Issue #409

Friday 28th April's issue is presented by Teleport

DevOps practices have revolutionized how apps and infrastructure are managed, but access hasn't kept up. Shared secrets like passwords and keys – the #1 source of data breaches – are the norm.

Teleport replaces shared secrets like passwords, keys, tokens, and even browser cookies with true identity, removing risk while letting engineers go fast.

Unify Access To All Of Your Infrastructure

The Case Against Measuring Cycle Time

- Abi Noda

tl;dr: “There are cases in which individual teams may find cycle time useful. However, using cycle time as a top-level performance measure that is pushed onto all teams is counterproductive. To actually improve performance, leaders should focus on measuring the friction experienced by developers and removing the bottlenecks that slow them down.”

Leadership Management

Engineering Maturity Model

- Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “It’s all about layering. The reason I can build a house is because I know what goes first, second, third, and fourth…” I think this is the same thing with great engineering organizations, it’s all about layering, knowing what goes first, second, third, and fourth.” Mike defines and describes these layers.

Leadership Management

How Passwordless Works

— Alan Parra

tl;dr: This post explains how passwordless can be implemented using modern technologies such as WebAuthn, while at the same time providing a better user experience and security than the traditional password-based approach.

Promoted by Teleport

Management Security

Uber’s Engineering Level Changes

- Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: “Uber addressed this inconsistency in levels by updating engineering levels to be more in-line with the rest of the industry. The company pretty much renamed senior 2 engineer as staff engineer, and updated the titles from L6. They also added a new level 9.”

Leadership Management

“A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.”

— Alan Perlis

Using ChatGPT As A Technical Writing Assistant

— Mike Mason

tl;dr: An experienced technical author explores using ChatGPT to assist with a number of writing projects. He finds ChatGPT can provide time-savings through drafts and prompting for additional content, but lacks accuracy and depth - as well as suffering from bubbly optimism. Overall it is useful if you work iteratively, asking for small chunks with well-crafted prompts.

CareerAdvice

Factors To Consider In Database Selection

- Alex Xu

tl;dr: Alex examines key factors that influence the decision-making process of database selection such as scalability, performance, data consistency.

Database

Sources Of Complexity: Constraints

- Hillel Wayne

tl;dr: “While people like coming up with grand theories of complexity, there’s very little info out there on the nitty-gritty specific sources of complexity… I think a lot about the different sources of complexity. This article is about one particular source.”

CareerAdvice

Nine Ways To Shoot Yourself In The Foot With PostgreSQL

- Phil Booth

tl;dr: (1) Keep the default value for work_mem. (2) Push application logic into Postgres functions and procedures. (3) Use lots of triggers. (4) Use NOTIFY heavily. And more.

PostgreSQL

Notable GitHub Repos

Buzz: Transcribe and translate audio offline.

Killport: CL utility for killing processes listening on specific ports.

PyScript: Create rich Python applications in the browser.

RedPajama-Data: Preparing large datasets for training LLMs.

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