Ivan's reading list

A mostly complete list of articles I've read on the internet
There are currently 2561 entries in the list
Last modified 2025-06-30
Repo: ivan-du-toit/readingList

June 2025

• The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles - 2025-06-30 - I presented an invited keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco this week. This is my third time speaking at the event—here are my talks from October …
• Take a Break — haykerman - 2025-06-29 -
• Good Engineer/Bad Engineer – Terrible Software - 2025-06-29 - - Why the best engineers aren’t always the smartest — and what separates engineers who ship from those who just code.
• The State of React and the Community in 2025 · Mark's Dev Blog - 2025-06-27 - Detailed thoughts on how React has been developed over time, and explanations for common community confusion and concerns
• Suppressions of Suppressions — overreacted - 2025-06-26 - I heard you like linting.
• What’s New in Playwright v1.52 & v1.53: Fix with AI, Describable Locators, and More! - DEV Community - 2025-06-24 - Here’s a quick tour of what’s new in Playwright v1.52 and v1.53! We’ve packed in some powerful...
• I hate Conventional Commits — musicmatzes blog - 2025-06-22 - - I am co-maintaining a few crates in the Rust ecosystem. Some very passively, some (config-rs) more actively. From time to time, and latel...
• AWS’ 10 Coolest New Products And Tools Of 2025 (So Far) - 2025-06-21 - AWS’ innovation and new products in 2025 include quantum chip, AWS Outposts, agentic AI, Amazon Bedrock, Aurora DSQL, Nova Premier and SageMaker.
• Fueled by Redmond expansion, Sound Transit sees record-breaking 3.2M boardings in May - Everett Post - 2025-06-20 - (The Center Square) – Sound Transit hit a post-pandemic ridership record in May with 3.2 million boardings, largely because of […]
• On Mutation Testing | Blog - 2025-06-19 - Do You Have A Moment To Talk About Your Codebase's Extended Warranty?
• Treat Your Humans Better Than Your Agents · Evan Todd - 2025-06-19 - - Folks are starting to figure out what kind of environment AI agents need to be productive. The gist is: Agents need clear guidelines in a markdown file at the root of the repository explaining how to contribute to the project. Agents need a clean, isolated, reproducible environment in which they can run tests and go wild without breaking stuff and getting stuck. If the environments are sufficiently isolated, you can run them in parallel and allow multiple agents to work concurrently. Agents need fast tools so they can get feedback quickly. Tests should run fast. Speed of the iteration loop is everything. Documentation and code comments help agents figure out what’s going on. Agents work best with small contained tasks which can be reviewed and deployed continuously, rather than in huge risky chunks. What’s maddening is, if you replace the word “agents” with “humans”, all these sentences are equally true, if not more so.
• UI Component Testing Revisited: Modern Implementation with Visual Verification - 2025-06-19
• Say "but yes", not "yes but" | sean goedecke - 2025-06-18 - - When you’re agreeing with someone but you have a caveat, don’t say “yes, but”. Instead, say “but yes”. For instance, if you’re happy with a suggested approach…
• How did software get so reliable without proof? – Surfing Complexity - 2025-06-18 - - In 1996, the Turing-award-winning computer scientist C.A.R. Hoare wrote a paper with the title How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof? In this paper, Hoare grapples with the observation tha…
• Dijkstra never took a biology course – Surfing Complexity - 2025-06-18 - - Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. — Edsger W. Dijkstra Think about a system whose reliability had significantly improved over some period of time. The first example that comes to my mind …
• Pattern machines that we don’t understand – Surfing Complexity - 2025-06-18 - How do experts make decisions? One theory is that they generate a set of options, estimate the cost and benefits of each option, and then choose the optimal one. The psychology researcher Gary Klei…
• Seattle’s $17.45M overhaul of Pike and Pine connecting Capitol Hill to the waterfront is complete | CapitolHillSeattle.com - 2025-06-18 - Do you feel more connected to the waters of Elliott Bay? Seattle officials cut the ribbon last week on the $17.45 million project to improve Pike and Pine and better connect Seattle’s new wat…
• Quick takes on the GCP public incident write-up – Surfing Complexity - 2025-06-17 - - On Thursday (2025-06-12), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) had an incident that impacted dozens of their services, in all of their regions. They’ve already released an incident report (go read it!…
• “What went well” is more than just a pat on the back – Surfing Complexity - 2025-06-17 - - When writing up my impressions of the GCP incident report, Cindy Sridharan’s tweet reminded me that I failed to comment on an important part of it, how the responders brought the overloaded s…
• AI at Amazon: a case study of brittleness – Surfing Complexity - 2025-06-17 - A year ago, Mihail Eric wrote a blog post detailing his experiences working on AI inside Amazon: How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet. It’s a great …
• The cracks in the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship are reportedly widening | TechCrunch - 2025-06-17 - OpenAI is reportedly considering accusing Microsoft, its largest backer, of anticompetitive behavior throughout their partnership.
• Jest 30: Faster, Leaner, Better · Jest - 2025-06-16 - Today we are happy to announce the release of Jest 30. This release features a substantial number of changes, fixes, and improvements. While it is one of the largest major releases of Jest ever, we admit that three years for a major release is too long. In the future, we are aiming to make more frequent major releases to keep Jest great for the next decade.
• Google caused outage by ignoring its quality protections • The Register - 2025-06-16 - : Promises operational change - and improvements to customer comms when it crashes
• TC39 Advances Array.fromAsync, Error.isError, and Explicit R... - 2025-06-16 - TC39 advances 9 JavaScript proposals, including Array.fromAsync, Error.isError, and Explicit Resource Management, which are now headed into the ECMASc...
• Vitest 3.2 is out! | Vitest - 2025-06-16 - Vitest 3.2 Release Announcement
• Announcing Babel 8 Beta · Babel - 2025-06-16 - After almost two years since the first Babel 8 alpha release (8.0.0-alpha.0), we are finally ready.
• MCP seems viral - nadh.in - 2025-06-16 - - The Model Context Protocol, its rate of adoption, nature, and implications, seem viral in nature.
• Parsing, Not Guessing | Francis Sunday - 2025-06-16 - - Using ASTs over regex to build a predictable, lightweight, theme-aware Markdown renderer in Go.
• We Live In a Golden Age of Interoperability - 2025-06-16 - - On the growth of open standards.
• Stop Vibe-Testing Your MCP Server - 2025-06-14 - Your tests are bad and you should feel bad
• Amazon joins the big nuclear party, buying 1.92 GW for AWS | TechCrunch - 2025-06-13 - Amazon and Talen revised an existing deal to buy power from the Susquehanna nuclear power plant.
• What No One Tells You About Early Retirement - Darius Foroux - 2025-06-13 - - Last year my net worth hit a level where I felt comfortable enough to enter early retirement. It was fun. But after a while felt useless.
• A tale of two Claudes - 2025-06-13 - Blog post: A tale of two Claudes by Steve Klabnik
• Shae Erisson's blog - Tools built on tree-sitter's concrete syntax trees - 2025-06-13 -
• The Innovation–Optimization Continuum - The Duckbill Group - 2025-06-11 - There’s a continuum, with “Innovation” on one end and “Optimization” on the other. Where are you?
• From One-Way to Two-Way Doors: Rethinking How We Make Big Decisions - 2025-06-11 - How to recognize the differences between one-way and two-way doors. A way to think about risk and decision-making.
• Concurrent Rendering in React ⛽🛣️ - DEV Community - 2025-06-11 - In this post, we will discuss the concept of concurrent rendering in React 18, which allows us to...
• Aurora DSQL: How to spend a dollar - 2025-06-09
• On Caring – Thinkst Thoughts - 2025-06-09 -
• Don’t Settle for Mediocre Frontend Testing: Build Stable, Reliable Systems Instead – Thinkst Thoughts - 2025-06-09
• Progressive JSON — overreacted - 2025-06-09 - - Why streaming isn't enough.
• Your Boss Thinks You Suck. Now What? - by Dave Anderson - 2025-06-09 - When your 'areas to improve' sounds like a shopping list. Or more subtly, an afternoon is ruined when you get a little honest feedback on your performance. And what you should do next.
• OpenSearch UI: Six months in review | AWS Big Data Blog - 2025-06-08 - OpenSearch UI has been adopted by thousands of customers for various use cases since its launch in November 2024. Exciting customer stories and feedback have helped shape our feature improvements. As we complete 6 months since its general availability, we are sharing major enhancements that have improved OpenSearch UI’s capability, especially in observability and security analytics, in this post.
• Interfacing MCP with Combinatorial, Convex, and SMT Solvers - 2025-06-08 - - Personal Blog
• Custom Search Param Serialization | TanStack Router React Docs - 2025-06-08 - Diagram showing idempotent nature of URL search param serialization and deserializationBy default, TanStack Router parses and serializes your URL Search Params automatically using JSON.stringify and JSON.parse. This process involves escaping and unescaping the search string, which is a...
• Search Params | TanStack Router React Docs - 2025-06-08 - Similar to how TanStack Query made handling server-state in your React and Solid applications a breeze, TanStack Router aims to unlock the power of URL search params in your applications. 🧠 If you ar...
• The Beauty of TanStack Router | TkDodo's blog - 2025-06-08 - Yes, it's type-safe, but there's so much more to love about TanStack Router.
• Why React Error Boundaries Aren't Just Try/Catch for Components | Epic React by Kent C. Dodds - 2025-06-08 - A deep dive into how React error boundaries work, why they're different from try/catch, and how to use them effectively in your apps.
• Source - Generate request handlers from HAR files, OpenAPI documents, and other sources. - 2025-06-08 - Generate request handlers from HAR files, OpenAPI documents, and other sources.
• Do NOT Assert on Requests (Do This Instead) | Epic Web Dev - 2025-06-08 - Test UI outcomes, not API requests. Mock network calls in setup, but assert on what users actually see and experience, not implementation details.
• ESLint v9.0.0: A retrospective - ESLint - Pluggable JavaScript Linter - 2025-06-08 - A pluggable and configurable linter tool for identifying and reporting on patterns in JavaScript. Maintain your code quality with ease.
• Firefox 139 for developers - Mozilla | MDN - 2025-06-08 - This article provides information about the changes in Firefox 139 that affect developers. Firefox 139 was released on May 27, 2025.
• JavaScript modules · V8 - 2025-06-08 - - This article explains how to use JavaScript modules, how to deploy them responsibly, and how the Chrome team is working to make modules even better in the future.
• Using ES modules in browsers with import-maps - LogRocket Blog - 2025-06-08 - In this post, we'll go through a few basic examples of how ES modules are used and then explore the possibility of using them in production.
• Bad code doesn't kill projects, poor leadership does - 2025-06-07 - Tech leadership strategies when teams sandbag, platform teams don’t care, and loud extroverts try to steal the spotlight

