Issue #375

16 December 2022


Issue #375
Pointer.io
Friday 16th December's issue is presented by Retool

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From BigCo To Startup: 20 Tips For Evaluating Early-Stage Companies & Making The Leap
#CareerAdvice

tl;dr: Broken down into 3 categories. Tips for: (1) Assessing a startup’s trajectory. (2) Assessing your fit with the role and the team. (3) Assessing your startup readiness & shifting to a scrappier startup mindset.
The GPT-3 Architecture, On A Napkin
- Daniel Dugas
#Architecture #GPT3

tl;dr: "There are so many brilliant posts on GPT-3, demonstrating what it can do, pondering its consequences, vizualizing how it works. With all these out there, it still took a crawl through several papers and blogs before I was confident that I had grasped the architecture. So the goal for this page is humble, but simple: help others build an as detailed as possible understanding of the GPT-3 architecture."
Visual Workflow Automation. Now With Code
#UsefulTool #Management

tl;dr: Build powerful automations fast, with all the hackability you’d expect as a developer. Stop provisioning infrastructure and maintaining one-off scripts. Build and automate cron jobs, custom alerts, and ETL tasks 10x faster with Retool Workflows.

Promoted by Retool
A Debugging Manifesto
- Julia Evans
#Debugging #CareerAdvice
 
tl;dr: Julia discusses the attitude and approach to take when debugging, explaining the following: (1) Inspect, don’t squash. (2) Being stuck is temporary. (3) Trust nobody and nothing. (4) It’s probably your code. (5) Don’t go it alone. (6) There’s always a reason. (7) Build your toolkit. (8) It can be an adventure.

“Amateurs only study successful projects, professionals study failures.”

― Larrie D. Ferreiro"
 
Just Use Postgres For Everything
- Stephan Schmidt
#PostgreSQL #Management

tl;dr: "One way to simplify your stack and reduce the moving parts, speed up development, lower the risk and deliver more features in your startup is “Use Postgres for everything”. Postgres can replace - up to millions of users - many backend technologies, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Mongo and Redis among them." Stephan gives explicit examples how.
How I Found a Bug In SQLite
- Philip O'Toole
#SQLite

tl;dr: "How could the disk image be corrupted? I put it down to re-use of an error code within SQLite, which is a fairly common practice in programming generally. But then I made the real mistake. I didn’t take the error seriously enough and decided it was probably something transient, never to be seen again."
IDN Is Crazy
- Daniel Stenberg
#IDN

tl;dr: "IDN, International Domain Names, is the concept that lets us register and use international characters in domain names, and by international we of course mean characters outside of the ASCII range. Recently I have fought some battles against IDN and IDN decoding so I felt this urge to write a lot of words about it to help me in my healing process and maybe mend my scars a little. I am not sure it worked but at least I feel a little better now."
When To Use gRPC vs GraphQL
- Loren Sands-Ramshaw
#API
 
tl;dr: "I’ve read a lot of comparisons of these two protocols and wanted to write one that is comprehensive and impartial... I was inspired by the release of connect-web (a TypeScript gRPC client that can be used in the browser) and a popular HN post entitled GraphQL kinda sucks." Loren writes a thorough comparison. 
 
Notable GitHub Repos
OSV-Scanner
Find vulnerabilities affecting a project's dependencies.
 
Hydra
The open source Snowflake alternative. OLAP Postgres.
 
 
Stc
Speedy TypeScript type checker.
 
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