitrani

#Python #Testing #Architecture

This article discusses Scout, an automated system running Python tests verifying the end to end behavior of Cloudflare’s APIs. Scout evaluates APIs in production-like environments, green lights a production deployment and monitors the behavior of APIs in production. This article dives deep into how it operates.

“The first step of any project is to grossly underestimate its complexity and difficulty.”

- Nicoll Hunt

Eight Graphs That Explain Software Engineering Salaries In 2023

- Tekla Perry

#Salary #CareerAdvice

Based on 2022 reports, these graphs show how (1) tech salaries rose but below inflation. (2) The best paying jobs. (3) Software engineering skills employers want you to have. (4) Software engineering skills by demand. And more.

Why People Misuse Inheritance

#Inheritance

The author argues that it feels like less work to implement and maintain an inheritance-based approach than a composition or delegation-based one. Yet, Of, the inheritance-based one is often either outright wrong or a “subtle bug waiting to happen.”

The Curious Case Of A Memory Leak In A Zig Program

- Krut Patel

#Zig #Debugging

“This is a small exposition on an unexpected "memory leak" I encountered when writing a Zig program. We will mainly focus on a very simple allocation pattern and see how it causes a "leak" when using a particular allocator from Zig's stdlib.”

Commandlinefu

#CommandLine

“The place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.”

Notable GitHub Repos

• Dalai: Run LLaMA and Alpaca on your computer.

• GGML: Tensor library for machine learning.

• Scrcpy: Display and control your Android device.

• AI Commits: Writes your git commit messages with AI.

  
  

  
  

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