- Pointer
- Posts
- Issue #552
Issue #552
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 24th September’s issue is presented by WorkOS
WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS.
With modular and easy-to-use APIs, integrate complex features like SSO, SCIM, and FGA in minutes of months.
High-quality documentation and seamless onboarding for your users eliminate unnecessary complexity for your engineers.
User Management is also free up to 1 million MAUs and includes MFA, bot protection, RBAC, and more.
— Abi Noda
tl;dr: “To provide better insights, Google researchers identified the key goals developers are trying to achieve in their work and developed measurements for each goal. In this paper, they explain their process and share an example of how this new approach has benefited their teams.”
Leadership Management
— Aaron Swartz
tl;dr: “But if I had to write down what it is that makes someone seem smart, I’d emphasize three things. First, do they know stuff? Ask them what they’ve been thinking about and probe them about it. Do they seem to understand it in detail? Second, are they curious? Do they reciprocate by asking questions about you? Are they genuinely interested or just being polite? Third, do they learn? At some point in the conversation, you’ll probably be explaining something to them. Do they actually understand it or do they just nod and smile?”
Management Hiring
tl;dr: "Crossing the Enterprise Chasm" is an inevitable transition every B2B SaaS company has to make when they start selling to enterprises. Although it's a necessary step, moving upmarket is fraught with challenges — building enterprise features takes a ton of capital, it requires aggressive prioritizations, and engineers generally don't like building enterprise features. Here's a guide for product and engineering leaders on making their SaaS apps Enterprise Ready.
Promoted by WorkOS
Management Guide
— Andrew Bosworth
tl;dr: “Failures happen. In engineering we often face a choice between trying to eliminate failures or making our systems handle them more gracefully. Both approaches are important but in my experience fault tolerance is the more valuable. The reason is simple: we can only eliminate failures we can imagine while fault tolerance adds some resilience to failures we could not imagine. I have found the same to be true for groups of people.” Andrew discusses how to implement this in management.
Leadership Management
"Learning never exhausts the mind."
— John Allspaw
tl;dr: (1) The Aretha Franklin Principle: Emphasizes valuing both humans and machines in a system, aiming for synergy rather than competition. (2) The Sacagawea Principle: Stresses the importance of computational tools supporting active information management and decision-making processes. (3) The Lewis and Clark Principle: Highlights the need to present guidance to users in a way that aligns with their goals and facilitates comprehension of key decisions.
Process Management
tl;dr: We need your coding intellect! Join forces with thousands of developers worldwide and help us understand your needs and desires.Share your insights, and you will get instant access to the coolest virtual goody bag with curated freebies, discount codes and more! Plus, we’ll donate to charity on your behalf (SPCA, Child’s Play, and Code the Dream). Start Here!
Promoted by SlashData
Survey
— Daniel Bryant
tl;dr: “There’s typically a lot of agreement within the team around the best platform engineering books, but the ranking can be controversial! We’ve pooled together our collective top five recommendations for this blog post.”
Books
tl;dr: “In this post, we dive deep into how Netflix’s KV abstraction works, the architectural principles guiding its design, the challenges we faced in scaling diverse use cases, and the technical innovations that have allowed us to achieve the performance and reliability required by Netflix’s global operations.”
Architecture Data
— Austin Whyte
tl;dr: “zstandard has gained enough traction to become a viable replacement for zlib. Zstandard offers higher compression ratios and shorter compression times and supports dictionaries: a way to preemptively exchange information about compressed content, further increasing compression ratios and reducing the overall bandwidth usage.”
Scale Socket
Most Popular From Last Issue
How I Computer In 2024 - Jon Seager
Notable Links
Localstack: Fully functional local AWS cloud stack.
Sidekick: Bare metal to production ready in mins.
Scalar: OS devex platform for APIs.
Unstract: Develop necessary prompts for document data extraction.
Valkey: Flexible distributed key-value datastore.
Click the below and shoot me an email!
1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it