May 2025

• Four Things I've Changed My Mind About in Engineering | Jake Worth - 2025-05-31 - - I think a mark of a great engineer is being willing to change one’s mind when presented with new information. Here are four technological things I’ve changed my mind about.
• MCPs vs APIs: Why designing tools for LLMs is different | jngiam - 2025-05-31 - We've been building AI agents at that connect to real-world applications, and have learned that the hardest apps to work with are the ones where users ca...
• I'm sick of being a 10x programmer. — tervagant - 2025-05-31 - - Back in the long, long ago, legend has it that some researchers made an earnest attempt to measure programmer productivity and discovered that among a sample of professio...
• Andy Jassy’s leadership lesson he practices at work and at home - 2025-05-28 - Jassy believes the best leaders are always learning: 'The second you're not learning is the second you're starting to unwind.'
• Preserving and Resetting State – React - 2025-05-28 - The library for web and native user interfaces
• Preserving and Resetting State in React | Epic React by Kent C. Dodds - 2025-05-28 - How React preserves or resets state depends on component position and keys. Learn why state disappears and how to fix it as well as links to more resour...
• Just Fucking Use React - 2025-05-28 - An opinionated guide on why and when to use React (or similar JavaScript frameworks) for modern web development, especially for complex, interactive applications. Challenges the 'pure HTML' narrative.
• Release v0.3.4 · aidenybai/react-scan - 2025-05-28
• Special Summer Transit Options Increase Multimodal Access Across Puget Sound - The Urbanist - 2025-05-26 - # Summer in Puget Sound means the return of Trailhead Direct, Bicycle Weekends, Seattle's free Waterfront Shuttle, and the Hurricane Ridge Shuttle.
• Governor Signs Washington’s First-in-the-Nation Shared Streets Law - The Urbanist - 2025-05-26 - # Cities in Washington will have the legal authority to create shared streets, which feature much lower speed limits and put pedestrians first, under Senate Bill 5595. Governor Bob Ferguson signed the bill into law Saturday. It will go into effect on July 27.
• Aurora Avenue Bus Lanes to Turn 24/7 to Aid RapidRide E Riders - The Urbanist - 2025-05-26 - # Peak-only bus lanes will be converted to all-day operation between Fremont and N 115th Street as soon as next week. The move was initially planned in response to major construction work on I-5, which has mostly been delayed to 2026 and 2027.
• Delegate Delegation — An Upgrade to the Common Delegation Practice of Micro Management - 2025-05-26 - Many managers (and individuals) assume that load balancing their team members is the manager's job. That's a pretty bad idea. And I'll explain why.
• Become a Mac keyboard ninja with Raycast | Alexandru ROSIANU - 2025-05-26 - - Ever since I had my first Windows desktop, then a Windows laptop turned into a Linux laptop, then a Linux laptop running Hackintosh in a VM, then a Mac, I've...
• Washington Legislature Greenlights Framework for Amtrak Improvements - The Urbanist - 2025-05-25 - # One bill to make it out of the Washington State Legislature this session was House Bill 1837, which sets targets to boost Amtrak Cascades frequencies, reliability, and speed. Meanwhile, Amtrak’s soon-to-be upgraded SoDo rail yard will host new and improved Amtrak Airo trains to one day accommodate that vision.
• Downtown Redmond’s Building Boom Shows No Signs of Slowing - The Urbanist - 2025-05-25 - # New apartment buildings like Eastline and Polaris have brought hundreds of units close to Redmond's forthcoming downtown light rail station. On the horizon are even bigger projects.
• Pierce County Republicans Try to Bury Vision Zero Safety Action Plan - The Urbanist - 2025-05-25 - # The fully completed plan, intended to provide an array of strategies that would advance Pierce County toward a goal of eliminating deaths and serious injuries by 2035, was only approved by a 4-3 vote last week.
• Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net - 2025-05-25 - - understand + work backwards from the root goal • don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement • make success inevitable • find your angle • think real hard • reflect on your thinking
• React Hook Factory - 2025-05-25 - how to create custom hooks programatically
• RFC: Unified Imperative Query Methods · TanStack/query · Discussion #9135 - 2025-05-25
• Dependency Inversion in React: Building Truly Testable Components · cekrem.github.io - 2025-05-25 - Learn how to apply the Dependency Inversion Principle in React to create more testable, maintainable, and flexible components. A practical guide to writing better React code.
• You Must Find a Passion Project - AKA How to Avoid Being a Boring Human - 2025-05-25 - I'm absolutely off topic today. Like if being on topic was a road in downtown Seattle, I'd be hiking up Rattlesnake Ledge today. Which, if you don't know, is far away.
• Hide zeros for users - 2025-05-25 - - User interfaces everywhere are a bit too generic nowadays, as they must be efficient in terms of maintenance and release time. However, that is not a reason to create a pointless and bad UX. It's enough to monitor the meaningfulness of interfaces and ask yourself, "Does it make sense?" to make the user experience great.
• Loss of Features is Progressive - 2025-05-25 - - Software bloat is never desirable, even when naysayers pretend it is.
• Always Think of the Hook First - 2025-05-25 - Spend more time on the introduction than anything else.
• Agent Recursion · Choly's Blog - 2025-05-25 -
• LLM text chat is everywhere. Who’s optimizing its UX? - 2025-05-25 - - When it comes to programming LLM tools, I've seen modes of interaction in the form of code completion, patch application, improvement suggestions, and...
• Thoughts on thinking - 2025-05-25 - I have been stuck. Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or start a project, I come to the same realization: in the context of AI, what I’m doing is a waste of time. It’s horrifying. The fun has been sucked out of the process... | Dustin Curtis | Designer, hacker, investor, nomad. Founder of Svbtle.
• Refactoring My Infrastructure As Code Configurations | Not a Number - 2025-05-25 - - The drupol/nixos-x260 repository began as a simple and practical way to manage the configuration of my Lenovo ThinkPad X260 laptop, hence the (bad) name. Unsurprisingly, I quickly became hooked on the NixOS Linux distribution, and before long, I was running it on every machine I owned… first at home, then even at work (shhht!). As the obsession grew, so did the project. It naturally expanded to support a wide variety of systems: from a simple Intel-based laptop, to a Raspberry Pi router tucked away in the basement, and even an old iMac from 2012. Each machine came with its own quirks and specific requirements. Like many personal setups, what started as a clean and elegant solution gradually evolved into a tangled web of host-specific hacks and duplicated logic.
• Metrics Are Easy—Impact Is Hard – Eleganthack - 2025-05-25 - - Metrics are the corporate world’s comfort blanket: soft, familiar, and dangerously good at lulling us to sleep. We count clicks, tally hours, track KPIs, and build dashboards that glow green. But i…
• (1) Secret Weapon of Highly Successful People: Being Low Maintenance - 2025-05-25 - 1 red flag to avoid because it makes you be perceived as high maintenance
• Functional HTML — overreacted - 2025-05-25 - Tags on both sides.
• Why no one talks about querying across signals in observability? | SigNoz - 2025-05-25 - Current observability tooling significantly lags behind user expectations by failing to support a critical capability - querying across different telemetry signals. This limitation turns what should be powerful correlation capabilities into mere “correlation theater” – a superficial simulation of insights rather than true analytical power.
• Converting values to strings in JavaScript has pitfalls - 2025-05-25 - Converting values to strings in JavaScript is more complicated than it might seem: Most approaches have values they can’t handle. We don’t always see all of the data.
• You should not write library style code! (probably) – Wilsons Blog - 2025-05-25 -
• Why Recreating an IAM Role Doesn't Restore Trust: A Gotcha in Role ARNs - Hacking The Cloud - 2025-05-25 - In AWS, deleting and recreating an IAM role results in a new identity that breaks existing trust policies. This behavior improves security by preventing identity spoofing but can cause failures in cross-account access and third-party integrations if not properly understood.
• Never say "it didn't work" | blog.larah.me - 2025-05-25 - - Be explicit when asking for technical support.
• Can APIs be beautiful? - Empathetic Engineer - 2025-05-25 - - People first developer advocacy
• inessential: My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers - 2025-05-24 -
• Bad Type Patterns - The Duplicate duck - 2025-05-22 - - Why aren’t people writing more types? Perhaps it’s because the intermediate and expert developers deleted the patterns that didn’t work and left no trace for...
• Seattle to Bellevue light rail delayed to 2026 - Axios Seattle - 2025-05-22 - The long-awaited light rail between Seattle and Bellevue won't open until early 2026, Sound Transit says.
• I'd rather read the prompt - 2025-05-18 - I have literally never seen LLM writing that actually improved my life.
• Robot Hallucinations | Cora Buhlert - 2025-05-18 - Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will be aware that the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle, Washington, is embroiled in a massive scandal. Turns out the programming team used ChatGPT to vet …
• E-bikes make your city smaller - mattsayar.com - 2025-05-18 - - Years ago, I decided to try commuting via bike, but it was a long 1hr 15m one-way trip to the office, uphill both ways. That's a long time to spend commuting every day. I could partially justify it because it also counts as exercising, so I…
• (1) Every SWE knows DOGE can't rewrite Social Security in a few months - 2025-05-18 - DOGE plans to port the entirety of Social Security from COBOL to Java, previously estimated at 5 years, within a few months. I explain why that's not happening.
• I Didn't Realize I Was a First Principles Thinker Until… | Thinking Out Loud - 2025-05-18 - - For the better part of 6 years, was a mystery to me. Of course I wanted to become a , but didn't understand how to become one. Then everything changed. T...
• Heard of Design Patterns? How About Behavior Patterns. - 2025-05-18 - Recognize patterns in management to be able to solve issues, and deliver results.
• I Would Love to Work With You - 2025-05-18 - - Like so many, I was laid off from Microsoft on May 13, 2025. Never good news, but life moves on and I'm still fired up to do fun things with the right group of people.
• Understand Your Manager - Don't Break Prod - 2025-05-17 - - Don't Break Prod provides bite-sized pieces of career advice for software engineers.
• (1) Resolve Risk First - Why Complexity and Ambiguity Not Effort Should Dictate Your Focus - 2025-05-12 - Too often we resolve the hardest work first, instead of the riskiest. A walk through of why that's a mistake.
• Reason 1,000,001 why OpenAI sucks - blog.thms.uk - 2025-05-10 - - After days of debugging unexplained span usage in Sentry - despite an ultra-low sampling rate - I discovered `traceparent` headers in requests traced back to OpenAI. Turns out, it's always AI.
• Claude’s System Prompt: Chatbots Are More Than Just Models | Drew Breunig - 2025-05-10 - - A couple days ago, Ásgeir Thor Johnson convinced Claude to give up its system prompt. The prompt is a good reminder that chatbots are more than just their model. They’re tools and instructions that accrue and are honed, through user feedback and design.
• Redmond-Bellevue light rail debut nears, but cross-lake span completion remains uncertain - 2025-05-07 - Redmond’s Sound Transit line, approved by voters in ST3, will open on Saturday before ST2 is finished.
• AWS RDS Reserved Instances Are Missing Key Instance Types - The Duckbill Group - 2025-05-06 - AWS is excluding newer RDS instance types from Reserved Instance purchases. Is this oversight or the quiet continuation of their RI deprecation strategy?
• Take BIG Bold Career Risks - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2025-05-06 - Why fear is a signpost for learning, what 'hyperscale' really means, why 'Give Away Your Legos' is more relevant than ever, what is a 'Glue Person', and Mark Zuckerberg's untold superpower
• You can’t prevent your last outage, no matter how hard you try – Surfing Complexity - 2025-05-06 - - I don’t know anything about your organization, dear reader, but I’m willing to bet that the amount of time and attention your organization spends on post-incident work is a function of …
• Amazon CloudWatch launches tiered pricing and additional destinations for AWS Lambda logs - AWS - 2025-05-05 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with Amazon CloudWatch launches tiered pricing and additional destinations for AWS Lambda logs
• How to Both Embrace and Defeat Imposter Syndrome - 2025-05-05 - Our skills aren't perfect. Moving past our weaknesses is how we discover our ways to add value, and improve along the way.
• Concurrent Optimistic Updates in React Query | TkDodo's blog - 2025-05-04 - How to build optimistic UI that is resilient to race conditions, even when multiple mutations update the same entity concurrently.
• Acknowledging and Navigating Uncertainty - by Annie Duke - 2025-05-04 - Q&A with Elizabeth Weingarten, author of How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty.
• West Seattle Link Gains Federal Approval to Fully Enter Design Phase - The Urbanist - 2025-05-04 - # The green light from the feds comes on the heels of the Sound Transit board advancing funding for West Seattle Link's design, in the face of increasing trepidation over costs.
• (1) The Female Gaze - Mary Harrington - 2025-05-04 - Women actually are fibbing about objectifying men's bodies. But not in the way you think
• zerowidth positive lookahead | What I've learned from jj - 2025-05-04 - - How Jujutsu's flexibility and safety changed my approach to version control
• Frontends are hard | SST - 2025-05-04 - - Modern serverless frontends are hard to deploy and here's why.
• Inside a High-Severity Outage: A Late Night Sev-2 at Amazon - 2025-05-04 - A detailed narrative of how we communicated about, worked on, and resolved a technical mess we created.
• (1) Founder Mode vs Manager Mode - 2025-05-03 - Which 'mode' is best for you? (plus, more insights from Brian Chesky on what happened at Airbnb)
• Installation | Linkwarden - 2025-05-03 - Our official Cloud offering is the easiest way to start using Linkwarden and is typically more affordable than renting a VPS.
• Claude can now connect to your world \ Anthropic - 2025-05-03 - Today we're announcing Integrations, a new way to connect your apps and tools to Claude. We're also expanding Claude's Research capabilities with an advanced mode that searches the web, your Google Workspace, and now your Integrations too.
• AWS Q1 earnings report 2025 - 2025-05-02 - Amazon continues to invest in infrastructure to run artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and other clients.
• West Seattle Link Extension gets the go ahead from the Federal Transit Administration | Westside Seattle - 2025-05-02
• Giving V8 a Heads-Up: Faster JavaScript Startup with Explicit Compile Hints · V8 - 2025-05-01 - - Explicit compile hints control which JavaScript files and functions are parsed and compiled eagerly
• Categorize Your Dependencies - 2025-05-01
• Google Cloud Revenues And Profits Flattening Out - 2025-05-01 - Every business has its patterns, and so it is with Google and its hodgepodge of advertising and cloud computing. The funny bit is that even though Google

