Issue #426

Tuesday 27th June’s issue is presented by Unleash

Feature flags are fantastic for pushing out the features your users want a lot more frequently. They’re even better when they’re low-risk, manageable, and scalable.

Test in production to the user segments you choose. Release and rollback features by flipping a toggle. Fix issues before they impact your users.

Try us out. We’re open-source.

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Accountability For Effective Teams

— Jessica Kerr

tl;dr: Accountability within teams should prioritize behavior over just measurable outcomes. Focusing on behavior is more fundamental and leads to better results in the long run. It requires having courageous conversations, confronting deficiencies, and suggesting paths aligned with collective goals. Blaming individuals after failures is not as effective as addressing behavior proactively.

Leadership Management

Helicopter Management And Other Mistakes

— Charity Majors

tl;dr: “The message is simply that it took me years and years to learn that there is more to being a great manager than caring about my team.” Charity discusses 3 rookie mistakes in new managers: (1) Only managing down. (2) Helicopter management - overly identifying with your team instead of considering them in context of the organization, or letting them take risks. (3) Your view of the business is incomplete.

Leadership Management

Building Your Own Feature Flag Platform Might Be A Mistake

- Mateusz Kwaśniewski

tl;dr: Feature flags play a critical role in software development. And they should: They’re great for enabling developers to manage features in a way that’s controlled and targeted. A home-grown feature flag platform might work great at first, but that’s just the honeymoon phase. How do you decide when it’s no longer worth the effort?

Promoted by Unleash

ᐧManagement

How Platform Engineering Works

— Chad McElligott

tl;dr: “I feel confident you will have a solid foundation upon which to build an effective Platform Engineering team if you follow these four principles”: (1) Set goals on outcomes, not outputs. (2) Truly know your customer. (3) Invent on behalf of your customer. (4) Scale your impact.  

Platform

“There is never enough time to do it right, but there is always enough time to fix it or to do it over.”

— Daniel T. Barry

Control, Escape, And Meta Tricks

— Susam Pal

tl;dr: Various keyboard shortcuts and sequences related to control, escape, and meta keys in Unix / Linux terminals, this article covers: (1) Terminal tricks (2) Control codes. (3) Meta key sequences (4) Vim tricks.

Tips

How To Use GitHub Copilot: Prompts, Tips, And Use Cases

— Rizel Scarlett, Michelle Mannering

tl;dr: 3 best practices for prompt crafting with GitHub Copilot: (1) Set the stage with a high-level goal. (2) Make your ask simple and specific. Aim to receive a short output from GitHub Copilot. (3) Give GitHub Copilot an example or two.

GitHub AI

Coroutines Make Robot Code Easy

— Fred Herbert

tl;dr: Coroutines allow for the creation of sequential and reusable code blocks, making it easier to write and modify autonomous behaviors. Compared to using state machines and complex command systems, coroutines offer a more intuitive and procedural programming approach, benefiting both beginners and experienced programmers alike. The author encourages the adoption of coroutines as a powerful tool for simplifying and improving autonomous code.

Coroutines

Making Python 100x Faster With Less Than 100 Lines Of Rust

— Ohad Ravid

tl;dr: “Our system also has to work on-prem with limited CPU resources, and while at first it performed well, as the number of concurrent physical users grew we started running into problems and our system struggled to keep up with the load. We came to the conclusion that we had to make our system at least 50 times faster to handle the increased workload, and we figured that Rust could help us achieve that.”

Rust Python

Notable GitHub Repos

AI Getting Started: AI getting started stack for weekend projects.

Embedchain: Framework to easily create LLM powered bots over any dataset.

Mailpit: Email testing for developers

Try: Run a command, inspect its effects before changing your system.

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