Issue #565

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

Tuesday 12th November’s issue is presented by Superblocks

Superblocks enables dev teams to outpace their roadmap by making internal app development lightweight and low-effort. Superblocks provides:

— Laura Tacho

tl;dr: (1) Dismissing intuition. (2) Data-driven theater. (3) Trying to be smart instead of making other people smart. (4) Not utilizing experts soon enough. (5) Not realizing that I’m not an engineering leader.

Leadership Management

— Jordan Cutler, Wes Kao

tl;dr: Wes and Jordan discuss the following frameworks: (1) Reduce cognitive load using phrases like “For example”, “Action Items”, “Action Needed”, “Next Steps,” etc... (2) MP-CB: Main point, context below. (3) Anticipate the objection. (4) CEDAF for delegating tasks. (5) QBQ: Question behind the question. 

CareerAdvice

tl;dr: Selecting a component library that looks good is easy - choosing one that sets your team up for success 3-4 months down the road is trickier. Our team prefers Radix and Chakra for their baked-in accessibility and extensibility, but other frameworks like MUI, Shadcn, and Blueprint are great options if you're looking to do less work upfront or have a more specialized use case. 

Promoted by Superblocks

ReactJS

— Lee Byron

tl;dr: “This is classic advice when operating in a large organization. There’s a problem to be solved, you have a bold solution in mind and everything necessary to take action, but there will be very real costs felt broadly. You think the tradeoff is worth it, but will your team or higher-ups agree?”

Leadership Management

“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.”

–  Robert Stevenson

tl;dr: “Data is the biggest reason software only moves forward. Once you save state, your code will need to understand that state forever. This is double true for state that leaves your system and becomes distributed. Billing state, emails, and async jobs are a common early introduction to these issues.”

Data

— 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

Management Guide

— Josh Doody

tl;dr: “Your salary expectations are one of the few things you know that the company doesn’t. That makes them extremely valuable and sharing them can make your salary negotiations very difficult and even cost you a lot of money.”

InterviewAdvice

— Julia Evans

tl;dr: “Here’s a table of all 33 ASCII control characters, and what they do on my machine (on Mac OS), more or less. There are about a million caveats, but I’ll talk about what it means and all the problems with this diagram that I know about.

ASCII

— Alex Fattouche, Corey Horton

tl;dr: “When initially measured in 2022, DNS data took up approximately 40% of the storage capacity in Cloudflare’s main database cluster (cfdb). This database cluster, consisting of a primary system and multiple replicas, is responsible for storing DNS zones, propagated to our data centers in over 330 cities via our distributed KV store.” 

Database Migration

How To Become A More Effective Engineer — Gergely Orosz, Cindy Sridharan

AI-Chatbot: Hackable AI chatbot built by Vercel.

BemiDB: Postgres read replica optimized for analytics. 

Docling: Get documents ready for Gen AI.

IronCalc: Set of tools to work with spreadsheets.

Maxun: OS no-code web data extraction platform.


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