Issue #382

20 January 2023


Issue #382
Pointer.io
Friday 20th January's issue is presented by Sym

Sym is the code-first way to manage developer access. Just-in-time access, intelligent approvals and cloud-native integrations are all available with our powerful SDK. The best way to get your authorization logic just right is with code. Keep your developers moving and your customers safe with Sym.
 

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#Leadership #Management
 
tl;dr: "I’d like to recommend 6 core meetings that I recommend every organization start with, and that I’ve found can go a surprisingly long way. These six are split across three operational meetings, two developmental meetings and finally a monthly engineering Q&A to learn what the organization is really thinking about." Will discusses each in depth. 
What Big Tech Layoffs Suggest For The Industry
- Gergely Orosz
#CareerAdvice #Management #IndustryNews

tl;dr: Gergely discusses rapid shifts in the engineering job market. "It’s certain we’ll see a correction of 2021-22’s hiring frenzy and it’s a given that Big Tech will hire much less this year than in 2022, while the question remains whether other large tech companies will follow suit and announce layoffs in the coming months."
Why Your Team Should Be Using Just-in-Time Access
- Adam Buggia
#Leadership #Management #Security

tl;dr: Least privilege in the cloud is hard, but progress can be made by taking a risk-based approach. Consider an attacker who obtained one of your developer’s credentials; what access would they have? By adding a temporal dimension to developer access policies, the attack surface can be significantly reduced for many security-breach scenarios. That’s where just-in-time access comes in.

Promoted by Sym
#CareerAdvice
 
tl;dr: (1) You rarely write something from scratch. (2) Domain knowledge is more important than your coding skills. (3) Writing documentation is not emphasized hard enough. (4) Code is secondary. Business value is first. (5) You’ll need to work around incompetence. (6) You work with uncertainty most of the time. (7) Assume everything has bugs. And more.
 

"The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds."

- Theo Jansen
Let's Build GPT: From Scratch, In Code, Spelled Out
- Andrej Karpathy
#AI #GPT3 #Video

tl;dr: "We build a GPT, following the paper "Attention is All You Need" and OpenAI's GPT-2 / GPT-3. We talk about connections to ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm. We watch GitHub Copilot, itself a GPT, help us write a GPT."
A Few Programming Language Features I’d Like To See
- Neil Madden
#LanguageDesign

tl;dr: "I’ve long thought it was time for a bit more experimentalism to return to programming language design, and not just for type systems! Maybe these ideas will inspire you to think up some whacky new programming languages." Neil discusses E’s quasi-literal syntax, Datalog / Prolog as a sub-language, Teleo-Reactive programs, and more.
How To Completely Own An Airline In 3 Easy Steps
- Maia Arson Crimew
#Security #Hacking

tl;dr: "I had trip sheets for every flight, the potential to access every flight plan ever, a whole bunch of image attachments to bookings for reimbursement flights containing yet again more PII, airplane maintenance data, you name it. I had owned them completely in less than a day, with pretty much no skill required besides the patience to sift through hundreds of results".
Hello, PNG!
- David Buchanan
#DeepDive #ImageCompression

tl;dr: Davi discusses the mechanics of how PNGs functions:" I'm writing this article to fulfil my role as a PNG evangelist, spreading the joy of good-enough lossless image compression to every corner of the internet... I'll be referencing the Working Draft of the PNG Specification released in October 2022, but every feature I mention here should still be present in the 1.0 spec."
 
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