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- Issue #543
Issue #543
What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read
Friday 23rd August’s issue is presented by Clerk
Clerk offers everything you need to provide your users a secure experience, tailored to your needs:
Pre-Built components (Sign-up, Sign-in, User profile) streamline the authentication process, increasing developer velocity
Flexible authentication solutions: MFA, Social Sign-On, Magic Links, Passkeys, or Custom OAuth Providers
Polished user experience purpose built with developers and end-users in mind
Simplify complex organization and role-based management with multi-tenant support
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: Wes covers simple ways to derisk the following workplace scenarios:(1) Sharing an idea your colleagues might find controversial. (2) Giving constructive feedback to a direct report. (3) Testing your offer. (4) You made a mistake and need to tell your customer. (5) Troubleshooting a technical issue. (6) Giving feedback to a peer. And more.
— Kent Beck
tl;dr: “The enthusiasm-enhancing way to allocate people to tasks is to let the people allocate themselves. They have context, in the form of accountability and purpose and approximate proportions, but to preserve enthusiasm they must make their own decision. And a fired up engineer is five times (for some value of five) as valuable as that same engineer just putting in hours.”
— Grant Slatton
tl;dr: “I recently had a conversation with a distinguished tech CEO and engineer. I loved hearing his description of a software development methodology he's occasionally used, and it got me thinking about other heuristics and generalizations.” Grant discusses tactics to develop software effectively.
— Jake Zimmerman
tl;dr: The highest signal-to-noise software engineering interview I’ve seen goes like this: “Here’s a repo you’ve never seen before. Here’s how to build and run the tests in this repo. There’s a bug: what we’re observing is X, but we want to see Y instead. Find the bug and maybe even write some code to fix it.” Jake explains why he values the question.
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
— David Bendory
tl;dr: (1) Adopt the mindset of someone unfamiliar with the project to ensure simplicity. (2) Use self-contained comments to clearly convey intent without relying on the surrounding code for context. (3) Include only essential information in the comments and leverage external references to reduce cognitive load on the reader. (4) Avoid extensive implementation details in function-level comments.
— Brian Morrison
tl;dr: Managing permissions in large SaaS applications can be a nightmare. Providing team owners a way to grant functionality to users in a simplified way can be the difference between companies purchasing your software or going with a competitor. Clerk provides you with a way to build this functionality with minimal effort.
Promoted by Clerk
— Sarah Constantin
tl;dr: “But the most creative and interesting potential applications go beyond “doing things humans can already do, but cheaper” to do things that humans can’t do at all on comparable scale.” Sarah shares a list of app ideas.
— Tomer Aberbach
tl;dr: “The date was November 8, 2021 and I was a bug triager on the Google Docs team. That day began like any other. I made myself some coffee and started looking through bug reports from the day before. But then something caught my eye.”
— David Brownman
tl;dr: “The Keep a Changelog project offers some good high-level guidelines, but speaking as someone who is frequently frustrated by changelogs, it seems like more specific advice is in order. I've collected some simple tips and examples to ensure your changelogs are fit for human consumption.”
The 3 Motivational Forces Of Developers - Ben Northrop
Maestro: Netflix’s workflow orchestrator.
N8N: OS workflow automation tool.
Srcbook: TypeScript & JavaScript notebooks.
TruffleHog: Find leaked credentials.
UV: An extremely fast Python package and project manager.
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1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it