Issue #403

Friday 7th April's issue is presented by PostHog

PostHog's open source suite of product tools now includes performance monitoring in session recordings - see not only what your users are doing, but also how long each action takes!

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Be A Thermostat, Not A Thermometer

- Lara Hogan

tl;dr: We are easily influenced by the mood of those around us — “one person’s behavior change can cause others to change their behavior,” and by setting the whole temperature for the room, they’re being a thermostat. As leaders, Lara advises us to pick up on these negative mood changes early and become the person that sets the the new temperature of the room in a positive and healthy way. She illustrates how to do so here.

Leadership Management

Accountability Is Not Blame

- Kent Beck

tl;dr: Blame is the opposite of responsibility — it’s someone with power pushing consequences away from themselves & onto someone with less power. The word “accountable” is often used as a proxy for “blame” - it’s not a relationship building strategy but used as a “relationship decaying” strategy. Kent discusses how this shows up amongst management.

Leadership Management

Why We Use GitHub As Our CMS

- Ian Vanagas

tl;dr: Ian explains the following 3 reasons in detail: (1) GitHub enables transparency and open contributions, values that are core to the company. (2) Github has most of the necessary tools for content workflows and Ian illustrates PostHog’s workflow here. (3) GitHub keeps the company engineering-focused.

Promoted by PostHog

Management GitHub TechStack

System Design Interview Cheat Sheet

tl;dr: “The system design questions are subjective. This cheat sheet is a work in progress and is written based on my research on the topic.” Topics include databases, API design, capacity planning, high level design, design deep dives, and more.

Tips InterviewAdvice SystemDesign

“You don’t win a race by trying not to lose.”

- Chad Fowler

Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

tl;dr: Twitter recommendation algorithm distills roughly 500 million tweets posted daily down to a handful of top tweets that show up on your device’s, specifically for you. This blog is an introduction to how the algorithm works.

Scale ML Algo

JSON vs XML

- Douglas Crockford

tl;dr: A podcast interview in which Douglas shares the story of JSON and his approach to finding a simple way to build software. Also, his battles against XML, against complexity, and his battles to say that there’s a better way to build software.

JSON XML Audio

Clocks And Causality - Ordering Events In Distributed Systems

- Giridhar Manepalli

tl;dr: In distributed systems, logical clocks play a key role in the ordering of system events. What are the various logical clock designs, and how do they help with event ordering? This article answers these questions.

DistributedSystem

How To Be A -10x Engineer

tl;dr: "To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:” (1) Nullify the output of 10 engineers. (2) Create 400 hours of busywork. (3) Create 400 hours of burnout or turnover. And more.

Entertaining

Notable GitHub Repos

Trurl: CL tool for URL parsing and manipulation.

Hocus: Disposable development environments on your own servers.

JARVIS: Interface to connect AI models for solving complicated tasks.

Auto-GPT: Experimental attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous

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