April 2025

• Google sends a harsh message to employees after layoffs - TheStreet - 2025-04-30 - The tech giant is doubling down on a new strategy.
• The 3-Year Journey to an Actually Good Monitoring Stack - 2025-04-25 - - Discover the journey behind Phare.io’s fourth uptime monitoring stack, from AWS Lambda to Bunny Magic Containers. Lessons learned, mistakes made, and what finally worked.
• Impossible Components — overreacted - 2025-04-24 - Composing across the stack.
• GitHub - gvergnaud/ts-pattern: 🎨 The exhaustive Pattern Matching library for TypeScript, with smart type inference. - 2025-04-24 - - 🎨 The exhaustive Pattern Matching library for TypeScript, with smart type inference. - gvergnaud/ts-pattern
• Simplify TanStack React Query State Handling with Pattern Matching - 2025-04-24 - How pattern matching can help elegantly handle different states (loading, error, success, empty) of TanStack React Query, making your components cleaner and more type-safe.
• Using Client Caches In Loaders - 2025-04-24 - A website containing blog posts related to the frontend.
• Release v2.7.0 · reduxjs/redux-toolkit · GitHub - 2025-04-24 - RTK has hit Stage 2.7! 🤣 This feature release adds support for Standard Schema validation in RTK Query endpoints, fixes several issues with infinite queries, improves perf when infinite queries pro...
• tsdown - The Elegant Bundler for Libraries - 2025-04-24 - The Elegant Bundler for Libraries
• tsup - 2025-04-24 - bundle typescript library with ease
• Semantic Unit Testing - 2025-04-21 -
• How Claude avoids JSON accuracy issue in tool calling - 2025-04-21 - There’s an article from Aider that demonstrates reduced accuracy of code generation in LLMs when using tool calls. In essence, their exercise demonstrates that asking an LLM to return JSON reduces the accuracy of code generation. Reduced accuracy { "file_path": "package.json", "content": "{\"name\": \"test\"}" } Better ``` // package.json {"name": "test"} ``` The primary hypothesis is that since per-token computation is limited, a part of the computation is instead directed toward getting proper escaping.
• (1) Don't be a resulter - by Annie Duke - Thinking in Bets - 2025-04-20 - A quick thought for the day
• State Senate Greenlights Sweeping Transit-Oriented Housing Bill - The Urbanist - 2025-04-20 - # Three years in the making, HB 1491 would require Washington cities to zone for apartment buildings near rail stations and rapid bus stops. A compromise around housing affordability mandates finally paved the way for the bill's passage in both chambers.
• Amazon.com (AMZN): $14 Billion Stake in Anthropic as Claude Launches $200 AI Subscription - 2025-04-19 - We recently published a list of Top 5 AI News Moving The Market Today. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) stands against other top AI news moving the market today. Investors continue to pour back into Big Tech stocks after the US government announced temporary tariff […]
• What MCP is Missing: UI Components - 2025-04-19 - - A blog post on MCP Missing UI
• Everything Wrong with MCP - by Shrivu Shankar - 2025-04-19 - Explaining the Model Context Protocol and everything that might go wrong.
• Your Strengths Are Your Weaknesses – Terrible Software - 2025-04-19 - The qualities you value most in engineers are also creating your biggest problems. Here’s how to handle this paradox.
• AI 2025-2026: My Falsifiable Forecasts for the Next Two Years - Ritza Articles - 2025-04-19 - - None
• I'm sorry, but those are vanity evals | Hex - 2025-04-19 - - Using GPT-4.1 as a case study of our framework for impactful LLM evaluation
• Introducing Zod 4 beta | Zod Docs - 2025-04-18
• Why RAG Is (Still) Not Dead: The Enduring Value of Retrieval in the Era of Expanding Context Windows - Skylar Payne (Wicked Data LLC) - 2025-04-16 - Every time a new Large Language Model debuts, the headlines follow a predictable pattern: “New Model with 1M Token Context!” Then come the hot takes: “RAG is...
• The new Cookie Store API | Fotis Papadogeorgopoulos - 2025-04-16 - Introducing the relatively new Cookie Store API, and what it means for web applications.
• The Evolution of Software Development: Navigating the AI-Powered Landscape - 2025-04-16 - - Discover how AI is reshaping software development and what it means for the future.
• The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer | 0x1 - 2025-04-16 - Is something I think about often because I can’t help but wonder if most other jobs are like this.
• Debugging JavaScript Memory Leaks | Bun Blog - 2025-04-16 - Use v8 heap snapshot API + Chrome DevTools to compare heap snapshots
• Gee Wiz – Alt + E S V - 2025-04-15 - On March 18, 2025 Google Cloud announced an agreement to acquire Israeli security company Wiz for $32B. Pending regulatory approvals, the deal is expected to close in 2026 as an all cash transaction. Why Wiz? Wiz is an agentless security tool, designed to run in multi-cloud environments. They tout an end-to-end platform, but their market
• G̶o̶o̶g̶l̶e̶r̶… ex-Googler. · 10 April 2025 - 2025-04-13 - My role at Google was eliminated.
• Ledgers are simple, stop spreading FUD! | Aivars Kalvāns - 2025-04-11 - When you do need thousands and tens of thousands of transactions per second, TigerBeetle is there for you. A few hundred per second you can do it yourself in ~25 lines of code. And you can reach thousands but it requires an understanding of databases and sometimes creative approaches.
• Washington’s E-bike Rebate Program Launches Wednesday - The Urbanist - 2025-04-08 - # Washingtonians in the market for a new e-bike can qualify for the chance to snag a $300 or $1,200 instant rebate starting Wednesday. The state will distribute about 10,000 rebates via a lottery system following a two-week sign up period that ends April 23.
• The Staff+ Performance Cliff - 2025-04-08 - - When Staff+ engineers transition from a team lead to an org-level lead, the increased ambiguity often leads to feeling lost and overwhelmed. This article explores the "Performance Cliff" phenomenon and offers practical strategies to adapt, stay organized, and redefine success in a leadership role.
• Why Companies Don’t Fix Bugs - 2025-04-08 - - A few years ago, a lone programmer named t0st did something extraordinary: he fixed an 8-year-old bug in GTA Online that had been driving players crazy. The bug? Painfully long load times, sometimes u
• The Best Programmers I Know | Matthias Endler - 2025-04-08 - - I have met a lot of developers in my life. Late…
• Oracle attempt to hide serious cybersecurity incident from customers in Oracle SaaS service | by Kevin Beaumont | Mar, 2025 | DoublePulsar - 2025-04-07 - Being a provider of cloud SaaS (Software-as-a-service) solutions requires certain cybersecurity responsibilities — including being…
• The Invisible Difference - Yusuf Aytas - 2025-04-07 - - The unspoken side of work. How presence, tone, and trust shape how others experience you, whether you notice it or not.
• 80/20 writing | Dan Bartlett: coach, writer, engineer & founder - 2025-04-07 - - A popular approach to running is the 80/20 philosophy, popularised by Matt Fitzgerald. It says that runners improve most effectively when 80% of their running is at low intensity, with the remaining 20% done at higher intensity. This approach recognises the value of high-volume, “easy” runs and aims to avoid what’s known as the “grey zone” of training. These are runs that are too hard to be easy and too easy to be hard. Research shows that this way of training provides limited aerobic benefit, whilst contributing significantly to fatigue. It’s a poor return on investment.
• MatterRank - Customizable Search Engines - 2025-04-04 - Build personalized search engines that score and rank results based on what matters to you.
• Building My Own Backend: How I Set Up Email Subscriptions with AWS Lambda - 2025-04-04 - Henry Josephson's personal website. Crosswords, AI Policy, Philosophy.
• i18n-check: End to end React i18n testing | Lingual - 2025-04-04 - i18n-check can be used to test your React internalization end to end and ensure all your i18n efforts are up to date. Aside from simple comparisons between the source and target language files, i18n-check can also find missing or unused translation keys in your source code. Running these checks on the CI can help to gain more insight on the current i18n state and highlight areas were improvements are needed.
• AWS CloudFormation now supports targeted resource scans in the IaC generator - AWS - 2025-04-01 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS CloudFormation now supports targeted resource scans in the IaC generator

