/Management

Real-World Engineering Challenges #7: Choosing Technologies

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Gergely interprets the following software engineering or engineering management case studies from tech companies: (1) Trello choosing Kafka over RabbitMQ for messaging. (2) Why Birdie moved to Micro Frontends. (3) Why MetalBear settled on Rust. (4) Why Motive moved over to Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile.

featured in #371


Design + Build Any Chat Use Case

tl;dr: Build real-time chat messaging in less time. Rapidly ship in-app messaging with our highly reliable chat infrastructure and feature-rich SDKs. Improve your overall in-app conversion, engagement, and retention.

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11 Laws of Software Estimation for Complex Work

- Maarten Dalmijn tl;dr: (1) The work still takes the same amount of time regardless of the accuracy of your estimate. (2) No matter what you do, estimates can never be fully trusted. (3) Imposing estimates on others is a recipe for disaster. (4) Estimates become more reliable closer to the completion of the project. This is also when they are the least useful. (5) The more you worry about your estimates, the more certain you can be that you have bigger things you should be worrying about instead. And more.

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Focus On High-Leverage Activities

- Addy Osmani tl;dr: Leverage is impact produced divided by time invested. To increase your leverage, ask yourself the following before any activity: (1) What if this activity was simple? (decrease time cost). (2) What if this activity was huge? (increase value). (3) What else could I be doing? (opportunity cost).

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What Is Reverse ETL? The Definitive Guide

- Tejas Manohar tl;dr: Learn everything there is to know about Reverse ETL, how it fits into the modern data stack, and how you can start activating your warehouse data today.

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Why Most Monitoring Strategies Fail

- AbdulFattah Popoola tl;dr: "CAR stands for Customers, Applications, and Resources; it offers a solution to the monitoring disconnect by establishing the interactions between the three entities: the user, the application, and the underlying resources." AbdulFattah discusses how to use CAR, as well as outcomes, such as the identification of blind spots - detecting outages that would have gone unnoticed before. Exposure of long-hidden and long-standing flaws in the system, which in turn enables proper architectural fixes.

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How To Handle A Reorganization As An Engineering Manager

tl;dr: (1) Don’t tell your team about the reorg too early. (2) Learn the company’s goals for the reorg. (3) Share ideas and advocate for yourself and others. (4) Think about how your team is likely to react, and tailor your communication to account for that. (5) Don’t add to the drama.

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Visual Workflow Automation. Now With Code.

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.

featured in #369


No Architecture Is Better Than Bad Architecture

- Kirill Rogovoy tl;dr: "Turns out, architecting code-introducing granular concepts, abstractions, relationships, and giving all those things names, scopes, and responsibilities has a cost. On top of that, undoing such structures is 10 times more costly than building them."

featured in #369


12 Factor App Revisited

tl;dr: "The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a methodology for building software-as-a-service applications. We cover how they have since evolved, and what we can learn from them today and how they changed the status quo of yesteryear."

featured in #369