/Management

Our Cloud Spend In 2022

- Fernando Álvarez tl;dr: "Getting this massive spend down to just $3.2 million has taken a ton of work. The ops team runs a vigilant cost-inspection program, with monthly reporting and tracking, and we’ve entered into long-term agreements on Reserved Instances and committed usage, as part of a Private Pricing Agreement. This is a highly-optimized budget.""This post will cover why I went through the effort of creating a Python SQL engine and how a simple query goes from a string to actually transforming data." Toby covers tokenizing, parsing, optimizing, planning and executing.

featured in #381

What Is A Product Engineer (And Why They're Awesome)

- Ian Vanagas tl;dr: "In this post, we define the role of a product engineer, break down the characteristics of the role, go over their skills, and finally figure out why they matter. We base this information on industry research, and job posts from top startups hiring product engineers, which we quote throughout."

featured in #380

Architecture Diagrams Should Be Code

- Brian McKenna tl;dr: "Architecture code can be versioned with the code which implements it. We can write algorithms to check our architecture. I’d like to see more tools available to describe architecture as part of code, allowing us to generate as many diagrams as we want, for accurate and easy communication."

featured in #380

Developers Are Already Responsible For Code Quality. Don't Add Blackbox E2E Tests To Their Backlog Too.

- Kirk Nathanson tl;dr: Should developers manage end-to-end tests? No. In this post we explain why effective teams offload blackbox end-to-end tests to dedicated experts.

featured in #379

Measuring An Engineering Organization

- Will Larson tl;dr: "There is no one solution to engineering measurement, rather there are many modes of engineering measurement, each of which is appropriate for a given scenario. Becoming an effective engineering executive is adding more approaches to your toolkit and remaining flexible about which to deploy for any given request." Will provides a template to work off of.

featured in #378

Which Meetings Should You Kill?

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: "I fear that the culprit is a surprising new factor, one that started before the pandemic but has gotten even more out of hand in the world of remote work: 1:1s." Camille discusses how group discussion topics have turned into 1:1 topics in the remote work era.

featured in #378

Build Internal Tools, Remarkably Fast

tl;dr: You don't have to be a frontend expert to build beautiful apps. Retool provides a powerful platform to build your UI, connect your data, and publish your app in record time. With 100+ powerful UI components, you can write custom code nearly anywhere to customize how your apps look and work.

featured in #378

Code Ownership And Software Quality

- Abi Noda tl;dr: "Ownership is negatively correlated with the number of bugs, and the more shared the file ownership the higher the likelihood that it will contain code defects. This trend is also supported by the fact that for all projects studied, the number of contributors is positively correlated with the number of bugs." Abi provides 4 management recommendations.

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5 Ways To Increase Velocity By Removing The Bottlenecks  In Your QA Process

- Kirk Nathanson tl;dr: With a recession looming and many companies freezing their hiring plans, savvy teams can look at other levers to increase velocity and improve product quality. Here are five cost-effective changes you can make.

featured in #377

OKRs Are Hard

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: "In this post, I decided to write down my definition of what a good OKR looks like. My thinking has evolved from what I first learned long ago in half-remembered talks, blog posts, and books, and is now based on my experience using them to set team goals over the past ten or so years."

featured in #376