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- Issue #574
Issue #574
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 13th December’s issue is presented by QA Wolf
If slow QA processes bottleneck your software engineering team and you’re releasing slower because of it — you need to check out QA Wolf.
QA Wolf gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and helps them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.
With over 100 5-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from Salesloft, Drata, Autotrader, and many more – you’re in good hands.
Schedule a demo to see if they can help you squash the QA bottleneck.
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: Wes discusses why you should consider raising your standards and why this has the potential to dramatically improve your team’s chances of getting what you want: (1) Why every leader should set higher standards. (2) Challenges when raising the bar. (3) How to normalize a culture of excellence.
Leadership Management
— Jacob Kaplan-Moss
tl;dr: Jacob presents a simple framework to help frame discussions about risk mitigation. “It’s intentionally very simple, a basic starting point. I’ll present a more complex framework later in this series, but I want to lay more of a foundation before I get there, so we’ll start here.”
Leadership Management
— Nishant Shukla
tl;dr: Golden Datasets have long been a reliable method for measuring AI prompt performance. But as AI innovation moves fast, companies need a more agile, flexible, and cost-effective solution to stay ahead of their competition. Enter random sampling of AI prompt performance—a cutting-edge approach that adapts to real-world data and drives scalable performance for QA Wolf customers. Stay ahead of the curve—watch the webinar now.
Promoted by QA Wolf
Management Data
tl;dr: “I think I’m a pretty good networker, but not any sort of natural networking savant – I’ve just been able to find good results by following a few easy habits. Networking is kind of like working out: It’s easy to get started and a relatively small amount of effort gives you significant benefits. If you follow some incredibly basic rules and aren’t lazy, you can build a great network with ease.”
CareerAdvice
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
— Kyle Cascade
tl;dr: “Whenever doing a big migration from system to system2, front-load as much work as possible into building migration scaffolding to system2. That way you can migrate to system2 as seamlessly as possible, without a huge manual migration effort, one piece of functionality at a time. Then you can undo the scaffolding from system. This “Strangler Fig Pattern” is the key to making large migrations successful without putting the burden on your customers.”
Migration
tl;dr: BlueOptima's study of 110k developers and 82 million code changes provides a coding automation framework inspired by the SAE Driving Automation levels. It shows that whilst we are currently very far from full automation the rapid rise of LLMs since 2022 requires preparation for new coding standards, hybrid expertise to mitigate quality and security issues and tailoring of automation to specific needs to maximise impact.
Promoted by BlueOptima
AI
— Kevin Bourrillion
tl;dr: “The Java And Kotlin Ecosystem team at Google has worked for several years to eliminate the sources of date / time bugs in Google’s codebase. We’ve learned a lot from this. But my goal here is not to provide a laundry list of programming practices. It’s more basic than that. I hope to provide a solid “conceptual model” for how we think about date and time concepts in the most helpful way. I’m shooting for it to be understandable, usable, and to avoid saying things that are egregiously wrong.”
TimeData
— Julia Evans
tl;dr: “It’s very useful for me to know what behaviour to expect from a random new terminal program that I’m using. Instead of “uh, programs could do literally anything”, it’s “ok, here are the basic rules I expect, and then I can keep a short mental list of exceptions”. I’m just writing down what I’ve observed about how programs behave in my 20 years of using the terminal, why I think they behave that way, and some examples of cases where that rule is “broken”.”
Terminal
tl;dr: “In this blog post, we'll explore how Canva’s Print team has built a configurable rules system for graph traversal. We'll describe how this system ensures deterministic results and produces the best route for our users and the environment.”
Architecture
Notable Reading
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Contemplative Reading - Subbu Allamaraju
Notable Links
Himalaya: CLI to manage emails.
JSON5: JSON for humans.
Limbo: OLTP DB management system.
MegaParse: Parser for every type of documents.
TorchGeo: Datasets, samplers, transforms, and pre-trained models for geospatial data.
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