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- Issue #591
Issue #591
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 18th February’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).
— Mitchell Hashimoto
tl;dr: "“I've learned that when I break down my large tasks in chunks that result in seeing tangible forward progress, I tend to finish my work and retain my excitement throughout the project. People are all motivated and driven in different ways, so this may not work for you, but as a broad generalization I've not found an engineer who doesn't get excited by a good demo. And the goal is to always give yourself a good demo.” "
Management CareerAdvice
tl;dr: “At Pinterest, we have built different quantitative models to understand why metrics move the way they do. This blog outlines the three pragmatic approaches that form the basis of the root-cause analysis (RCA) platform at Pinterest. As you will see, all three approaches try to narrow down the search space for root causes in different ways.”
Leadership Management
— Jeff Everhart
tl;dr: In this report, we'll look at how product and engineering teams at companies like Vercel, Webflow and Zapier have built their product notification infrastructure in 2024 and outline predictions for 2025.
Promoted by Knock
Infrastructure
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. Large language models are very good at writing code and rapidly getting better. Multiple multi-billion dollar attempts are currently being made to develop a pure-AI software engineer. The rough strategy - put a reasoning model in a loop with tools - is well-known and (in my view) seems likely to work. What should we software engineers do to prepare for what’s coming down the line?”
CareerAdvice
"The leader has to be practical and a realist yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist."
— Rob Pike
tl;dr: "Corporate websites seem so slow these days... What's going on? Everything related to e-commerce websites has gotten slow and sluggish on mobile, on fast desktops, on fast Internet connections... They are just slow." Rob explains why.
Trends
tl;dr: Vehicle specs power everything from insurance quotes to resale values, but inaccurate data can lead to costly mistakes. CarsXE delivers real-time, VIN-verified vehicle specifications, ensuring engineers build reliable, high-performing applications with trusted data at scale.
Promoted by CarsXE
UsefulTool
— Neil Macy
tl;dr: “I had the morning off work today. So I did what anyone would do, and started playing around with my Terminal setup. There are some things that have bugged me for a while, and some things that I've meant to try out for a while, and this seemed like a good chance to play around.”
Teminal
— Julia Evans
tl;dr: "I was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually couldn’t find something that explained all of the steps. So I wanted to try to write down some more complete directions and mention some of the gotchas I’ve run into over the years.”
Tips
— Tulika Bhatt
tl;dr: “Capturing these moments and turning them into a personalized journey is no simple feat. It requires a state-of-the-art system that can track and process these impressions while maintaining a detailed history of each profile’s exposure. This nuanced integration of data and technology empowers us to offer bespoke content recommendations.”
Data
Most Popular From Last Issue
Software Quality — Abi Noda
Notable Links
CodeViz: Visualize & navigate your codebase.
Emittery: Simple and modern async event emitter.
Inko: Language for building concurrent software.
MegaParse: Parser for every type of documents.
OmniParser: Screen Parsing tool for pure vision based GUI agent.
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