Issue #494

Tuesday 5th March’s issue is presented by FusionAuth

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Parkinson's Law: It's Real, So Use It

— James Stanier

tl;dr: “When you are asking people to do something, lead with a recommendation of when it should be done by. Be explicit about this, but open to negotiation. It's such a simple technique, but when you compound its usage over a year at a big company, you will be amazed at the difference it makes.” Parkinson's Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" and, by setting aggressive deadlines, James discusses how leaders can leverage it. 

Leadership Management

68 Bits Of Unsolicited Advice

— Kevin Kelly

tl;dr: (1) Learn how to learn from those who disagree with you or even offend you. See if you can find truth in what they believe. (2). Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points. (3). Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary and it prevents you from trying to make it perfect so you have to make it different. Different is much better. (4). Don't be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of that same question and is too embarrassed to ask it. (5). Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love, keep asking them “Is there more?” until there is no more.

CareerAdvice

Why Passkeys Improve User Security & How To Implement Them

— Dan Moore

tl;dr: When developing an API, safeguarding it is crucial. Consider the choice between employing a centralized API key verification system or opting for a decentralized approach. The centralized method necessitates ongoing communication among API key consumers, API-serving systems, and the central authority responsible for issuing API keys, all aimed at verifying the keys' validity.

Promoted by FusionAuth

Management UsefulTool

5 Lessons I Learned The Hard Way From 6 Years As A Software Engineer

— Jordan Cutler

tl;dr: (1) Bring solutions, not problems. Focus on showing how you are there to support the team that needs the help. (2) Clean code isn’t the end goal. Collaborating effectively with your team is more important. (3) Team outcomes are greater than individual outcomes. What you spend your time on should be directly correlated with what will bring impact for the team. (4) Adapt to your manager. Understand how to adapt to your manager’s style and goals to see the best collective outcomes. (5) Influence isn’t about wording. Focus on building relationships with a foundation of trust. 

Leadership Management

“Good features and ideas that do not integrate with a system’s basic concepts are best left out”

— Fred Brooks

How LinkedIn Serves 5 Million User Profiles Per Second

tl;dr: The author covers: (1) Why LinkedIn switched to Espresso, a document-oriented database. (2) Scalability issues with Espresso. (3) Introduction to Couchbase. (4) How LinkedIn incorporated Couchbase as a caching layer. (5) Caching layer design principles. 

Architecture

Start Your Journey At Authorization Academy

tl;dr: Authorization Academy is a series of (free) technical guides for building application authorization. Learn about RBAC, ReBAC, authorization enforcement, and authorization in microservices 

Promoted by Oso

Guide

"Help, I See A Problem And No One Is Prioritizing It!"

— Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya

tl;dr: “It feels like I'm the only one with glasses on! Getting a handle on this situation is a really important skill and there are a few good techniques for it. There's also a meta-problem here which you need to learn to handle if you want to enter leadership roles.” Nicole discusses how to approach this situation with your manager, potentially reconcile perspectives with them, and lean on peers.  

CareerAdvice

My Favourite Data Structure: The Trie

tl;dr: “The trie is a deeply nested tree. The structure is commonly used for predictive text engines because you can represent all strings as a tree. Then, you can use word probabilities to decide on what word you should recommend. This could be done by using a reference corpus of millions of words from English publications to identify how common different words are.” James illustrates how a trie works. 

DataStructure

The One Billion Row Challenge In Go: From 1m 45s To 4s In Nine Solutions

— Ben Hoyt

tl;dr: “This article describes the nine solutions I wrote in Go, each faster than the previous. The first, a simple and idiomatic solution, runs in 1 minute 45 seconds on my machine, while the last one runs in about 4 seconds. As I go, I’ll show how I used Go’s profiler to see where the time was being spent.”

Optimization Go

Notable Links

AI For Beginners: Microsoft's 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum.

Continue: OS autopilot for VS Code and JetBrain.

Daft: Distributed dataframes for multimodal data.

Screenshot-To-Code: Drop in a screenshot and convert it to clean code.

Vercel AI SDK: Library for AI-powered streaming text and chat UIs.

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