March 2025

• Components Are Just Sparkling Hooks :: Building Better Software Slower - 2025-03-31 - Here’s a question you might encounter while interviewing for React developer roles: “What is the difference between a component and a hook?” The answer that the interviewer is likely looking for is along the lines of “A component is a building block for the UI, and hooks are utility functions provided by React to manage state and side-effects 😴”. It’s a satisfactory answer if your goal is to find employment. But if you want to make an impression, the more daring answer is: “There is no difference 🔥”.
• Big Changes Ahead for Voting Maps After Next Census | Brennan Center for Justice - 2025-03-30 - New population estimates from the Census Bureau suggest sharp gains and losses that could reshape the country’s politics after 2030.
• The “No, But” Engineer § Scott Smitelli - 2025-03-30 - - When you're improvising a comedy scene, the golden rule is to respond with "yes, and" to everything your partners say and do. This unwavering acceptance can produce riotous bouts of laughter. In an engineering team, it just creates unholy messes.
• Cursor Under the Hood - Roman Imankulov - 2025-03-29 - - Exploring what Cursor, the AI Code Editor, is doing under the hood when you ask it to write code
• King County Metro Resuming Fare Enforcement on March 31 - The Urbanist - 2025-03-29 - # Beginning on Monday, March 31, King County Metro will relaunch fare enforcement on buses and streetcars after a five-year hiatus. The new format will be a little more forgiving for fare payment violations.
• Catchy Advice, Boring Advice | Kiran Chauhan - 2025-03-29 - - On the other day, I was reading a post on a social network where a person who went to an interview for the position of (junior) developer asked a question at the end of it: how one can become a senior developer. He was very impressed by the answer of the interviewer. The answer was,
• Laurence Tratt: Better Shell History Search - 2025-03-26 -
• The Role of A/B Testing in Entshittification | Mert Bulan - 2025-03-25 - - How over-relying on A/B testing can degrade user experience and contribute to the entshittification of products.
• The Real Failure Rate of EBS — PlanetScale - 2025-03-24 - Our experience running AWS EBS at scale for critical workloads
• (1) RTO is a lie, 3rd party misinformation, the source of my anecdotes, and how (not) to make decisions. An article of many topics! - 2025-03-24 - Sometimes writing about one topic just isn't good enough.
• Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes - 2025-03-24 - A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full …
• It's probably time to stop recommending Redux - Nathanael Bennett - 2025-03-24
• Agile Otter Blog: There is No Automatic Reset for Engineering - 2025-03-24 - Do you remember all those rushed changes that your developers implemented three years ago, and how they complained about the design damage t...
• Model Context Protocol explained as simply as possible | sean goedecke - 2025-03-24 - - --
• The Reasons Behind Link Outages – Seattle Transit Blog - 2025-03-24 - Two reports on the causes of Link’s many unplanned outages ($) were released on Thursday, as Mike Lindblom at the Seattle Times writes. One report is by engineering consultant HNTB; the other…
• The Plague of Linters - kettanaito.com - 2025-03-24 - If you ever had a debate about which linting rule to use, you must read this.
• How I force LLMs to generate correct code - Claudio Santini - 2025-03-24 - Unvibe: A Python Test-Runner that generates correct code
• Why I Won’t Use JSDOM | Epic Web Dev - 2025-03-24 - Explore how JSDOM's browser simulation works, and learn front-end testing approaches using Vitest Browser Mode for direct browser testing and native APIs
• (1) Drive a Culture of Innovation - 2025-03-24 - Get your team to invent well
• How I've run major projects | benkuhn.net - 2025-03-24 - - focus • maintain a detailed plan for victory • run a fast OODA loop • overcommunicate • break off subprojects • have fun • bonus content: my project management starter kit
• The Unforwarder: How i stopped backing up junk photos - 2025-03-24 - - Taming the WhatsApp chaos
• Live Mode | OpenStatus - 2025-03-23 - How we leverage TanStack Infinite Query for implementing live mode
• The Ugly Truth About The Education System You Were Never Told - 2025-03-23
• Op-Ed: Optimize Sound Transit, Split System into Urban and Regional Lines - The Urbanist - 2025-03-23 - # As Sound Transit builds the largest light rail expansion in the country, splitting the system into urban and suburban lines could unlock its full potential and queue up logical extensions.
• The good times in tech are over | sean goedecke - 2025-03-22 - For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of…
• Engineers should state the obvious | sean goedecke - 2025-03-22 - - --
• Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5 billion annually - Tech Startups - 2025-03-22 - Amazon is set to cut around 14,000 managerial positions by early 2025, aiming to save between $2.1 billion and $3.6 billion annually. This reduction marks a 13% drop in Amazon's global management workforce, shrinking the number of managers from 105,770 to 91,936. This move follows recent layoffs in Amazon's communications and sustainability units, as the
• GitHub - sinclairtarget/git-who: Git blame for file trees - 2025-03-22 - Git blame for file trees. Contribute to sinclairtarget/git-who development by creating an account on GitHub.
• LLM Assisted Fuzzing - 2025-03-22 - - A new approach to false-positives.
• (1) Hacking Together Prime Video - 2025-03-20 - 3 product hacks, outnumbered, Jeff Bezos calling it “The worst product name in Amazon’s history", press leaks, customer complaints, and legal problems—all part of Prime Video's launch (Chapter 2)
• Two West Seattle routes lose trips, one gains trips for Metro’s next service change March 29 | West Seattle Blog... - 2025-03-18
• Isn’t Testing Obvious? – Pippa Hillebrand - 2025-03-18 - I am sometimes surprised by the rants people feel the need to go on on the internet. Then I am reminded that they are fuelled by people, and people are often idiots (citation: I am people). So, let…
• Not the lessons I expected – Pippa Hillebrand - 2025-03-18 - Near the end of January I decided it was time to open myself back up to the working world after a sabbatical of roughly six months. At time of writing (early March) I don’t have a full time positio…
• Amazon Bedrock now supports multi-agent collaboration - AWS - 2025-03-18 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with Amazon Bedrock now supports multi-agent collaboration
• King County Metro Installing ORCA Readers for All-Door Boarding Systemwide - The Urbanist - 2025-03-15 - # King County Metro has added ORCA transit card readers at all doors on nearly 75% of its bus fleet and has a goal of finishing work by the end of the year. Until it does, Metro said all-door boarding is officially not permitted outside of RapidRide lines and Third Avenue. However, some riders have started anyway.
• Moving away from US cloud services by Martijn Hols - 2025-03-15 - - Relying on US cloud services poses legal and political risks for EU users, so I'm moving away from US cloud services. Here's how and why I did it.
• Token-saving updates on the Anthropic API \ Anthropic - 2025-03-14 - - We've made several updates to the Anthropic API that let developers significantly increase throughput and reduce token usage with Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
• Orca transit ridership surges past 150M trips | FOX 13 Seattle - 2025-03-13 - Transit ridership in the Puget Sound region jumped in 2024, officials respond to new reports as Amazon, World Cup, and increased population drives demand on our roadways.
• Why I Won’t Use JSDOM | Epic Web Dev - 2025-03-11 - Explore how JSDOM's browser simulation works, and learn front-end testing approaches using Vitest Browser Mode for direct browser testing and native APIs
• Seattle’s Waterfront Bike Path Opens After Long Wait - The Urbanist - 2025-03-09 - # The 1.2-mile bike lane restores a connection along the central waterfront that hasn't existed in years, and is sure to turn into one of the city's most highly-used bike facilities.
• The HTML command and commandfor attributes - 2025-03-08 - Opening and closing popovers and dialogs without JavaScript using invoker commands, and custom commands with the JavaScript command event
• Async, Sync, in Between - 2025-03-08 - The coloring problem in modern programming, and a proposal of a new approach
• The More Important Half of Great API Boundaries | Kyle Gill - 2025-03-07 - Designing good tools depends on much more than the features you include. Like the best margherita pizzas in Italy, or the best ambient music…
• Infrastructure as actual Code (IaaC) | Alexander Samsig - 2025-03-06 - - Could we please stop using DSLs in a configuration language to define infrastructure?
• Logs Matter More Than Metrics - HyperDX Blog - 2025-03-06 - Developers have a strange fascination with metrics and relatively little love for logs. Together, these are misplaced priorities.
• Claude, Makers, and Managers - 2025-03-06
• (1) Adding Value Through Removal — Why Creation and Building is Overvalued - 2025-03-05 - Removing things is often just as complex as adding things. It is a way to add value which is often overlooked.
• (1) Are PIPs designed to fail? - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2025-03-04 - Why performance improvement plans (PIPs, Pivots) almost always fail
• Downtown Redmond Link Opening May 10 – Seattle Transit Blog - 2025-03-04 - A test train pulls away from Downtown Redmond Station. Photo courtesy of Claudia Balducci via Bluesky. At the future Marymoor Village Station this morning, Sound Transit announced the Downtown Redm…
• Automate Ballard Link – Seattle Transit Blog - 2025-03-04 - Sound Transit is currently in the planning phase of building the Ballard Link Extension (BLE). These plans currently include a second downtown Seattle transit tunnel parallel to the one currently u…
• SODO guideway construction – Seattle Transit Blog - 2025-03-04 - At last week’s Sound Transit Board meeting, Sound Transit’s West Seattle project manager Brad Owen showed the extend of the guideway from the SODO station along the Spokane viaduct, acr…
• AI disruption – code editors are up for grabs – James Governor's Monkchips - 2025-03-03 - One of the surprisingly sticky parts of IT infrastructure over recent decades is, weirdly enough, the code editor or IDE. Sure, backend databases and transaction systems may have a long shelf life, but developers are like baby ducks with their mothers – once they imprint on an editor they’re Emacs or Vim for life. But
• Absence of Software Architecture 🏗️ Why Software Architecture Matters | JUWEL Development - 2025-03-03 - - Explore the crucial role software architecture plays in creating sustainable systems. Learn how the absence of a clear architectural foundation can lead to increased complexity, inconsistent decisions, and higher long-term costs. Discover how prioritizing architecture from the outset can streamline development, improve scalability, and minimize risk
• how to gain code execution on millions of people and hundreds of popular apps - eva's site - 2025-03-03 - - how to gain code execution on millions of people and hundreds of popular apps
• Where Team Topologies Goes Wrong - Sebastian Rheinnecker's Blog - 2025-03-02 -
• Structured data extraction from unstructured content using LLM schemas - 2025-03-02 - - LLM 0.23 is out today, and the signature feature is support for schemas—a new way of providing structured output from a model that matches a specification provided by the user. …
• You can’t delete the default - 2025-03-02 - - Every company has a default. It’s the set of things that happen when nobody is pushing in any particular direction. Usually, its the combined momentum of all the pushing you’ve been doing. There are times in a company where its useful to remove that default. You want to
• memory.elliott.computer - 2025-03-02 -
• The Perceived Cost of Living - 2025-03-02 - - When someone says, “Everything is getting more expensive,” what does that actually mean? Rising prices are easy to observe, but quantifying their impact on daily life requires a deeper look at how
• Using jj as a manager – alper.nl - 2025-03-02 - - I think when people ask what’s so great about jj they tend to go deep into things such as mega-merge strategies and stacked PRs. These things are cool, no doubt, but jj can be useful starting…
• React Performance: Common Problems & Their Solutions | Product Blog • Sentry - 2025-03-02 - Nobody has time for buggy apps. Learn the best practices for improving React performance, including solutions to common problems & tools here.
• ORCA Pod and Sound Transit Reducing Select Fares on March 1 - The Urbanist - 2025-03-02 - # Sound Transit alongside Community Transit and the wider ORCA card pod will make some limited fare changes on Saturday, March 1, including lowering regular adult day passes from $8.00 to $6.00 and for reduced fare day passes from $4.00 to $2.00.
• Trump Officials Delay Expected Approval Date for West Seattle Light Rail - The Urbanist - 2025-03-02 - # The 30 to 60 days of additional review isn't unique to Sound Transit's light rail project, CEO Goran Sparrman said, but will nonetheless likely alarm many transit advocates and threaten the project's schedule.
• Op-Ed: 10 Reasons Seattle Adding 30 Neighborhood Centers Is Smart Planning - The Urbanist - 2025-03-02 - # Keeping all 30 proposed Neighborhood Centers is essential for a more affordable, sustainable, and thriving Seattle. If we chip away at Neighborhood Centers, we’ll be left with the same housing shortages, rising costs, and inequitable growth patterns we’ve seen for decades.
• Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - Isolated Declarations - 2025-03-01 - - TypeScript's new isolated declaration feature is a game changer for sharing code among developers. It significantly simplifies the process of packaging your code for consumption whilst reducing the time to create type definition files from minutes, sometimes even hours, down to less than a second.
• Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - Rust and JavaScript Plugins - 2025-03-01 - Up until recently, supporting JavaScript in Rust based tools has been deemed not worth it. The main concern is the overhead of the de-/serialization cost when sending data back and forth. But there is a way to get rid of the deserialization cost entirely that's not widely known.

