Issue #408

Tuesday 25th April's issue is presented by Speakeasy

Developers love it when APIs have SDKs. But only the biggest companies can afford to build & maintain them. Until now. Speakeasy's SDK creation pipeline makes offering idiomatic, feature-rich SDKs easy.

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Is Critical Thinking The Most Important Skill For Software Engineers?

- Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: “If someone cannot explain a concept without jargon, I now doubt they truly understand what they are talking about. The true test of properly understanding a given topic is whether you can teach it to someone else. Explaining your thoughts without the use of jargon - or gradually introducing jargon - is a form of teaching, as you need to adopt to someone who has less domain knowledge.” Gergely provides us with 4 tips on how to improve our critical thinking skills.

Leadership Management CareerAdvice

From Assumption To Next Step

- John Cutler

tl;dr: John discusses how to go from risky assumption to next steps using a single phrase. “One of the significant challenges was what to do with all of the discomfort and anxiety-inducing assumptions. Teams understood the theory — why it might benefit them to surface assumptions, designate “operating assumptions”, prioritize risky assumptions, and make plans to reduce uncertainty where it counts.”

Leadership Management

APIs Vs SDKs: Why You Should Always Have Both

tl;dr: This post explains what APIs and SDKs are, exploring the different use cases, examples and best practices for each, and explaining why having both are necessary.

Promoted by Speakeasy

Management UsefulTool

Rescuing A Project In Progress

- Jason Fried

tl;dr: “This isn't about calling in reinforcements or adding more resources. This is about stopping, slowing down, eliminating the spread of attention, honing in, and driving to completion.” Jason discusses the importance of establishing "completion discipline" in projects.

Management CareerAdvice

“The task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity.”

— Grady Booch

Real Time Presence Platform System Design

tl;dr: “In layman’s terms, the presence status shows whether a particular user is currently online or offline. The presence status is popular on real-time messaging applications and social networking platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Slack. The presence status represents the availability of the user for communication on a chat application or a social network.”

Architecture InterviewAdvice

Prompt Engineering Vs Blind Prompting

- Mitchell Hashimoto

tl;dr: “In this blog post, I will make the argument that prompt engineering is a real skill that can be developed based on real experimental methodologies. I will use a realistic example to walk through the process of prompt engineering a solution to a problem that provides practical value to an application.”

AI

Understanding Database Types

- Alex Xu

tl;dr: “We’ll arm ourselves with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing databases for various components of our application. We will dive into the process of database selection, examining the various types of databases, discussing factors that influence database performance and cost, and guiding ourselves toward the best choices for our application while balancing essential tradeoffs.”

Database

Spinning Diagrams With CSS

- Harold Cooper

tl;dr: “Several people expressed surprise that the spinning diagrams don’t use any JavaScript or animated image formats, just HTML and CSS. So I thought I’d explain how they work before I forget.”

CSS FrontEnd

Notable GitHub Repos

Bark: Text-prompted generative audio model.

Bloop: Code search engine.

Conductor: Microservices orchestration engine.

Milvus: Open-source vector database.

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