Issue #378

6 January 2023


Issue #378
Pointer.io
Tuesday 3rd January's issue is presented by Retool

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Measuring An Engineering Organization
- Will Larson
#Leadership #Management 

tl;dr: "There is no one solution to engineering measurement, rather there are many modes of engineering measurement, each of which is appropriate for a given scenario. Becoming an effective engineering executive is adding more approaches to your toolkit and remaining flexible about which to deploy for any given request." Will provides a template to work off of.
Which Meetings Should You Kill?
- Camille Fournier
#Leadership #Management

tl;dr: "I fear that the culprit is a surprising new factor, one that started before the pandemic but has gotten even more out of hand in the world of remote work: 1:1s." Camille discusses how group discussion topics have turned into 1:1 topics in the remote work era.
Build Internal Tools, Remarkably Fast
#Management #UsefulTool

tl;dr: You don't have to be a frontend expert to build beautiful apps. Retool provides a powerful platform to build your UI, connect your data, and publish your app in record time. With 100+ powerful UI components, you can write custom code nearly anywhere to customize how your apps look and work.

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There Is No Secure Software Supply-Chain
- John McBride
#OpenSource 

tl;dr: "The security of open source software is under threat and we’re running out of people to reliably maintain those projects. And as our stacks get deeper, our dependencies become more interlinked, leading to terrifying compromises in the secure software supply-chain. For a perfect example of what’s happening in the open source world right now, we don’t need to look much further than the extremely popular Gorilla toolkit for Go."
 
“If it is not written down, it does not exist.”

― Philippe Kruchten
 
Microfeatures I'd Like To See In More Languages
- Hillel Wayne
#ThoughtPiece #LanguageDesign

tl;dr: "Since I spend a lot of time in niche obscure languages, I also encounter a lot of cool QoL features that most people might not have seen before. Here’s a few of them!" Hillel discusses: (1) Number representations. (2) Balanced string literals. (3) Generalized update syntax. (4) The Chapel power hour. And more.
#ML #GPT3
 
tl;dr: "The dataset of 300 billion tokens of text is used to generate training examples for the model. For example, these are three training examples generated from the one sentence at the top. You can see how you can slide a window across all the text and make lots of examples."
A Guide To Fixing Developer Posture
- Gayle Laakmann McDowell
#Guide #CareerAdvice

tl;dr: "This post is about anterior pelvic tilt, the most common posture dysfunction... How do you know if you have an anterior pelvic tilt? Look at your belt. If you belt points towards the floor, you have an anterior pelvic tilt. Or, look sideways in the mirror. does your butt stick out? Chances are that you have an anterior pelvic tilt. I’m gonna break bad posture in 2 sections, lower body and upper body. The lower body influences the upper body, but upper body doesn’t always influence the lower body."
#Entertaining
 
tl;dr: "Because I’m not here to ridicule the lackluster sales of the Mach 20 hardware. I’m here to ridicule the lackluster sales of the Mach 20 software.... That leaves three customers who purchased a copy and didn’t return it. And the support specialist had personally spoken with two of them."
 
Recommended Reading
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Notable GitHub Repos
Burn
Complete deep learning framework with extreme flexibility written in Rust.
 
nanoGPT
The simplest, fastest repository for training / finetuning medium-sized GPTs.
 
Microfeed
Lightweight cms self-hosted on cloudflare.
 
Score
Platform-agnostic, container-based workload specification.
 
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