February 2025

• Being explicit about expectations isn't micromanagement - Michael Bensoussan – Engineering & Leadership - 2025-02-28 - - Goals without explicit expectations are just wishes. I learned that being clear about what you need from senior engineers isn’t micromanagement — it’s good leadership. Because when everyone knows what good looks like, they can focus on delivering instead of mind-reading.
• Being explicit about expectations isn't micromanagement - Michael Bensoussan – Engineering & Leadership - 2025-02-28 - - Goals without explicit expectations are just wishes. I learned that being clear about what you need from senior engineers isn’t micromanagement — it’s good leadership. Because when everyone knows what good looks like, they can focus on delivering instead of mind-reading.
• Fire and Advance - kupajo - 2025-02-28 - - Move fast, gain ground. Rapid execution and building momentum can propel projects forward.
• How I know I'm working with a strong engineer | sean goedecke - 2025-02-28 - - Two thoughts that I have
• on approaching hard problems • Buttondown - 2025-02-28 - - Friends, colleagues, and lovers of words, I usually use this space to talk about books, but today I want to tell you about my friend Adriana Salerno. Like...
• Optimizing SPA load times with async chunks preloading | Matteo Mazzarolo - 2025-02-25 - - Improve the performance of client-side rendered SPAs by avoiding the waterfall effect caused by route-based lazy-loading.
• Getting Perfectly Structured Data from LLMs | Omar Kamali - 2025-02-25 - - If you've ever struggled to get consistent JSON output from large language models, I have a simple and clever solution for you.
• Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code \ Anthropic - 2025-02-25 - - Today, we’re announcing Claude 3.7 Sonnet, our most intelligent model to date and the first hybrid reasoning model generally available on the market.
• Claude Code Initial Impressions - 2025-02-25 -
• (1) Vaultwarden Serverless - Chase Douglas - 2025-02-25 - or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AWS Aurora DSQL
• Old man yells at subnets - by Aditya Bhargava - DuckTyped - 2025-02-25 - In the last chapter, we talked about VPCs, and how a VPC is a private network inside AWS.
• Why CEO Matt Garman is willing to bet AWS on AI | The Verge - 2025-02-25 - The new head of AWS says Amazon is betting on a “massive” shift with AI.
• Good engineers are right, a lot | sean goedecke - 2025-02-25 - - It's an iffy Amazon leadership principle but a great engineering metric
• Get Out of the Building: Essential Lessons from IMVU and Amazon on Starting with the Customer - 2025-02-25 - 3 core principles: Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code; Test Assumptions, Not Just Features; Build Measurement Into Your Process
• The Six Steps to Saying No — Why Being a Team Player is Not Necessarily Great - 2025-02-25 - Frequently, saying no is better than saying yes. Our teams can concentrate on the highest value work if we set clear boundaries.
• The Downfall of Alternative Frontends - 2025-02-25 -
• Engineers who won’t commit | sean goedecke - 2025-02-24 - - Why remaining non-commital is cowardly
• Tactical vs Strategic Developers - by Alain - 2025-02-24 - "A Philosophy of Software Design" pt.1
• Tactical vs Strategic Developers - by Alain - 2025-02-24 - "A Philosophy of Software Design" pt.1
• Empowering Your Staff Doesn’t Work. Here’s What Does. – Klaus Breyer - 2025-02-23 - - There was a time when I managed some individuals who weren’t particularly independent. They were talented, no doubt, but hesitant to take action without my input. My solution? Empower them. Or so I thought. I’d say things like, You’re empowered! Make the call! Take charge! But it never worked the way I hoped. They’d start a task, get partway through, and then ask for clarification—or worse, look for my approval. Frustrated, I found myself micromanaging to ensure things were done correctly. The cycle repeated endlessly: empowering them in words, controlling them in actions.
• Bookmarklet Maker - 2025-02-23 - - Bookmarklet creator tool.
• Bookmarklet Maker - 2025-02-23 - - Bookmarklet creator tool.
• Amazon employees share frustrations on return to work - 2025-02-22 - Employees voice concerns as Amazon navigates roadblocks in the return-to-office plan, highlighting ongoing challenges at work. - 4398 words
• Why are big tech companies so slow? | sean goedecke - 2025-02-22 - - It's not incompetence or process, it's thousands of feature interactions - 7361 words
• Mayor Harrell Issues Executive Order to Expedite Seattle Light Rail Expansion - Office of the Mayor - 2025-02-22 - Seattle – Today, Mayor and Sound Transit Board Member Bruce Harrell announced a new Executive Order to improve the coordination of City of Seattle (City) efforts to safely and efficiently speed up the delivery of light rail to West Seattle and Ballard. The voter-approved Sound Transit (ST) 3 project is one of the largest infrastructure […]
• The Hidden Costs of Running a Global Engineering Team and Recipes for Mitigation - Michael Bensoussan – Engineering & Leadership - 2025-02-21 - Time zones kill engineering velocity in ways that aren’t obvious until you’re stuck with them. Drawing from real experience managing teams across US and European time zones, I break down the hidden costs of global engineering teams and share battle-tested ways to minimize the damage. - 10414 words
• React "as" Prop Using TypeScript | Playful Programming - 2025-02-21 - Learn how to type the "as" prop in React to dynamically change the rendered HTML tag. - 3379 words
• This menu needs to die - 2025-02-21 - - M.G. Siegler: The Great AI UI Unification And depending on which model you choose to use, you get other options from there, as various buttons will be enabled in the message box for 'Web Search' and now 'Deep Research'. Oh and I forgot the '+' button, which has - 3715 words
• My LLM codegen workflow atm | Harper Reed's Blog - 2025-02-21 - - A detailed walkthrough of my current workflow for using LLms to build software, from brainstorming through planning and execution.
• Interfaces as a principle of engineering - AlexandreHTRB blog - 2025-02-20 - - Interfaces are a concept that extends beyond programming, covering economy, industry and society.
• captureOwnerStack – React - 2025-02-20 - The library for web and native user interfaces - 4742 words
• (1) Harvard "CEO Test" - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2025-02-20 - 7 questions to be a more effective leader - 7808 words
• Real User Monitoring With a Splash of OpenTelemetry | Honeycomb - 2025-02-20 - Austin explains why real user monitoring is mostly a data analytics problem, and how pairing RUM with OpenTelemetry can help.
• 8 Million Requests Later, We Made The SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack Look Amateur - 2025-02-20 - Surprise surprise, we've done it again. We've demonstrated an ability to compromise significantly sensitive networks, including governments, militaries, space agencies, cyber security companies, supply chains, software development systems and environments, and more. “Ugh, won’t they just stick to creating poor-quality memes?” we hear you moan. Maybe we should, maybe - 65453 words
• Retry behavior - AWS SDKs and Tools - 2025-02-19 - Retry behavior includes settings regarding how the SDKs attempt to recover from failures resulting from requests made to AWS services. Configure this functionality by using the following settings.
• Retry behavior - AWS SDKs and Tools - 2025-02-19 - Retry behavior includes settings regarding how the SDKs attempt to recover from failures resulting from requests made to AWS services. Configure this functionality by using the following settings.
• Terraform Validate Command - Validate Configuration Locally - 2025-02-19 - Learn how to use the Terraform validate command with examples. See the changes -no-color and -json options make in output. Terraform validate vs. plan.
• Slides: Going Staff – Journeys of a not so young anymore Software Engineer - 2025-02-18 - - And somewhat belatedly the slides I presented at the Ruby User Group Berlin February meetup almost 2 weeks ago 😅 I’ve been extremely busy, so sorry for the delay. “Going Staff” se… - 2091 words
• Get your work recognized: write a brag document - 2025-02-16 - Get your work recognized: write a brag document - 16225 words
• Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities • The Register - 2025-02-14 - FBI, CISA harrumph at Microsoft and VMware in call for coders to quit baking avoidable defects into stuff
• Op-ed: Boosting Freight Rail Is a Forgotten but Essential Climate Action - The Urbanist - 2025-02-14 - # Moving freight by rail is significantly more efficient than by truck, a fact that could help Washington meet its climate goals. But are state leaders neglecting improvements to the state rail network? - 15582 words
• Introducing the Anthropic Economic Index \ Anthropic - 2025-02-14 - Announcing our new Economic Index, and the first results on AI use in the economy - 12755 words
• Some terminal frustrations - 2025-02-14 - Some terminal frustrations - 9384 words
• Seattle Hiring Small Army of Planners for Sound Transit 3 Work - The Urbanist - 2025-02-13 - # A quiet change to the spending categories in Seattle's dedicated transit funding measure mean that the City of Seattle will be able to hire dozens of staff to work on different aspects of Sound Transit planning. - 13406 words
• Seattle Readies Land Use Code Overhaul in Preparation for Sound Transit 3 - The Urbanist - 2025-02-13 - # Seattle's land use code is ill-equipped to handle the scale of permits that will be required to approve the city's next light rail lines. This proposed overhaul is intended to ensure transit remains on schedule. - 11385 words
• Do the Right Things Quietly - kolyder - 2025-02-13 - - On the power of performing good deeds without seeking recognition. Working quietly can increase your freedom, optionality, and the compounding effect of goodwill.
• Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry - Blogomatano - 2025-02-13 - Software development topics I've changed my mind on over the course of a decade - 3114 words
• Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools—Daniel De Laney - 2025-02-13 - You don’t want to have a conversation with your computer, you want to build.
• There are a lot of ways to break up long tasks in JavaScript. | Alex MacArthur - 2025-02-12 - It's very common to intentionally break up long, expensive tasks over multiple ticks of the event loop. But there are sure are a lot of approaches to choose from. Let's explore them. - 768 words
• Batyr Nuryyev | A Simple Method for Smarter Decision Making - 2025-02-12 - Simple framework for making complex decisions. - 6615 words
• WTF are Popcorn Tasks? | Madole.xyz - 2025-02-12 - Drowning in 'urgent' requests? Learn how to manage 'popcorn tasks' — those unplanned interruptions that derail your sprints — with a simple backlog strategy. Boost productivity and reduce stress! | Blog post - 2688 words
• Prettier 3.5: New objectWrap option, experimentalOperatorPosition option and TS config file support! · Prettier - 2025-02-12 - This release includes a lot of bug fixes and the following new features: - 10328 words
• Initial election results show support for Seattle social housing tax opposed by Amazon, Microsoft – GeekWire - 2025-02-12 - (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle voters are showing support for a new tax on big business that would fund a social housing developer. More - 6063 words
• Seattle Releases Road Map for Transportation Levy Spending in 2025 and Beyond - The Urbanist - 2025-02-12 - # The 2025 delivery plan for the first year of the Seattle Transportation Levy spells out a broad array of projects that will enter the pipeline this year. - 15127 words
• Seattle Breaks Ground on Bell Street Bike Lane, Waterfront Park Linkage - The Urbanist - 2025-02-12 - # A $5.2 million project overhauling two blocks of Bell Street adds a protected bike lane and pedestrian upgrades, but stops short of full pedestrianization. - 9655 words
• OpenAI's First Fear - its daniel johns - 2025-02-12 - - An exploration of how OpenAI’s fear of public perception led to hesitant decisions, branding confusion, and the importance of bold innovation. - 7218 words
• Prompting LLMs is not engineering · A Place Where Even Mammoths Fly - 2025-02-12 - - prompt engineering is nothing but an attempt to reverse-engineer a non-deterministic black box for which any of the parameters below are unknown: - training set - weights - constraints on the model - layers between you and the model that transform both your input and the model's output that can change at any time - availability of compute for your specific query - 2234 words
• We are destroying software - <antirez> - 2025-02-12 - 1518 words
• Introducing AWS CloudFormation Stack Refactoring | AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog - 2025-02-11 - Introduction As your cloud infrastructure grows and evolves, you may find the need to reorganize your AWS CloudFormation stacks for better management, for improved modularity, or to align with changing business requirements. CloudFormation now offers a powerful feature that allows you to move resources between stacks. In this post, we’ll explore the process of stack […] - 12025 words
• AWS Vs. Microsoft Vs. Google Cloud Earnings Q4 2024 Face-Off - 2025-02-10 - Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AWS cloud sales for fourth quarter 2024 includes global market share, total revenue, operating income and sales growth comparison.
• Building, Breaking, and Rebuilding: My Journey to a Smarter RAG Application - 2025-02-05 - Ever tried organising years of accumulated knowledge into a searchable system? - 5896 words
• Global Variables Are Not the Problem - 2025-02-03 -
• Observability as the pillar of great architectures - 2025-02-03 - - When we think of “observability,” the first idea that probably comes to mind is “problems” or “troubleshooting” ( if you prefer the jargon). - 7423 words
• AI: Are We Holding It Wrong? | thoughts - 2025-02-02 - My thoughts written down.
• The Era of Tab Continuation - Allen Pike - 2025-02-02 - - Press tab to complete your work.
• It's OK to hardcode feature flags - 2025-02-02 - - The safest and most reliable way to deal with feature flags is to hardcode them - 3034 words

