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- Issue #572
Issue #572
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 6th December’s issue is presented by Knock
Building product notifications gets complicated fast. Knock abstracts away the complexity and gives you:
A single api to send multi-channel notifications (email, slack, in-app, etc).
Embeddable UIs to ship in-app feeds and inboxes quickly while keeping your design on brand.
Observability and analytics about message and user behavior, delivered to any tool of your choice (Datadog, etc).
— Jacob Kaplan-Moss
tl;dr: “How risky is this vulnerability? How dangerous is it to launch this new feature if it hasn’t gotten a proper security review yet? How much risk is left after we do that review?” So welcome to a new series about how to think about risk. This series is a crash course, a high-level introduction to the most important concepts and risk frameworks. It’s intended for people who encounter risk from time to time and need some basic tools, but don’t want to make a deep study of it.
Leadership Management
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “Creating a new position for yourself — one that doesn't yet exist — sounds too good to be true. But many of us have done it, and I’ve personally done it multiple times. I want to share a few ideas that will help you do it too.”
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
Management Guide
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “Why do engineers get mad at each other so often? I think a lot of programmer arguments bottom out in a cultural clash between different kinds of engineers: believers vs grifters, or coasters vs grinders. I’m going to argue that good companies actually have a healthy mix of all four types of engineer, so it’s probably sensible to figure out how to work with them.”
Leadership Management
“If it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it.”
— Kiran Prakash
tl;dr: “Working backwards from the end goal is a core principle of software development, and we’ve found it to be highly effective in modelling data products. In this article we'll explore a step-by-step, methodical approach to identifying data products that avoids overdesign while providing just enough clarity for teams to begin implementation.”
Design Data
tl;dr: Ever wished you could dub videos as easily as you translate text? Rask AI's new API handles everything – transcription, translation, dubbing, and even lip-syncing – in a single integration. Tech teams love how simple it is! Want to see it in action? Book a demo this week and grab a $500 welcome bonus, exclusively for Pointer readers. Check out the docs or get your free demo! See Rask AI in action.
Promoted by Rask AI
UsefulTool Video
— Mac Chaffee
tl;dr: “As someone who has built a career on Kubernetes, I'm always thinking about what "the next platform" is for job security purposes. By "platform", I mean the kind that platform engineers like myself build for internal dev teams on which to run their applications.” Mac shares a rough list of problems with Kubernetes - based platforms and a list of requirements for "the next platform.
Platform
— Phil Booth
tl;dr: “Concurrency diagrams are very simple and usually quick to create. They force you to put your assumptions in front of everyone to see, including yourself. Sometimes the act of creating a concurrency diagram can change your own mind about how different parts of a system should be sequenced. All you need are boxes, arrows and text.”
Concurrency
tl;dr: “To facilitate rapid iteration and experimentation of LLMs at Uber, there was a need for centralization to seamlessly construct prompt templates, manage them, and execute them against various underlying LLMs to take advantage of LLM support tasks. To meet these needs, we built a prompt engineering toolkit that offers standard strategies that encourage prompt engineers to develop well-crafted prompt templates.”
AI
Most Popular From Last Issue
Why Can't We Make Simple Software? — Peter van Hardenberg
Notable Links
Advent of Code: Calendar of small programming puzzles.
Keep: OS alert management platform.
Ladybird: Truly independent web browser.
SeekStorm: OS full-text search library
Studio: Lightweight Database GUI in your browser.
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