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Issue #557
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 11th October’s issue is presented by AssemblyAI
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— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “For those of us with a collaborative leadership style, it’s important to have scripts you can realistically picture yourself saying.” Wes’ underlying rule is by mentioning the cost of going on a tangent, you remind them that the tangent is not free. She shares three different scripts to regain control of a meeting.
Leadership Management
— Phil Booth
tl;dr: “Because of all that evolutionary pressure, there are many little cues and behaviours embedded in our personalities, which help to make society work. The way we stand or sit, the way we speak, the direction we choose to look, what we do with our hands; these are all ways in which we project our status. Every interaction between people is filled with these little status transactions and most of the time we don't even realise it.” Phil discusses how this impacts engineering orgs and how to manage accordingly.
Leadership Management
— Kelsey Foster
tl;dr: The AI landscape has evolved rapidly, with a shift from basic automation to more sophisticated, conversational experiences. Read the inspiration behind Supernormal's latest product and more, some initial post-launch metrics, and what’s next for its AI products. Read the full story.
Promoted by AssemblyAI
AI UsefulTool
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “Writing forces me to structure my thoughts, test my ideas, and refine my arguments. It is a way of holding myself accountable to the discipline of thinking deeply. Writing clarifies the ambiguous, reveals the gaps in logic, and uncovers assumptions that might otherwise go unchallenged. This is particularly important in my role as a leader where decisions have far-reaching consequences. A well-articulated argument not only influences but also educates and inspires. Through writing, I can communicate complex ideas in a digestible format that can be revisited, scrutinized, and built upon.”
CareerAdvice
“Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success.”
— Alex Kladov
tl;dr: “An article about a couple of relatively recent additions to my workflow which I wish I knew about years ago: Split And Go To Definition. Go to definition is super useful. But often, when I use “goto def” I don’t actually mean to permanently go there. Rather, I want to stay where I am, but I need a bit more context about a particular thing at point. What I’ve found works really great in this context is to split the screen in two, and issue “go to def” in the split.” Alex shares an example.
Productivity
— Brian Morrison
tl;dr: In this guide, we demonstrate how you can build an environment that isolates tasks to specific teams, enabling developers to manage team-specific tasks efficiently. Using Clerk's Organizations and RBAC features and Neon's Postgres database, this setup is ideal for leaders looking to implement scalable and secure team management solutions.
Promoted by Clerk
Guide
— Thorsten Ball
tl;dr: “Time for me to pass on something I've been practicing for years but haven't found written down somewhere. It's a simple thing. A practical thing. Forged in the trenches. It won't win any contests in which the audience gasps and says "oh, now that is clever." But it’s easy. Simple even. And it can save a lot of time and tears and, at the end of the day, isn't that some of the best stuff? When debugging or testing your program, do not use data that looks like a variable or type name.”
BestPractices Data
— Renato Massaro
tl;dr: “When modeling a Postgres database, you probably don’t give much thought to the order of columns in your tables. After all, it seems like the kind of thing that wouldn’t affect storage or performance. But what if I told you that simply reordering your columns could reduce the size of your tables and indexes by 20%? This isn’t some obscure database trick — it’s a direct result of how Postgres aligns data on disk.”
PostgreSQL
tl;dr: Explore the interactive heatmap of total compensation pay ranges across the United States, organized by DMA regions and accompanied by a color-coded legend. Click into a region and uncover insights on salary percentiles, breakdown of total compensation components, and top paying companies.
Compensation
Notable Reading
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Notable Links
Gptme: AI assistant in the terminal.
Huly: All-in-one project management platform.
Jazz: Build apps with distributed state.
Ladybird: Truly independent web browser.
Rainfrog: Database management tui for postgres.
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