January 2025

• Write better comments by removing "we" - by Jacob Voytko - 2025-01-31 - By removing unnecessary usages of "we" and being direct and explicit, you can increase the signal-to-noise ratio of your comments. - 4652 words
• "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens - Xe Iaso - 2025-01-31 - - Xe Iaso's personal website. - 1749 words
• "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens - Xe Iaso - 2025-01-31 - - Xe Iaso's personal website. - 1749 words
• Write better comments by removing "we" - by Jacob Voytko - 2025-01-31 - By removing unnecessary usages of "we" and being direct and explicit, you can increase the signal-to-noise ratio of your comments. - 4652 words
• Emojicode Documentation - 2025-01-29
• Don't Be A ::Duck:: | ᕕʕ •ᴥ•ʔ୨ Shank Space - 2025-01-27 - - Ducks are awesome. They have some remarkable properties – their feet don't get cold, they eat rocks, have three eyelids with 340 degree vision and can fly up...
• DeepSeek-R1 and exploring DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B - 2025-01-27 - DeepSeek are the Chinese AI lab who dropped the best currently available open weights LLM on Christmas day, DeepSeek v3. That model was trained in part using their unreleased R1 …
• How I use git worktrees - llimllib notes - 2025-01-27
• AWS CodeBuild now supports test splitting and parallelism - AWS - 2025-01-27 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS CodeBuild now supports test splitting and parallelism
• You Can't Schedule Creativity: Putting Inspiration Into Your Outlook Calendar - 2025-01-27 - Creation can't be forced, but it can certainly be encouraged gently. - 4951 words
• Working fast and slow | sean goedecke - 2025-01-27 - - How I deal with being way more productive on some days than others - 4365 words
• The Lost Futures of Computing: How We Got Boxed Into the Desktop Metaphor - André Klein Dot Net - 2025-01-27 - - In the late 1960s, Xerox was the undisputed king of the copier world, practically printing money with its revolutionary machines. With a stranglehold on 95% of the U.S. copier market, the company wasn’t just thriving—it was reshaping how the world handled information. Not out of an immediate fear for their paper-centric business, but with visionary... Continue reading → - 8868 words
• Don’t be afraid of rabbit holes | Branislav Jenco - 2025-01-25 - - I’ve gotten myself into some deep rabbit holes in the course of everyday software development. I find some surprising behavior, or an apparent bug, and before I know it, 57 tabs are open in my browser. They hold a record of my journey through the source code of 5 different codebases, their GitHub Issues, their fork’s GitHub Issues, Stack Overflow, paywalled Medium articles that weren’t worth opening and, these days, a conversation with a helpful-but-not-really LLM. - 2679 words
• Replit, the Figma Replacement | Nic Bertino - 2025-01-25 - - Nic Bertino is a design leader, music maker, and disco lover out here getting people close to good design.
• Tours through the Book - The Fuzzing Book - 2025-01-25 - This book is massive. With more than 20,000 lines of code and 150,000 words of text, a printed version would cover more than 1,200 pages of text. Obviously, we do not assume that everybody wants to read everything.While the chapters of this book can be read one after the other, there are many possible paths through the book. In this graph, an arrow $A \rightarrow B$ means that chapter $A$ is a prerequisite for chapter $B$. You can pick arbitrary paths in this graph to get to the topics that interest you most:But since even this map can be overwhelming, here are a few tours to get you started. Each of these tours allows you to focus on a particular view, depending on whether you are a programmer, student, or researcher. - 12380 words
• Staffers unload on Amazon ‘leadership’ after return-to-office for lack of parking, desk shortage: report - 2025-01-25 - Amazon staffers slammed the company for being sorely underprepared after forcing them to return to the office five days a week — with not enough desks for everyone, packed parking lots and a startling surge in workplace thefts, according to a report. “Our upper ‘leadership’ has botched this so hard along with so many other things,” one Amazon worker said via the company’s Slack, Business Insider reported. “Makes one wonder what other poor...
• RTO Mandates: Hard Truths for Leaders - 2025-01-25 - In this short video, learn why return-to-office mandates can backfire and how to build a strong hybrid work culture. - 2044 words
• Interview Series: Ethan Evans. - by Sebastien Taveau - 2025-01-24 - The retired VP at Amazon and now Executive Coach shares his mantras. - 14285 words
• The Sorrowful Tale of the Dread Pirate Roberts - 2025-01-24 - Ross Ulbricht's pardon, and the squalid bargain between Trump and the Silicon Valley right - 14121 words
• Announcing Rspack 1.2 - Rspack - 2025-01-24 - Fast Rust-based web bundler
• Announcing ArkType 2.0 - 2025-01-24 - 100x faster validation with DX that will blow your mind - 2963 words
• AWS CodePipeline introduces new debugging experience in AWS Management Console - AWS - 2025-01-23 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS CodePipeline introduces new debugging experience in AWS Management Console
• AWS CodePipeline introduces new debugging experience in AWS Management Console - AWS - 2025-01-23 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS CodePipeline introduces new debugging experience in AWS Management Console
• Capturing Decisions | Designer Decisions - 2025-01-21 - How to capture design decisions in data
• The problem with design tokens | André Torgal - 2025-01-21 - - Exploring the limitations of design tokens, namely the struggle to properly model design contexts in design systems. - 8564 words
• (1) The Hidden Advantage of Sharp Edges — Why Being Disagreeable is Best - 2025-01-21 - Anyone can be valuable if they have the right motivation, but strangely enough, being disagreeable multiplies that value. - 3786 words
• (1) Get Unstuck and Move Up in 2025 - 2025-01-21 - 6 ways to escape being stuck - 8461 words
• (1) Notes on Nix - by Forrest Brazeal - Good Tech Things - 2025-01-21 - They helped me. Maybe they will help you. - 6736 words
• Big Bets | Jack Danger - 2025-01-21 - - A ‘Big Bet’ is a rapid push into a new market space, typically championed by an executive and led by experienced engineers. While the term ‘bet’ suggests a risk, these initiatives often fail and come with hidden costs, like draining morale and neglecting other key products. I witnessed multiple big bets at Square and had the misfortune of being part of a couple. I worked on the Square Wallet team, which was Square’s first attempt to create a B2C product. Later, I got picked to implement the doomed “Square 275” feature where we charged merchants a flat fee for unlimited credit card processing. Both were big bets mandated by the CEO, bypassing the best practices of product research. - 6286 words
• Calling strangers uncle and auntie | Onur Solmaz blog - 2025-01-21 - - Cultures can be categorized across many axes, and one of them is whether you can call an older male stranger uncle or female stranger auntie. For example, calling a shopkeeper uncle might be sympathetic in Singapore, whereas doing the same in Germany (Onkel) might get a negative reaction: “I’m not your uncle”. - 3295 words
• (1) Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling? - 2025-01-20 - I have my suspicions - 7217 words
• The Best 25 Bucks I Ever Spent - 2025-01-20 - - Bonus: why you need to do it too.
• Object.freeze() Goes Hard 🥶❄️ - DEV Community - 2025-01-20 - The title says it all. Let's talk about one of JavaScript's most underrated features:... - 9915 words
• Cursor is Anthropic’s Largest Customer (and Maxing Out Their GPUs) - Vincent Schmalbach - 2025-01-19 - Cursor is Anthropic’s Largest Customer and is apparently hitting the limits of what their GPU infrastructure can handle.
• Provisional Guidance for Users of LLM-Based Code Generators — /dev/lawyer - 2025-01-19 - - available intuition for avoiding big risks
• The Source of Readability - 2025-01-19 - - Readability is more objective than you'd think. - 15502 words
• Browsers need to change how autofill works - 2025-01-19 - Web developer and cybersecurity researcher
• (1) Why It Might Be Time to Rethink Using Cosine Similarity - 2025-01-19 - Last year, researchers from Netflix released a study on the nuances of using cosine distance in recommendation systems. - 2949 words
• all kpis are derivatives of revenue or cost | Joe Conway Technology Leader - 2025-01-17 - - Every metric, objective or goal should be driving revenue or reducing cost. If it isn’t, it’s not something a business, product or team should be pursuing.
• Memorization Is Important In CS - 2025-01-17 - Programmer with who can't stop picking new hobbies..
• Amazon and Takealot crush Incredible in South African online delivery battle – MyBroadband - 2025-01-17 - Makro also performed very well in MyBroadband’s latest online delivery test. - 5591 words
• I stumbled upon a high-value communication hack for 1:1s - 2025-01-17 - - Taking notes during a meeting is smart, but this extra step is brilliant.
• Shaping the future of CDK together | AWS Open Source Blog - 2025-01-17 - When AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) was announced in 2019, the project introduced a new stage in the evolution of infrastructure as code (IaC), and changed the way customers build on AWS. For those less familiar, CDK is an open source software development framework enabling builders to model and provision their cloud application resources using […] - 4860 words
• Document Your Progress at Work - 2025-01-17 - - How can you ensure that your contributions are also recognized? - 3285 words
• Career Paths in Tech, Part 1: Why Choose the IC Path? - Coder to CTO | Coder to CTO - 2025-01-17 - - Why the Individual Contributor path offers opportunities for technical mastery, direct impact, and meaningful career growth in modern tech organizations. - 5668 words
• Maybe don't navigate(-1) in Remix/React Router — ProgrammingAreHard — - 2025-01-17 - 4186 words
• Why don’t we do more prescribed burning? An explainer. – Kevin Drum - 2025-01-17 - - Prescribed fires—or the lack of them—are on everybody's lip these days. Most people are just parroting talking points for political purposes, but perhaps you'd actually like to be a little smarter about it? Sure you would. It's a weekend and you have some spare time. So let's go through some history and then some current events. It's a little long… - 13022 words
• Jonas Hietala: First impressions of Ghostty - 2025-01-17 - - 6469 words
• Zero to One Hundred Thousand Tests · Evan Todd - 2025-01-17 - - When I started at StrongDM five years ago (woah), we had zero automated tests. Last year we had 50,000 tests. Today, around 70% of our code is covered by over 100,000 tests, most of which run on every pull request. What follows is my personal opinion about what constitutes a “good” automated test based on my observation of this colossal increase in test coverage. The goal is not to convince you I’m right, but to draw some contrasts and provoke you to question assumptions and form your own opinions.
• (1) America's plan to control global AI - by Henry Farrell - 2025-01-17 - Gaia est omnis divisa in partes tres* - 14867 words
• ECMAScript feature: import attributes - 2025-01-17 - The ECMAScript feature “Import Attributes” (by Sven Sauleau, Daniel Ehrenberg, Myles Borins, Dan Clark and Nicolò Ribaudo) helps with importing artifacts other than JavaScript modules. In this blog post, we examine what that looks like and why it’s useful. Import attributes reached stage 4 in October 2024 and will probably be part of ECMAScript 2025.
• Improve your soft skills - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2025-01-17 - EQ advice on being a better storyteller, writer, public speaker, and how to develop executive presence - 13509 words
• Adopting the compiler at Wakelet.com in production. · reactwg/react-compiler · Discussion #52 · GitHub - 2025-01-16 - As we have a quite large codebase at wakelet.com, it took a while to roll the compiler out as we kept hitting edge cases and odd issues with our components (usually us doing weird things). However,...
• Powershell Users Like To Vomit - Tim Kellogg - 2025-01-14 - - In a stunning new study, PowerShell users insist that they like to vomit. How can this be? It's all about the data, and why you absolutely should question the data. - 4289 words
• What Expats Don’t Tell You About Moving Abroad | Alex Zvorygin - 2025-01-14 - - Doesn’t your western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic country have a lot of problems? The job/housing/dating markets are demoralizing, the institutions are terrible, and the people are kind of deranged. And perhaps it’s hard to admit, but you’re also just not having a good time. - 5156 words
• Just Present the First Draft! - 2025-01-13 - 1108 words
• I Know About The Date In The Footer | Henry From Online - 2025-01-11 - - A quick note about string interpolation and jokes that didn’t land. - 334 words
• Procession, memorial service on Jan. 10 for King County Metro Transit Operator Shawn Yim – Metro Matters - 2025-01-10 - King County Metro, community members, riders and transit agencies throughout the region will gather Friday, Jan. 10, to celebrate and remember Transit Operator Shawn Yim, who was killed in the line… - 3864 words
• Improving SVG chart interactivity with Voronoi diagrams - 2025-01-09 - - How I used Delaunay triangulation and Voronoi diagrams to fix hover issues in my SVG charts (with React and D3.js). - 11244 words
• When will we fix the tools that run the world? - 2025-01-09 - 1640 words
• Passkeys are incompatible with open-source software (was: “Passkey marketing is lying to you”) – Smoking on a Bike - 2025-01-09 - - 10204 words
• What makes strong engineers strong? | sean goedecke - 2025-01-09 - Self-belief, pragmatism, speed, and technical ability - 6589 words
• Confusing The Feature With The Value – Sherman On Software - 2025-01-09 -
• A Software Observability Roundup - parente.dev - 2025-01-07 - - I spent some time recently catching up on my #to-read saves in Obsidian. More than a fewof these were blog posts from 2024 about software observability. Talk of "redefining observability","observability 2.0", and "try Honeycomb" had caught my eye in a few spaces,and so I had been hoarding links on the topic. After spending a few days immersing myself in thosearticles and branching out to others, I decided to write this bullet-form roundup. - 10321 words
• Google's Search Results are Infested, and Open AI is Using Google's Playbook from the 2000s - Chuck W Nelson - 2025-01-07 - Google search results are becoming annoying to use and Open AI is about to eat Google's lunch. - 4594 words
• Everything Google killed in 2024: 8 new entries to the Google Graveyard - 2025-01-07 - RIP - 17307 words
• How to Miss Your Dates and Fail Your Goals With Finesse - 2025-01-06 - Everyone fails goals. How you fail your goals will determine what type of leader you are. - 3571 words
• (1) Managers Make Teams Deliver More Value, Not Deliver More Output - 2025-01-06 - True productivity for a team is measured by the value created, not the work completed. The job of a manager is to focus on the value hidden behind the piles of work. - 9168 words
• Opening Date for Seattle Waterfront Bike Path Pushed Back Again - The Urbanist - 2025-01-04 - # Bike and scooter riders have been waiting a long time for the separated pathway along Downtown Seattle's waterfront to open. The wait is set to continue for another few months. - 7837 words
• Amazon's Project Kuiper revs up to join megaconstellation market – GeekWire - 2025-01-03 - What will 2025 bring from the final frontier? The rise of Amazon's Project Kuiper satellite network will be one of the big stories in space. - 6985 words
• Downtown Seattle leader calls Amazon's return-to-office mandate 'influential' as 5-day policy begins – GeekWire - 2025-01-03 - Amazon workers and others near The Spheres on the company's Seattle headquarters campus. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Will other companies - 3619 words
• Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title - 2025-01-01

