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- Issue #576
Issue #576
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 20th December’s issue is presented by Shopify
Shopify released the latest Edition with all the latest dev updates, but it’s a little different this time: it’s “boring.”
The focus is on improving existing tools and features over flashy new releases.
These upgrades will boost performance and ensure everything works well together.
Here are some of the 150+ updates:
Flexible storefront customization
Liquid DX improvements
Shopify.dev LLM
tl;dr: “An easy playbook for technical roadmap development is Problem Driven Development. In short, it means you develop your technical roadmap based on fixing things that are going wrong. It sounds simple, but it can be very empowering.”
Leadership Management
— Doug Turnbull
tl;dr: Instead of relying on detailed design docs before coding, the author advocates for "coding binges" - creating messy prototype code in draft PRs to explore solutions, getting early feedback, and then gradually refactoring into clean, production-ready PRs. Design docs still have their place, but hands-on coding often reveals problems and solutions that design docs can't predict.
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: Shopify released the latest Edition with all the latest dev updates, but it’s a little different this time: it’s “boring.” The focus is on improving existing tools and features over flashy new releases. These upgrades will boost performance and ensure everything works well together. Here are some of the 150+ updates: flexible storefront customization, liquid DX improvements, Shopify.dev LLM.
Promoted by Shopify
DevTools
— Slava Akhmechet
tl;dr: 15 tips, including: (1) Understand your role, and with each update add to the body of evidence that you’re a good steward in that role. (2) Add a little randomness to the cadence. (3) Know what your next update will be and work toward it. (4) Always start with a one sentence TL;DR and a 2-4 sentence recap of the overall goals of the project. (5) Within reason, deliberately engineer pleasant surprises so you can include them in your updates. And more.
CareerAdvice
“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”
— Anders Sundman
tl;dr: “How well do you know Git? Many of us use it daily and pick up the basics as we go. After a few years, you might start to think that you know Git pretty well. But there are more things in the Git man pages than are dreamt of in your philosophy...”
Git
tl;dr: In case you missed it, there’s a whole new generation of low-level programming languages being created right now. Rust demonstrated vividly in 2016 that there is a massive unmet need in this space, and it has spawned a bunch of successor languages, though none of them have really hit the relative big-time like Rust has. I’m one of those programmers that has spent 20 years or so asking “can we please do low-level code in anything besides C and C++?” so I wanted to take an actual look at the languages I know about and do a bit of compare-and-contrast.
LanguageDesign
— Jason Patterson, Dave LaMacchia
tl;dr: (1) How did the Threads iOS team maintain the app’s performance during its growth? (2) How Meta’s Threads team thinks about performance, including the key metrics to keep the app healthy. (3) Case studies that impact publish reliability and navigation latency.
Performance iOS
— Eaton Zveare
tl;dr: “I took a step back and looked at the cart object and an idea came to mind. The cart object was able to accept item updates, but could it accept price updates too? I put together a PUT request to update the price. Surprisingly, it worked.”
Security
Most Popular From Last Issue
Avoiding The Soft Delete Anti-Pattern - Tim Fisken
Notable Links
Clever Algorithms: Nature-inspired programming recipes.
Cyphernetes: Kubernetes query language.
Helium: Lighter web automation with Python.
Limbo: OLTP database management system.
Siyuan: OS personal knowledge management software.
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