Issue #419

Friday 2nd June’s issue is presented by Byteboard

Byteboard’s technical interview platform simulates real work to help engineering managers assess across 20+ domain-related skills with a single interview.

Companies like Figma, Webflow, and Tines have relied on Byteboard to build great engineering teams while saving 100s of hours, reducing time-to-offer by 30%, and increasing diversity by over to 40%.

Get Started Today

Be Plainspoken

— Andrew Bosworth

tl;dr: Andrew discusses the superpower of being plainspoken. “Our desire to maintain harmony can cause us to be indirect about uncomfortable truths. Our desire to influence can cause us to pre-emptively address every arcane objection. Our desire to impress can cause us to use more language than necessary. And the expectations we have internalized about corporate communication often cause us to write in a way we never would to our friends.”

Leadership Management

An Educational Side Project

— Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: “What does a great side project look like, which helps learn new technologies, but also helps stand out when looking for a new job?” Gergely analyses an Uber simulation app built from scratch in this context.

SideProject CareerAdvice

Hiring Engineers In The Age Of AI And ChatGPT

— Obasi Shaw

tl;dr: Hiring in the age of AI? Here's how tools like ChatGPT and Github Copilot impact the role of engineers, how they’ll change technical interviews, and how companies can adapt their interview process to the mainstream usage of these tools.

Promoted by Byteboard

Management Hiring

Six Ways To Shoot Yourself In The Foot With Healthchecks

— Phil Booth

tl;dr: (1) Aggregate other services into your app’s healthcheck. (2) Set a short timeout on healthcheck requests. (3) Set a long timeout on healthcheck requests. (4) Leave a long delay before starting healthchecks on new instances. (5) Set a low threshold on consecutive failures before turning unhealthy. (6) Set a high threshold on consecutive successes before turning health.

BestPractices

“Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it, the user or the developer.”

— Larry Tesler

The Fear Of Shipping

— Keith Smiley

tl;dr: “Something I've become very aware of lately is how difficult it is for me to ship. I have at least a dozen unfinished projects that I could probably ship, yet I find any excuse to hold them back.” Keith discusses why he thinks he feels this way.

CareerAdvice

Slack Architecture

tl;dr: The author guides us through the design for a system where the: (1) User can send real-time messages to another user and within a channel. (2) Chat messages should be persisted and displayed in chronological order to keep the total order of messages. (3) User can send media files such as pictures or short audio files. And more.

SystemDesign

Break Glass, Not Rules: Ensuring Compliance in Emergency Code Changes

tl;dr: In "break glass" scenarios, code review often gets skipped. But many compliance frameworks like SOC2 require that all changes get reviewed. PullApprove tracks these unreviewed pull requests as "bypassed" and facilitates a post-merge review process.

Promoted By PullApprove

Management Security

300ms Faster: Reducing Wikipedia's Total Blocking Time

— Nicholas Ray

tl;dr: “Wikipedia’s mobile site suffered from a piece of JS that could take over 600ms to execute during page load on low-end devices, effectively blocking user interactions.” Nicholas walks through the steps taken to reduce the execution time of this task by about 50%.

Performance

My First Superoptimizer

— Austin Henley

tl;dr: Austin builds a superoptimizer, a tool that finds the optimal code for any given code snippet. “It generates every possible permutation of code instructions and tests each generated program for equivalence to the original program.”

SideProject

Notable GitHub Repos

Ecoute: Live transcription tool.

LocalGPT: Chat with your documents on your local device.

QR Code Designer: novel method of designing QR codes.

SuperAGI: Build and run useful autonomous agents

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