Issue #412

Tuesday 9th May’s issue is presented by Postman

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Measuring Flow And Focus

- Abi Noda

tl;dr: Based on a study with Google engineers, the best predictor of flow is “focus time:” performing a number of similar actions in a given window of time. Researchers also identified 3 practices for facilitating flow: (1) Schedule management. (2) Goal setting so engineers are working on tasks that feel fulfilling. (3) Giving time to “get into flow.”

Leadership Management Productivity

Interviewing Engineering Executives

- Will Larson

tl;dr: The topics that Will explores are: (1) Avoiding the unicorn search. (2) How interviewing executives goes wrong. (3) Structuring your evaluation process. (4) Focusing on four areas to evaluate engineering executives.

Leadership Management

Benefits Of API Collaboration In An API-First World

tl;dr: Collaboration is the key to successful API development. Whether it's working with internal teams or external partners, effective collaboration can help teams work faster, smarter, and with fewer errors. In this article, we explore the best practices for API collaboration and offer tips for working more effectively across the entire API lifecycle.

Promoted by Postman

Leadership Management API

Back Of The Envelope

tl;dr: “The back of the envelope calculation is commonly used to evaluate different architectural designs. Although the optimal design depends on the system requirements, the back of the envelope calculation provides an opportunity to compare different architectural designs without prototyping.”

CareerAdvice Architecture InterviewAdvice

“If you’re afraid to change something it is clearly poorly designed.”

— Martin Fowler

Scaling Up The Prime Video Audio / Video Monitoring Service And Reducing Costs By 90%

- Marcin Kolny

tl;dr: “To ensure that customers seamlessly receive content, Prime Video set up a tool to monitor every stream viewed by customers. This tool allows us to automatically identify perceptual quality issues and trigger a process to fix them.” Marcin discusses how the service’s architecture.

Architecture Scale

What Is A URL

— Azeem Bande-Ali 

tl;dr: Azeem covers how different systems handle the same URLs differently, and the security risks caused by those inconsistencies.

Security URL

Uptime Guarantees — A Pragmatic Perspective

— Itzy Sabo

tl;dr: “The cost of building and operating a system in a way that guarantees 99.99% uptime is several times as expensive as 99.5%. This is in terms of system complexity, the number of engineers required, their specialisations, experience levels, and corresponding salaries, as well as significantly increased operational costs and arrangements.”

Performance Management

ChatGPT Prompt Engineering For Developers

— Mike Fish

tl;dr: “You will learn how to use a large language model (LLM) to quickly build new and powerful applications. Using the OpenAI API, you’ll be able to quickly build capabilities that learn to innovate and create value in ways that were cost-prohibitive, highly technical, or simply impossible before now.”

UsefulTools

Notable GitHub Repos

Appsmith: OS platform to build, deploy, and maintain internal apps.

Atuin: Magical shell history.

Open LLMs: A list of open LLMs available for commercial use.

Qdrant: Vector DB for next-gen AI applications. 

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