Interesting post on how leaders manage time via @cate@hachyderm.io
The “long ass note” works for me too. And I don’t think I’ve come across Eat the Frog before, but like it and have found something similar works for me too (but I should be more disciplined at it).
This paper gives a good introduction to devex. It would be interesting to see more of what smaller organisations are doing in this space.
Challenges in changing your email address - in my experience, this tends to go particularly wrong at the interfaces of different systems (like the SSO ones mentioned there).
Interesting post on the history of influential programming languages.
Interesting comparison of memory use of a benchmark async task. Go does worse than you’d expect based on the general talk, and Python does pretty reasonable. It would be interesting to do this with a bunch of different Pythons (3.11, 3.12, different async options, threading, etc).
Nice introduction to prompt engineering vs. blind promoting. I feel like if LLMs continue to be widespread and are not a flash-in-the-pan, a lot of people will get better at the blind approach, just like many people learnt how to write effective web searches. In the meantime (and maybe always) an engineering approach has value.
Thoughts on scaling up vs out in the current world - quite focused on BigQuery style work, but also generally applicable. I’ve done a lot of scale out work over the last 15 or so years - I’m not sure how much of that I would change if doing it today.
Suggestions on evaluating dependencies. I would recommend using something like snyk.io’s advisor as well, which does a bunch of this as well as more (like some security checks).
Looking at table size & performance in MySQL.
More Matt Mullenweg, this time on Design Better and an interesting grab-bag of different topics.
Distributed is back! This episode (mostly) doesn’t have Matt but is interesting and informative. I particularly liked the discussion around the difference between meetups and offsites (the other type I see is what I call “royal tours”), and the discussion around psychological safety.
Will Larson’s post on measuring an engineering organisation, in slide format.
Neat new tool from the people behind rich & textualize, Trogon is an interactive tool for your click tools, making it easier to discover/explore.
Good tips for boosting developer productivity.
Comments on uptime targets - the other point I would make here is that for nearly any system, there are multiple pieces that can independently fail without taking the whole thing down, so you actually need to consider a whole bunch of separate uptime targets.
Summary of a Google research paper on flow/focus.
Interesting thoughts on developer surveys: infraeng.dev/developer…
Nice intro to contrafreeloading.
Changing from microservices although with some general “microservices are often the wrong choice” commentary.
Things to consider before committing to a rewrite.
Another “we moved away from microservices” story but also interesting in terms of the monitoring that they are doing. h/t Kostas
Long but good post on planning from an executive level.
I love this post on organisational culture (building on from the classic “choose boring technology”). This bit especially:
The best informal culture is almost always bottoms up. But managers, execs, HR/People teams, etc can encourage informal culture. One of the most powerful things you can do is just participate. Show up for drinks, play the board games, keep the puns rolling, get silly with your team! Your participation gives people permission and shows that you value their creative cultural labor at work.
I love this site on building cli interfaces, not only what it says but it’s so beautifully designed.
It’s also interesting to think about the cli as a conversation in the context of LLM tools that are so hot right now.