This post on K8s ends positively, but I can’t see how using K8s directly is a good idea unless you’re big enough to dedicate people to it.
This post on K8s ends positively, but I can’t see how using K8s directly is a good idea unless you’re big enough to dedicate people to it.
Personally, I do find that deadlines help get things done - I wonder how universally true this is, though - it seems like maybe it’s true for a subset of people.
Lots off great stuff in this Sentry post but especially:
“you’re not going to hire infinite PMs, have them sit on 1:1 customer calls [- you’re] instead going to look for friction - you’re going to find customer pain points, passive negative feedback - and you’re going to optimize the product around that”
And
“developers who go from BigCo to SmallCo often bring Sentry with them. BigCo might have chosen to self-host Sentry, but SmallCo could care less, and simply opts for our cloud service. Eventually SmallCo becomes BigCo, and […] it acts in a lot of ways like a typical funnel”
Me, when I forget to turn ‘Silence Unknown Callers’ back on.
I like the idea of JS (or other languages) in Markdown as in this explainer on Observability 2.0, but “language\n...\n” already has a well-used meaning (render the content in a pretty-print style). It seems like there should be different syntax for “execute the content and substitute the output”.
I honestly like r8 (the clear version parallelised) most, I think. Some of the other tricks, like using ints not floats are good (and more accurate anyway), but the later solutions get too optimised for my taste.
(It is true that this could matter in some cases, but I suspect that last 6.5x speed up generally isn’t needed and gets outweighed by the much trickier maintenance).
A pretty good summary of how writers about Apple get the iPad all wrong.
(I was full-time iPad for about 8 years, as a software developer, architect, PO, and PM).
Great post looking at the flaws of various Python datetime libraries. Dates and times are hard, but that’s why we use these libraries!
Not all mistakes are learning opportunities, but there are some mistakes it’s a mistake not not to make.
I’m not sure I entirely agree with re-adding backlog items (I guess if it’s infrequent), but I do with the rest. Some of these “mistakes” are hard to make, though, like turning down deals or letting people go.
Great post on why it’s worth having engineering managers.
I agree with all of this, and have similar experiences. Where I struggle is seeing 4-5 layers of management providing value rather than falling into power plays.
Very well written deep dive into dict() vs {} in Python.
Another post in the series on the business and history of Sentry - this also dovetails with the recent Kaplan-Moss post about funding developers. I’ve never been in this position, but if I was I would love to follow this example.
A great explanation of a great code commit.
I’m loving being able to code more in the open again, and I strive to write good PRs (which squash to a commit), although they are not yet this good.
Neat tool that makes books in an image clickable through to a Google Books oage. There’s a GPT bit in the middle, but I feel it could easily be one of the cloud OCR tools or even an offline one (you’d probably need to pre-process a bit, based on my experience).
I can tap a photo of a dog in Photos and have it tell me the breed with a link to more info. I assume books and other objects must be coming to that too.
This Work Chronicles comic rings so true!
(Also, I think Work Chronicles is my favourite comic these days).
“If you’re a marketer, consider sending a single email during an off-period that asks people to update those [holiday-related email] preferences all at once” - this is excellent advice.
I vividly remember scanning 1000+ books into Delicious Library, which was vastly faster than entering them all completely manually, but something like this LLM based book scanning would be so much faster, particularly if it was wrapped into a real tool that did full lookups, etc (like Delicious Library did).
The possibility for hallucinations doesn’t worry me much - quickly verifying the results afterwards (plus the second layer of a lookup) would mostly solve that. I’d be more worried about not noticing something was missed, but good tool UX could probably solve that.
I agree with all of this (except the “dollar store” reference that goes over my non-US head): any time people are paid to work on open-source it’s a win. I saw somewhere the argument that once there is sufficient funding we can start being more critical, which is an appropriate approach.
Interesting post on falsehoods junior devs believe about seniors. I agree with most, but not:
Nice intro post to Bloom filters.
Applies equally to work and older schooling: Work Chronicles
This enterprise budgeting cartoon is so true.
Interesting read on random number generator seeding in C++ but broadly applicable. I’m glad that I work in a language where someone else takes care of getting this right!
A very thoughtful look at the hyperscaler clouds and how Europe can and should react. We really need people in a position to take action to be thinking about this in the AoNZ context as well, or maybe a Pacific context (not APAC - Asia is its own thing).
Very detailed post on Sentry’s removal of all cookies and user tracking - helps to have a reasonable familiarity with mar[keting]tech to follow what happened and the advice.