Issue #322

3 June 2022


Issue #322
Pointer.io
Friday 3rd June's issue is presented by Doppler

Doppler is building the first SecretOps platform to empower developers and security teams of all sizes to seamlessly manage secrets across environments and teams. 

Say goodbye .env files and set up Doppler today

#CareerAdvice
 
tl;dr: Murat committed to asking "crazier" left-field questions in each post he wrote. After 70 posts, he learned that these: (1) Are useful as they took him out of "default mode." (2) Keep the brain more engaged. We tend to ask easier questions. Harder ones feel uncomfortable or seem impolite. (3) By calling them "MAD" questions, they give him the license to be more uninhibited. 
How To Eliminate Organizational Debt
- Aaron Dignan
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: (1) Launch a bounty programs so any employee that encounters a policy or process hindering their ability to deliver value can submit it with a recommendation. (2) Practice continuous governance so individuals have the power to recommend changes to their own roles. (3) Don’t rush to a policy and process for everything as there can be an efficiency cost to keeping things open-ended.

Manually Updating .env Files Isn't DevOps
#Management

tl;dr: No one enjoys keeping .env files in sync across environments. Learn how to automate the pain away by applying DevOps thinking to how you manage application config and secrets.

Promoted by Doppler
Pinterest’s Model for the Future of Work
- Jeremy King
#Leadership #Management #Remote

tl;dr: "We are going to ask our employees to be in the office a maximum of 25% of their time. For the balance of that time, employees can be wherever they want, either in or out of the office. We really want to earn employee’s in-office time and be incredibly intentional about when we ask folks to travel."


"Programming is not about typing, it's about thinking."

- Rich Hickey

 
How Do Video Games Stay in Sync?
#Networks #Latency
 
tl;dr: "Have you ever wondered how real-time games can keep multiple clients in sync even when there are large latencies between users? How can you see other players reacting to your actions near instantly, in spite of the fact that the communication between your computer and the server is not instant?
Getting A Vanity Phone Number With 4 Repeating Digits
- JonLuca DeCaro
#Scripts

tl;dr: "I didn’t really care what the area code was, so removing the params should make it easier to find a number I liked. I wrote a quick script to repeatedly call the API and try and find a number with at least 3 consecutive numbers."

How Fast Are Linux Pipes Anyway?
- Francesco Mazzoli
#Linux

tl;dr: "We'll explore how Unix pipes are implemented in Linux by iteratively optimizing a test program that writes and reads data through a pipe. We will begin with a simple program with a throughput of around 3.5GiB/s, and improve its performance twentyfold. The improvements will be informed by profiling the program using Linux’s perf tooling."
In Search Of The Least Viewed Article On Wikipedia
- Colin Morris
#ML

tl;dr: "Based on our findings above, the least viewed articles on Wikipedia are not going to be merely about topics with little popular interest - they must also be “unlucky” in the sense of having very small random gaps... Of these 600,000 least lucky articles, all received at least a few views in 2021. The booby prize for least popular article of 2021 is shared by two articles which received exactly 3 probably-human pageviews."
 
Notable GitHub Repos
System Design Resources
Best resources for System Design on the Internet. 

 
Dragonfly
A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached.

 

Devops Exercises
Questions & exercises on technical topics related to DevOps and SRE.

 
WTFPython
What's happening under the hood for lesser-known Python features.

 
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