December 2024

• Learn to write well BEFORE you have something worth saying | Eukaryote Writes Blog - 2024-12-31 - - Lessons learned from trip reports and journal articles. - 6306 words
• How to Use Your Mentor Effectively? - by Raviraj Achar - 2024-12-31 - What was the last thing you discussed with your mentor? Was it a quick question about a task, or perhaps seeking feedback on a design document? While these interactions are valuable, they barely scratch the surface of what mentorship can offer. This approach, though common, often results in classic mentor under-utilization. - 5561 words
• Up to 18 e-buses for King County Metro: Solaris wins first contract in the US market - 2024-12-30 - Solaris has been awarded its first contract in the US market: 4 electric buses will be supplied to King County Metro, the main public... - 3521 words
• Ridership Patterns for King County Metro Route 40 – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-12-30 - King County Metro’s Route 40 travels inbound from Northgate Station to downtown Seattle via Crown Hill, Ballard, Fremont, and South Lake Union. Outbound trips travel in the reverse direction. In Oc… - 7280 words
• JSON command-line toolbox (jq, gron, jc, etc) - 2024-12-29 - The JSON format is the backbone of current Internet protocols and APIs, and this article contains a list of tools to make a better use of it from the command-line, without the need of writing complex programs to read, search, parse, transform and transmit JSON data. - 9732 words
• Frameworkism: Senior Software Developers' Pit of Doom – Aaronontheweb - 2024-12-28 - - Mistakes so insane and destructive that they require experience to make. - 19323 words
• Amazon and the endangered future of the middle manager - 2024-12-28 - Amazon CEO Andy Jassy delivered one of 2024's major job headlines with his five-day office mandate, but there's a bigger tech organizational shakeup at work.
• Principal Engineer Roles Framework - 2024-12-28 - I have worked on Amazon S3 for ~12 years and if there is one thing that I have learned, it is that when you run complex systems at scale, you must think deeply about how teams work. It’s not enough to be get into the details about what you build. - 17069 words
• Op-Ed: A Wishlist for Pierce County Under Ryan Mello’s Leadership - The Urbanist - 2024-12-28 - # Greening neighborhoods, boosting Pierce Transit funding by 50%, and embracing housing growth are the top three goals Rubén Casas has laid out for Pierce County under Ryan Mello's progressive leadership. - 12924 words
• 24/7 Aurora Bus Lanes to Keep Riders Moving During I-5 Overhaul - The Urbanist - 2024-12-28 - # To keep buses moving as lanes are set to be shut down on I-5 over a three-year period, the Seattle Department of Transportation is set to convert peak-hour bus lanes to all-day. But the city isn't calling the change permanent. - 8347 words
• 2026 FIFA World Cup - Wikipedia - 2024-12-28
• Egoless Engineering - 2024-12-28 - It turns out misery is a shitty proxy metric.
• Building Reliable GenAI Applications: A Hands-on Testing & CI Workshop - 2024-12-26 - Recap and a walkthrough video of the Testing & CI for GenAI Workshop we ran yesterday. Join the next one! - 3966 words
• Sell Yourself - Don't Break Prod - 2024-12-26 -
• Product management is broken. Engineers can fix it - 2024-12-26 - How we've redefined the PM and engineer relationship - 12704 words
• Instrumenting a React App Using OpenTelemetry - The New Stack - 2024-12-26 - Learn how to get started with OpenTelemetry in a React app with basic and auto-instrumentation, as well as adding custom spans and metrics.
• OpenTelemetry Challenges: Handling Long-Running Spans - The New Stack - 2024-12-26 - The solution to long-running spans in OpenTelemetry is more creative than “don’t have long-running spans.” Learn how to address this common problem.
• Parkinson's Law: It's Real, So Use It - by James Stanier - 2024-12-26 - Yes, just set that deadline. - 5203 words
• Is King County Metro Headed for an Electrification Reset? - The Urbanist - 2024-12-26 - # King County Metro is set to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the coming years on electrifying its fleet and converting its bus bases, but the question of whether those projects come at the expense of transit service is set to get a closer look thanks to a provision in the county's 2025 budget. - 18191 words
• Preferring throwaway code over design docs - 2024-12-26 - If you have discipline to throw away your first idea, draft, throwaway PRs often drives more progress than a design doc. - 4840 words
• The Lies About Abstraction - 2024-12-26 - - 6619 words
• Seeing the World Through Your Field - Sebastian Mellen's Blog - 2024-12-26 - Something funny happens if you work in a particular field long enough, which is that you start to see everything that happens through the lens of the field you work in. For example, my current company (Cerebrum) operates in the background screening space. So I’ve started to see everything through the lens of background checks. Economic news is about companies, and news about companies is really news about the people in those companies, which is really news about who those people are hiring, which is really news about the background screening industry.
• Advent of Code analysis through the years – Blog Jesse van Elteren - 2024-12-25 - What can we learn from the stats?
• Start With Your Vision — Not With Goals. Measure What Really Matters. - 2024-12-25 - Goals Without Vision Are Worse Than Useless. They can lead you in an expensive wrong direction. - 5459 words
• Shoreline Votes to Ditch Parking Mandates, Legalize Neighborhood Cafes and Stores - The Urbanist - 2024-12-25 - # In approving a unanimous update to its Comprehensive Plan, the Shoreline City Council is set to go well beyond the minimum requirements of state law in pursuit of creating additional housing options and more vibrant neighborhoods. - 9763 words
• Glut of New Completed Single-Family Houses for Sale Spikes to Highest since 2007, Prices Drop to Lowest since 2021 But Are Still Way too High | Wolf Street - 2024-12-25 - 7244 words
• What will happen to U.S. economic power under Trump? - 2024-12-25 - Economic statecraft needs, like, a state - 5828 words
• AI: Are We Holding It Wrong? | thoughts - 2024-12-25 - My thoughts written down.
• AI: Are We Holding It Wrong? | thoughts - 2024-12-25 - My thoughts written down.
• Why we need seven bins - 2024-12-25 - It's time for some #binchat - 15437 words
• The True Cost of PMI: Why you should pay down your low-interest mortgage - 2024-12-25 - I got a guaranteed return of 10.66% by paying down my low-interest mortgage to eliminate PMI. - 5119 words
• NPM search is broken | blog - 2024-12-25 - As an active user of npm and an author/maintainer of several libraries, I’ve recently encountered significant problems with npm’s new search experience. While I appreciate the effort the npm team has put into improving search, the current implementation has introduced serious issues that negatively impact discoverability and usefulness. - 5664 words
• ٩◔̯◔۶ Web 3.0 slept with my wife - 2024-12-25 - - Feature Chum You know how when a tech company pushes a feature onto its users and it’s evident that the feature is just a way for the company to collect more user data or for some other nefarious business goal? You can tell that the feature results from some c-suite demand for world domination, and the marketing department sort of backed into whatever user benefit they’re touting. There isn’t a great word for that.
• Plans for high-speed train from B.C. to Oregon lands federal award - 2024-12-22 - The vision of building a high-speed rail line between Vancouver, B.C., and Portland has landed nearly $50 million to support planning efforts. - 3177 words
• Seattle-Area Light Rail Breaks Ridership Record, Again | Planetizen News - 2024-12-19 - Thanks to a new extension and reorganized connecting bus lines, the Link light rail system topped 3 million rides in October. - 4305 words
• (1) AI Fight Club and what it hides - by Henry Farrell - 2024-12-17 - Ritualized combat and syllabi that speak - 12257 words
• (1) Why did Silicon Valley turn right? - by Henry Farrell - 2024-12-16 - The "pounded progressive ally" thesis has limits - 22487 words
• Executives are Measured by Results: Here’s how to get them - 2024-12-16 - Why delivering results is what matters; Executing with autonomy; Recovering when things go wrong - 10418 words
• (1) Leading a High-Performing Org & Cross-Functional Acumen with Omar Halabieh (Amazon Tech Director) - 2024-12-16 - Chat with Omar Halabieh (Amazon Tech Director) - 7373 words
• King County Council Gets On Board with Civic Campus Redevelopment - The Urbanist - 2024-12-16 - # The King County Council approved a motion getting on board with Executive Dow Constantine's vision to add housing and other uses transforming the County's campus in Downtown Seattle. The vote pushed the idea a small step toward becoming a reality. - 9672 words
• We’ve Been Here Before – Terrible Software - 2024-12-16 - - Technological advancements have empowered engineers to focus on creativity and strategy. AI will similarly elevate human insight, generating growth and innovation.
• ARM needs to become more mainstream - 2024-12-16 - - … or at least more upstream. Recently I tried to migrate our home NAS from our good old (TM) Intel Celeron N3150 to a more modern Radxa Rock 5 ITX. The new board fits perfectly to the needs of our home: Small, enough peripherals for what I need, low-power yet strong enough to host our home services on it for the next years to come. And it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, although it’s not cheap either. - 4651 words
• Don't write clean code, write CRISP code — Bitfield Consulting - 2024-12-16 - - “Clean code” is so over: all the cool kids are switching to CRISP code . I’ll show you how to achieve it in five catchy, T-shirt-friendly slogans. - 15739 words
• 3 shell scripts: Kill weasel words, avoid the passive, eliminate duplicates - 2024-12-14 -
• US births fell in 2023 to the lowest count in more than 40 years | AP News - 2024-12-14 - A little under 3.6 million babies were born in 2023, according to provisional statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s about 76,000 fewer than the year before and the lowest one-year tally since 1979.
• How React Compiler Performs on Real Code - 2024-12-12 - Exploring the impact of React Compiler on initial load and interaction performance. With numbers. Measured on a real app. - 25510 words
• How React Compiler Performs on Real Code - 2024-12-12 - Exploring the impact of React Compiler on initial load and interaction performance. With numbers. Measured on a real app. - 25510 words
• Reflections on managing state - 2024-12-12 - In this post, I reflect on my experience of using multiple state management libraries and I describe the best practices I found for managing state in React.
• Amazon CloudWatch adds network performance monitoring for AWS workloads using flow monitors - AWS - 2024-12-11 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with Amazon CloudWatch adds network performance monitoring for AWS workloads using flow monitors
• A 'silver tsunami' unlikely to help Seattle's housing crisis | FOX 13 Seattle - 2024-12-11 - The anticipated "silver tsunami" of homes from older, downsizing owners is unlikely to bring relief to Seattle's housing affordability crisis, according to new research from Zillow. - 3772 words
• DSQL Vignette: Aurora DSQL, and A Personal Story - Marc's Blog - 2024-12-08 -
• Fed Balance Sheet QT: -$98 Billion in November, -$2.07 Trillion from Peak, to $6.90 Trillion, Lowest since May 2020 | Wolf Street - 2024-12-07 - 6608 words
• The Levy to Move Seattle Era Draws to a Close - The Urbanist - 2024-12-07 - # As Seattle's nine year transportation levy expires and a new one is set to take its place, the city is leaving behind the transformative goals of the Move Seattle era and trading them for something more modest. - 12549 words
• 2024 Forbes CMO Summit Europe - 2024-12-04 - AI startup Anthropic will collaborate with Amazon Web Services and put the supercomputer to work with its AI technology. - 9364 words
• Sound Transit Boardmembers Push for More Ambitious Rainier Valley Safety Plan - The Urbanist - 2024-12-04 - # Sound Transit plans to make a series of spot improvements over the next few years intended to improve safety at its at-grade stations in the Rainier Valley. But multiple board members are pushing the agency to think much bigger. - 12106 words
• Ballard Link Mode Selection – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-12-04 - A decade ago, Sound Transit hired experts to review transit modes to select the best mode for the Spine which could accommodate at-grade, elevated, and tunneled sections. It reconfirmed the decisio… - 5982 words
• A Complete Guide to React Router: Everything You Need to Know - 2024-12-02 - In this comprehensive, up-to-date tutorial, you'll learn everything you need to know to build production ready apps with React Router.
• Relentless Self-Improvement - 2024-12-02 - 4 ways to be exceptional - 4043 words
• (1) 6 Ways that Good People Build Trust, and Become Leaders That Others Follow - 2024-12-02 - What type of leader do you want to be? One core identifying feature of admired leaders is how many people follow them to their next role. And trust is the core tool to improve that metric. - 6072 words
• Clever, Brave, Persistent - Cam Hashemi - 2024-12-01 - - helping people help themselves - 4797 words
• Variants Explained - 2024-12-01 -
• Concurrency diagrams - 2024-12-01 - - When engineers discuss program design and system architecture, a common source of misunderstanding is concurrency. Often that's because we make internal assumptions about it, which we presume to be self-evident. But we don't all make the same assumptions, so you can end up in a situation where multiple conflicting beliefs are held about the concurrency of a system and nobody realises. Left unchecked, these misunderstandings can lurk until much later in the development process, when they're more expensive to fix. You can prevent these misunderstandings from happening by making concurrency explicit up-front, in a diagram.
• Trains are offices | hidde.blog - 2024-12-01 - - Some thoughts on traveling by train
• AL2023 vs. AL2: less disk space with ext4 | Practical Engineering - 2024-12-01 - - Usable space dropped from 93.3% to 92.6% on a 128GiB volume - 6462 words

