Issue #266

5 November 2021


Issue #266
Pointer.io


Friday 5th November's issue is presented by Stream
The Engineer’s Guide to Career Growth - Advice from My Time at Stripe and Facebook
- Raylene Yung 
#CareerAdvice
 
tl;dr: Critical for building a career as an engineer: (1) Strive to be the most valuable, but least critical i.e. you shouldn't be the point of failure. (2) Maintain an emotional equilibrium, especially as the larger your team gets, the greater the ups and downs. (3) Focus on growth and learning at every step — not on climbing the ladder. Raylene also provides advice for various roles i.e. junior engineers, ICs, tech leads, and more. 
#Leadership #Management
 
tl;dr: This article covers management planning breaking them down into the following: vision, reality, decisions, the plan & accountability, and execution preparedness. Starts with the goals of planning, such as: (1) Focus on the right global priorities. (2) Ensure clear ownership. (3) Coordination across shared workstreams. (4) High shipping velocity. 
Building vs. Buying In-App Chat: The Ultimate Guide to Weighing Cost, Risk, & Other Product Roadmap Decisions
#Management

tl;dr: Don’t waste months building in-app messaging from scratch. Today’s sharpest PMs are buying software components instead of building them to focus their engineering resources. Stream’s Chat APIs & SDKs provide the solid infrastructure you need to scale.

Promoted by Stream.
Complexity Is Killing Software Developers
- Scott Carey
#ThoughtPiece #IndustryTrend

tl;dr: "The explosion of choice and the pace of development make it challenging for developers to keep up with the zeitgeist, with many developers getting caught in the headlights.” The movement towards microservices and a rapid increase in business demands have created more complexity and burden for developers.
A Note From Stream

Free Activity Feeds & Chat APIs for Qualifying Teams. Stream’s scalable APIs & SDKs come with all the building blocks to ship a custom messaging or activity feed experience that rivals leading social platforms.
 
 
Developer Tools Secrets That Shouldn’t Be Secrets
- Christian Heilmann
#DeveloperTools

tl;dr: (1) Console is much more than "log()." (2) You can log without source access – live expressions and logpoints. (3) You can log outside the browser – VS Code debugger. (4) You can inject code into any site – snippets and overrides, and more.
An Oral History Of Bank Python
- Cal Paterson
#Python

tl;dr: "A look at a group of software systems not well known to the public, which I call "Bank Python". Bank Python implementations are effectively proprietary forks of the entire Python ecosystem which are in use at many (but not all) of the biggest investment banks. Bank Python differs considerably from the common, or garden-variety Python that most people know and love (or hate)."
How To Design A Good API And Why It Matters
- Preslav Mihaylov
#API
 
tl;dr: Based on a 2007 talk, this post covers why APIs matter, the process of design, general principles, and briefly bullets out class, method and exception designs. 
#RemoteWork
 
tl;dr: Horatio was responsible for the products and infrastructure powering voice / video calling across FB Messenger and Instagram. Here he discusses some of the protocols that go into audio and video calling.
 
Notable GitHub Repos
Arco
A comprehensive React UI components library.
 
MangoDB
A truly Open Source MongoDB alternative.
 
Trojan Source
Invisible Vulnerabilities.


 
Toxiproxy
A TCP proxy to simulate network and system conditions for chaos and resiliency testing.
 
Pointer.io
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