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Issue #550
What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read
Tuesday 17th September’s issue is presented by Speakeasy
Breaking changes create a support nightmare and undermine trust in your APIs. But creating comprehensive test suites is prohibitively time consuming.
Now Speakeasy automates API contract testing. We'll generate test suites that run as part of your API release process, checking for new version compatibility with past API versions. With Speakeasy you can develop quickly, with confidence.
— John Allspaw
tl;dr: 13 characteristics of senior engineers: (1) They seek out constructive criticism of their designs. (2) Understand the non-technical areas of how they are perceived. (3) Do not shy away from making estimates and are always trying to get better at it. (4) Have an innate sense of anticipation, even if they don't know they do. (5) Understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work.
CareerAdvice
— Eliran Turgeman
tl;dr: “The core message is that you shouldn’t just go with the first design that comes to mind. Instead, come up with at least two different designs even if you have to force yourself. No matter how confident you are, you’ll make better decisions when you compare options side by side.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: API design is important, yet it is only useful if it's well-documented and consistently represented across every API surface area (docs, SDKs, etc.). OpenAPI gives you greater visibility into your API, enabling you to unify all aspects of errors, responses, and parameters, ensuring consistency. This open-source documentation project will help you understand the OpenAPI Specification.
Promoted by Speakeasy
API
— Will Larson
tl;dr: “Even as popular sentiment has generally turned away from microservices, many engineering organizations have a bit of both, often the reminents of one or more earlier but incomplete migration efforts. This strategy looks at a theoretical organization stuck with a bit of both approaches, let’s call it Theoretical Compliance Company, which is looking to determine its path forward.”
Architecture Monolith
“Plans are worthless. Planning is essential.”
— Matt Lacey
tl;dr: (1) Because the issue was reported with a vague description of how to recreate it. (2) Because the reported issue was related to functionality, I'm not familiar with. (3) Because I took the time to investigate the real cause of the issue, not just looking at the symptoms. (4) Because I investigated if there were other ways of getting to the same problem, not just the reported reproduction steps.
CareerAdvice
— John-Daniel Trask
tl;dr: Instead of getting caught up in the fear or the hype of AI, let’s have a grounded conversation. At Raygun they’re cutting through the noise with a clear, evidence-based look at the real potential of this technology.
Promoted by Raygun
AI
— Benjamin Dicken
tl;dr: “Large databases often have a small number of very large tables that makes scaling difficult. How can you scale with these while keeping your database performant? This article covers vertical scaling, vertical sharding and horizontal sharding.”
Database
— Alex Kladov
tl;dr: “This post describes my current approach to testing. When I started programming professionally, I knew how to write good code, but good tests remained a mystery for a long time. This is not due to the lack of advice — on the contrary, there’s abundance of information & terminology about testing.”
Tests
— Julia Evans
tl;dr: “I wrote about how much I love fish in this blog post from 2017 and, 7 years of using it every day later, I’ve found even more reasons to love it. So I thought I’d write a new post with both the old reasons I loved it and some reasons.”
Shell
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
Conform: Form validation library.
ERPNext: ERP made simple.
Linutil: Simplify Linux tasks.
OS Pledge: Share commitment to pay maintainers of OS.
Top 20: RedMonk top 20 languages over time.
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1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it