- Pointer
- Posts
- Issue #606
Issue #606
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 11th April’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked finds the answers you need from your team’s code, discussions, docs, issue trackers and more.
Now everyone can get their work done — without having to dig for answers or interrupt their teammates.
tl;dr: “In the squishy realm of managing humans, the specific things you say have specific outcomes. Unfortunately, most managers are very bad at speaking precisely. Speaking precisely, especially about long-term, uncertain things, is not something many people do by nature. Let’s explore some common examples of imprecise language and how to fix them.”
Leadership Management
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “Some of these are strategies I’ve personally used and found invaluable, while others are well-regarded methods worth sharing. As I examined them, I noticed they naturally fell into two key categories: Structured Time Management Techniques and Productivity-Boosting Frameworks, each offering a unique approach to mastering time and maximizing efficiency. Let’s dive in.”
Leadership Management
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: Developer documentation is a paradox. Teams spend hours writing it, yet it’s often outdated, incomplete, or hard to navigate. But the solution isn’t writing more or centralizing documentation—it’s surfacing the context where developers need it.
Promoted by Unblocked
Management Documentation
— Matthias Endler
tl;dr: “I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: “What does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?” In the hope that this will be an inspiration to someone out there, I wrote down the traits I observed in the most exceptional people in our craft. I wish I had that list when I was starting out. Had I followed this path, it would have saved me a lot of time.”
CareerAdvic
“The hardest bugs are those where your mental model of the situation is just wrong, so you can’t see the problem at all.”
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Researchers from Microsoft and the Institute for Work Life ran a three-week randomized controlled trial of GitHub Copilot with 228 engineers at a large global software company. Engineers were randomly assigned to one of three groups: those newly given access to GitHub Copilot and instructed to use it (treatment), those asked not to use any AI tools (control), and those who were already using Copilot (continuing). Over three weeks, participants in all groups completed daily diary entries. Researchers also collected telemetry data to observe behavioral patterns alongside shifts in beliefs and attitudes.”
Leadership Management
— Nick Schrock
tl;dr: Most enterprise data teams face two opposing goals: enforce best practices with a software-engineering mindset, and empower internal stakeholders to work autonomously. Dagster Components unlocks the power to do both. Join Dagster live on April 16th as we introduce Components, the new standard for building maintainable, self-service data platforms.
Promoted by Dagster
Event Platform
— Chris Dong
tl;dr: “At Discord, we faced a challenge that would make most data teams flinch: scaling dbt to process petabytes of data while supporting 100+ developers simultaneously working across 2,500+ models. What started as a simple implementation quickly hit critical limitations to accommodate millions of concurrent users generating petabytes of data.”
Architecture
— Scott Chacon
tl;dr: “I thought it would be fun today, as the Git project rolls into it’s third decade, to remember the earliest days of Git and explain a bit why I find this project so endlessly fascinating.”
Git
— Carlos Sanchez Martinez
tl;dr: “In this blog post, we explained how we approach listing lifetime value at Airbnb. We covered our measurement framework, including baseline LTV, incremental LTV, and marketing-induced incremental LTV. We also zoomed into measurement challenges, like when travel patterns changed drastically during the COVID pandemic and accurately estimating LTV became more difficult.”
DataScience
Most Popular From Last Issue
Dangerous Advice For Software Engineers — Sean Goedecke
Notable Links
Agent S2: Framework for computer use agents.
Bare: Small and modular JS runtime for desktop and mobile.
Cookbook: Examples for using the Gemini API.
Fleet: OS platform for IT, security, and infra teams.
Folo: Follow everything in one place.
How did you like this issue of Pointer?1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it |