Issue #317

17 May 2022


Issue #317
Pointer.io
Tuesday 17th May's issue is presented by Stream

 
Did you know that the Stream Chat & Feeds APIs are free for qualifying small teams and personal dev projects?
 
A Recipe For Self-Improvement
- Paulo André
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: A formula to work on any aspect of your own self-improvement. All steps work in parallel, in a continuous loop. (1) Awareness: Being aware of a problem is not enough, you have to accept it, believe it is worth fixing, and now is the time. (2) Understanding: Asking and understanding why you act in this way. (3) Overcoming: realizing when and how your behavior is in conflict with your values and goals.
Why I Left Google: Work-Life Balance
- Scott Kennedy
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: "Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. One for career, a second for physical health, and a third for social and family life. At any point, one bucket might be running low. But as long as the overall water level is high enough, things should be fine," Scott discusses how the events in his life, in this context, guided him to leave Google.
Compose Chat Messaging Tutorial
#Guide #Management
 
tl;dr: Experience deeply customizable UI components powered by the Jetpack Compose framework, with built-in support for theming, right-to-left support, custom reactions, attachments, data formatting, and many more awesome features!

Promoted by Stream.
Moving The Finish Line
- Will Larson
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: "Executives are evaluated based on their perceived outcomes rather than actual outcomes." Will discusses this common issue and how it’s hard to force a poorly run company to become better run, but easy to make local improvements on your team. It’s a bit harder to allow those local improvements to spread organically. 

"Becoming a good engineer is about collecting experience. Each project, even small ones, is a chance to add new techniques and tools to your toolbox."

– Addy Osmani
 
Why Success Is Often Elusive At The Highest Echelons
- Cindy Sridharan
#Leadership #Management #CareerAdvice
 
tl;dr: "Many leaders mould the organization in their image or the image of the past workplace. Engineering leaders brought into embattled organizations tasked with stabilizing the chaos are often heavily incentivized to do this. Many a time these folks, in my experience, tend to fail harder and more often than those who try to learn the organizational ropes and tailor their leadership style to fit the organizational culture."
Airbnb’s Microservices Architecture Journey To Quality Engineering
- Antoine Craske
#Management #Architecture

tl;dr: Airbnb went through this process implementing the following practices: (1) Provide infrastructure as code to improve developer’s productivity. (2) Clarify ownership and improve with tooling & observability. (3) Define a new architecture supported by organization & methods. (4) Lead a deprecation working group to accelerate the migration. Antoine discusses how each was solved.
The Apple GPU And The Impossible Bug
- Alyssa Rosenzweig
#Apple #Debugging

tl;dr: Alyssa dives into the rabbit hole uncovered by reverse-engineering AGX to build open source graphics drivers. "The driver fails to render large amounts of geometry. Spinning a cube is fine, low polygon geometry is okay, but detailed models won’t render. Instead, the GPU renders only part of the model and then faults."
#Heroku #ThoughtPiece #Productivity
 
tl;dr: "If I didn't have something like Heroku in my life I doubt that my career would be the same or even I would be the same person I am today. It's really hard to describe what having access to a platform that lets you turn ideas into production quality code does to your output ability. " The author also worked on the product at Salesforce. "I ended up working there and when I did I understood why Heroku had fallen so much."
 
Notable GitHub Repos
Wireit
Upgrade npm scripts to be smarter & more efficient.
 
Bud
Full-stack web framework for Go. 
 
Awesome
Lists about all kinds of interesting topics. 
 
Now in Android
Functional Android app built with Kotlin & Jetpack Compose. 
 
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