Issue #567

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

November 19th, 2024

Tuesday 19th November’s issue is presented by Knock

Building product notifications gets complicated fast. Knock abstracts away the complexity and gives you:

— Ted Neward

tl;dr: Ted shares his answer to the following interview question: "You're the tech lead and your team is getting stretched thin. You decide to add resources but you can afford 1 senior full-stack developer or 2 junior full-stack devs. Which do you choose and why?" 

InterviewAdvice Management

— Joe Lonsdale

tl;dr: “These lessons summarize what Joe Lonsdale learned from working over many years with Peter Thiel, a chairman and founder of Palantir. These are very much worth reading — they will change the way you think.”

CareerAdvice

— Chris Bell

tl;dr: “If you opened this blog post, you’re probably about to wade into the complicated ecosystem of notification and customer engagement tooling. It can feel like a daunting task. Not to fear, in this post we’re here to walk you through the basics of notification systems and the ecosystem of tools, frameworks, and vendors that surround them.”

Promoted by Knock

Guide Management

— Will Larson

tl;dr: “The solution here is obvious, always make sure you agree on the problem and general solution, and provide evidence the team is working well. These can be an appendix of a document or appendix slides, and should take little to no time to prepare as the first two are core decisions for your team, and the later is a set of metrics or plans that you should already be maintaining as part of operating your team.”

Leadership Management

“I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals and I try to ignore the rest.”

–  Venus Williams

— Saira Khanum

tl;dr: “We’ve found the Producer-Consumer pattern to be exceptionally effective in reaching these goals. This pattern has been successfully implemented in several of our core infrastructure systems, including the distributed server query system, server console monitoring, and network security monitoring. In this process, we have identified and built general solutions that are repeatable in similar environments, greatly improving engineering efficiency by leveraging proven methodologies.”

Design Infrastructure

tl;dr: Data on metrics like revenue, employee turnover, and job satisfaction provide crucial insights into efficiency, quality, and direction. But they don’t capture if your engineers are feeling overworked, underappreciated, or unmotivated. Access the Ultimate DevEx Playbook for insights and best practices from Jellyfish and AWS so you can get closer to a better developer experience now.

Promoted by Jellyfish

Guide DevEx

— Evan Schwartz

tl;dr: “Vector embeddings by themselves are pretty neat. Binary quantized vector embeddings are extra impressive. In short, they can retain 95+% retrieval accuracy with 32x compression and ~25x retrieval speedup. Let's get into how this works and why it's so crazy.”

Embeddings

— Scott Ringwelski

tl;dr: “Not because anyone is being rude, or because anything they are saying is necessarily wrong. Nobody is being intentionally malice, here. It’s that (in my opinion) the word “just” added as a qualifier to an idea carries with it a whole bunch of implied baggage.”

CareerAdvice

How We Built A Self-Healing System To Survive A Terrifying Concurrency Bug At Netflix

— Matthew Hawthorne

tl;dr: “It was a Friday afternoon, and I heard a lot of commotion. I emerged from my cubicle to see my colleagues passionately discussing a problem: our CPU usage was slowly growing across our cluster.”

SystemDesign

Bbot: Recursive internet scanner for hackers.

Fast-Grid: World's most performant web table.

HyperDX: OS observability platform.

SQL Style Guide: Ensure legible and maintainable projects.

WebVM: Virtual machine for the web.


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