November 2024

• Fake It Till You Make It — To Become a Leader, Act Like One - 2024-11-30 - I found, rather than waiting for my promotions at Amazon, I was more fulfilled and grew myself as a leader by pretending I had already been promoted. - 9758 words
• AWS Rolls Out Updates to Amazon Cognito - 2024-11-30 - Amazon Web Services' identity and access management platform has added new features that help developers implement secure, scalable, and customizable authentication solutions for their applications.
• Thanksgiving pies: How many does Costco sell? | Fox Business - 2024-11-29 - In 2023, Costco notched sales of 2.9 million pumpkin pies and 1.3 million apple and pecan pies in the U.S. during the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving. - 3506 words
• How to be a great manager - Dmitry Kudryavtsev - 2024-11-29 - - An insight from a non-manager perspective. - 10015 words
• Question Best Practices - 2024-11-29 -
• Claude’s Quality is Dropping - Here’s Why - Vincent Schmalbach - 2024-11-29 - - Claude’s performance has taken a noticeable hit lately. I’ve been using it daily for several months, and the degradation is pretty clear. Let me break down what’s happening and why I think it’s…
• Deno v. Oracle: Canceling the JavaScript Trademark - 2024-11-28 - Oracle is holding the JavaScript trademark hostage, and we’re pursuing legal means to #FreeJavaScript. Here’s a brief update. - 3390 words
• Three Tales from an Amazon Bar Raiser - by Dave Anderson - 2024-11-27 - A few examples of situations I went through as a bar raiser, one of the most entertaining positions at Amazon. - 14598 words
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 supports scaling to zero capacity - AWS - 2024-11-27 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 supports scaling to zero capacity
• (1) Visualize your success - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2024-11-27 - 5-minute exercise for "corporate athletes" - 5442 words
• Microsoft’s Response to Its Major Outage Is the 1 Thing No Company Should Ever Do - 2024-11-26 - Microsoft Outlook and Teams went down, and the company's response isn't helping anything. - 4689 words
• Please just stop saying "just" - 2024-11-26 - - Do you work in Software Engineering, and have you seen messages or sentences like these before? - 4488 words
• Amazon CloudFront now supports additional log formats and destinations for access logs - AWS - 2024-11-25 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with Amazon CloudFront now supports additional log formats and destinations for access logs
• Seattle Transportation Levy Passes – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-11-24 - On November 5th, Seattle voters passed the $1.55 billion 2024 Seattle Transportation Levy. Transportation Levy Project Examples Transportation Levy Overview The transportation levy spends money in … - 16366 words
• Why Washington was the only state to shift blue in 2024 - Axios Seattle - 2024-11-23 - In all other states, Trump's vote margin grew between 2020 and 2024, per an Axios analysis.
• Seattle City Council taps JumpStart payroll tax to fill 2025-2026 budget shortfall - Axios Seattle - 2024-11-23 - The City Council approved an $8.5 billion budget for 2025-2026 on Thursday, using the JumpStart tax to plug a budget hole.
• (1) The case against living in the Bay Area, for ambitious tech people - 2024-11-22 - come on, man - 11207 words
• Demand Destruction for Existing Homes: Sales in 2024 Track Lowest since 1995 amid Highest Supply for October in 6 Years | Wolf Street - 2024-11-22 - 8330 words
• Marko Živanović | Falsehoods Programmers Believe About the IT Industry - 2024-11-22 - - After a long time, I once again stumbled upon the very popular article “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names”.
• (1) Risk-takers surpass "reliable" workers - 2024-11-22 - What sets you apart: Taking risks, high performance, and building relationships - 4208 words
• LRMs Are Interpretable - Tim Kellogg - 2024-11-22 - - 6500 words
• Ranked: U.S. States vs. G7 Countries by GDP per Capita - 2024-11-19 - Why compare American states vs G7 economies? Answer: for a granular look at how America has left its peers in the dust. - 4932 words
• For The Love Of Iframes - 2024-11-19 - - Chronically underrated, chronically over-prescribed
• West Seattle Link Route Selection – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-11-19 - During their meeting on October 24th, the Sound Transit Board selected the preferred alignment for the West Seattle Link Extension (WSLE). They also authorized staff to have their partners develop … - 7204 words
• Council Affirms Support for SLU Streetcar, but Opposes Center City Extension - The Urbanist - 2024-11-19 - # By a 5-3 vote last week, the Seattle City Council said it wasn't ready to plan for the decommissioning of the South Lake Union Streetcar. But unifying the city's two streetcar lines into one system seems less likely than ever before. - 12060 words
• Cycling to work, your ultimate commuting checklist — here’s everything you need to ride to work and back | road.cc - 2024-11-19 - From bike recommendations, the kit, accessories and everything in between, here are the essentials for your daily commute and some upgrades for enhancing your ride when you've got the basics
• The magic of keeping one level of abstraction per function • Tymek Zapała - 2024-11-19 - I’m a software engineer and product maker based in Cracow, Poland. My mission is to create useful products by writing high-quality code and sharing my knowledge throughout the journey.
• Supporting Offline Mode in TanStack Query - 2024-11-19 - One of the main challenges I've faced when using TanStack is achieving offline usage while having full control over the data layer. In this blog post, we'll explore how to use Effect and Effect Schema, along with the browser's IndexedDB, to persist TanStack Query data locally. - 18765 words
• Example of Using useSyncExternalStore with LocalStorage | 56kode - 2024-11-19 - Learn how to efficiently synchronize application state with external data sources like LocalStorage using React's useSyncExternalStore hook, with a practical example and detailed explanation. - 7414 words
• Thoughts on Bluesky - Can's blog - 2024-11-19 - - Let’s talk about Bluesky, the decentralized microblogging application that’s currently eating Twitter and Mastodon’s lunch. Or so some say. In … - 10195 words
• Migrating from Zod to Valibot: A Comparative Experience | Matthew Kwong - 2024-11-18 - Learn about migrating from Zod to Valibot for form validation: smaller bundles, familiar APIs, but with room for documentation improvement. - 9227 words
• How I ship projects at big tech companies | sean goedecke - 2024-11-18 - What I think about when I'm lead engineer on a project - 12232 words
• The Bus Factor | MClare Blog - 2024-11-18 -
• Shae Erisson's blog - The github plugin my coworkers asked me not to write. - 2024-11-18
• IMG_0416 - ben-mini - 2024-11-16 - Between 2009 and 2012, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube” that allowed users to upload videos directly to YouTube from the Photos app. - 4942 words
• Adopting the compiler in Sanity Studio · reactwg/react-compiler · Discussion #33 · GitHub - 2024-11-16 - At Sanity we've been testing the compiler on Sanity Studio, to help improve the end user experience for people that are creating content, editing content, simply working with all sorts of content. ...
• No suspects in custody after string of armed robberies in south Seattle | king5.com - 2024-11-16 - The downtown activation team conducts targeted enforcement of “dangerous and disruptive behavior” and cleans and restores areas of concern. - 2187 words
• Top 10 IntelliJ IDEA Secrets for Insane Productivity | by Pernekhan Utemuratov | Medium - 2024-11-15 - Many developers these days use IntelliJ, but not many use it the right way. Let’s fix that ;) - 4603 words
• IntelliJ’s timeless Tips and Tricks | by Fedor Korotkov | Medium - 2024-11-15 - I want to start with a few disclaimers. I’m a huge fan of IntelliJ and my opinion is definitely biased. I even worked at JetBrains… - 10770 words
• 10 Advanced TypeScript Concepts Every Developer Should Know - DEV Community - 2024-11-15 - TypeScript is a modern programming language often preferred over JavaScript for its added type... - 15625 words
• (1) 3 Elements of Executive Leadership - 2024-11-15 - Be a trusted decision maker; Scale yourself to lead large orgs; Inventing and handling change - 8167 words
• Server and Client-Side React - by Robin Wieruch - 2024-11-15 - The web development landscape keeps evolving. - 2766 words
• A Pro's Guide to Deciding Whether it's Too Cold to Ride Outside - Velo - 2024-11-14 - Training in Canadian winters has given pro cyclist Haley Smith a lot of experience deciding whether or not to ride outside. - 3273 words
• What's going on with the vacant hole across from Seattle City Hall - Axios Seattle - 2024-11-14 - It's been almost two decades, and still, we've got nothing.
• OpenAPI for Contract Testing | Ujjwal Ojha - 2024-11-12 - - Using OpenAPI to its full capability can help you achieve contract testing and help improve reliability of your deployments. - 12624 words
• Unlocking the Power of JSON Patch | Zuplo Blog - 2024-11-12 - - JSON Patch is a simple, efficient, and standardized way to apply partial updates to JSON documents, especially over HTTP - 13977 words
• Optimize resource loading with the Fetch Priority API  |  Articles  |  web.dev - 2024-11-10 - The Fetch Priority API indicates the relative priority of resources to the browser. It can enable optimal loading and improve Core Web Vitals. - 21506 words
• Improving Support: Balancing Tickets and Real-Time Help - 2024-11-10 - - Discover why direct help is vital when real-time requests arise, enhancing efficiency and team cohesion beyond ticketing. - 3952 words
• Conditional React hooks pattern | Robin Malfait - 2024-11-10 - A pattern for conditionally applying React hooks. - 7148 words
• State of Frontend 2024 - 2024-11-10 - Based on surveys filled in by 6028 developers from 139 countries, the State of Frontend 2024 is supported by 23 expert commentaries about frontend trends and the future. - 6513 words
• 7.26.0 Released: stage 4 features enabled by default, and a new experimental code printer · Babel - 2024-11-10 - Babel 7.26.0 was just released! - 3875 words
• Communication for team leaders - Context - 2024-11-10 - You can have a fantastic team of subject matter experts and brilliant technical people, but if they don't talk to each other, you will never get a good product or outcome for a project. - 5411 words
• the death of the architect • Buttondown - 2024-11-10 - - Once upon a time, every project began with the creation of a canonical design document. This was called the system architecture, because it "rightly... - 7191 words
• Communication for team leaders - Trust - 2024-11-09 - - The second part of a three-part: Communication for Team Leaders. This one is about trust, letting go and delegating. I think it's the hardest one for new managers. - 7729 words
• (1) Comments - Skip first-line management and go straight to executive - 2024-11-09 - A reader question if it's possible to get into management without previous people management experience
• Building My Resume in HTML using Eleventy by Michael Engen - 2024-11-09 - - 9636 words
• The Big "Server Waterfall Problem" with RSCs | Epic React by Kent C. Dodds - 2024-11-09 - Understanding server-side waterfalls with RSCs and client-side waterfalls we're familiar with and why server-side waterfalls are probably better. - 218 words
• blog.kdgregory.com: My Thoughts on CodeCommit Deprecation - 2024-11-09 - AWS's recent fait accompli deprecation of CodeCommit and six other services was a shock to me. * Not because CodeCommit was a parti...
• Cloud Dev Environments | Rboyd's Developer Experience Blog - 2024-11-09 - A statically generated blog example using Next.js and Markdown. - 5985 words
• Yes, You Can Measure Technical Debt - by Kevin Borders - 2024-11-09 - How to calculate costs and build the business case for fixing technical debt - 11252 words
• The Problem with Your Feedback Strategy — and How to Fix It Today! - 2024-11-09 - Feedback Growth Matrix: 4 Ways to Adjust Your Feedback Approach Based on Your Employee's Performance & Motivation - 8174 words
• I've had a change of heart regarding employee metrics - 2024-11-09
• (1) 4 (More) Good Things and 2 (More) Bad Things and 2 Misunderstandings About Working at Amazon: From 12+ Years in Management - 2024-11-09 - A continuation of my previous article about my experiences at Amazon. What they do well, what they don't do well, and in this article, I also mention a few common beliefs I disagree with. - 10502 words
• Seattle Set to Double Down on Arbitrary Parking Mandates - The Urbanist - 2024-11-09 - # Despite being a longtime parking reform leader, Seattle is set to require off-street parking, even as it unlocks significant housing capacity near transit. This will make housing harder to build. - 10907 words
• Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities - 2024-11-08 - macOS comes with a lot of built-in utilities. Here's a list of some that I find interesting. - 3273 words
• Gamers are weird - 2024-11-08 -
• Problem solving vs Problem picking - Blog by Grzegorz Kossakowski - 2024-11-08 - - I frequently participate in debates about why Poles playing an outsized role in building frontier AI in the US doesn’t translate into an AI boom in their home country. - 3946 words
• Upgrading React with micro-frontends - 2024-11-07 - How to upgrade React incrementally across multiple micro-frontends - 2971 words
• Sleepy Bainbridge Island Decides How To Grow Up - The Urbanist - 2024-11-05 - # Bainbridge Island and its picturesque downtown of Winslow is poised to see significant changes thanks to new state laws, as the Bainbridge council grapples with how to plan housing growth for the coming decades. - 14698 words
• Anthropic hikes the price of its Haiku model | TechCrunch - 2024-11-05 - Anthropic has released its newest AI model, Claude 3.5 Haiku. But it's pricier than the last generation — and lacks image analysis capabilities (for now).
• FOLLOWUP: Why the West Seattle low bridge broke down again for hours | West Seattle Blog... - 2024-11-05
• Stop Using Try-Catch: A Better Way to Handle Errors in JavaScript - DEV Community - 2024-11-04 - JavaScript developers, there’s a new way to handle errors without relying on messy, repetitive... - 6463 words
• Are electric bikes worth it? | CNN Underscored - 2024-11-04 - We tracked our output while riding a normal bike and an e-bike to see if electric bikes are actually worth it. Here are our results. - 9037 words
• Frustrated bystander shares photos of city's unusable new bike lane: 'We need to get those aggressive tow truck drivers out there' - 2024-11-03 - One bystander found a city's new bike lane to be completely unusable, thanks to several cars parked in the lane. - 3118 words
• (Why) Pascal Deserves a Second Look – TIM COATES - 2024-11-02 - - For some reason that’s probably irrational to most people, I have a deep-seated passion for Pascal. It’s the language I keep coming back to, the one I’ve invested time in, and the one I’ve bu…
• Ensuring a Great Performance Review - 2024-11-02 - 6 actions before your review and 2 actions during and after your review - 6133 words
• (1) 3 Career Principles that got me to Director at Google - 2024-11-02 - What helped me get 5 promotions in 10 years at Google - 12281 words
• (1) Limited Big Tech promotions and the options to consider - 2024-11-02 - IC Director role vs People Management career? - 5319 words

October 2024

• Maximal effort, minimal impact: How I learned what engineering guidelines should be like | Antonio Martinović blog - 2024-10-31 - - A story of how I fixed our engineering guidelines
• Type-safe configuration files with TypeScript - Carlos Menezes - 2024-10-30 - - A simple, type-safe way to handle configuration files in TypeScript
• (2) 3 Good Things and 3 Bad Things About Working at Amazon: From 12+ Years in Management - 2024-10-28 - Line manager to Senior Manager to Director. It was a great place to work, but I have a pretty balanced view of what Amazon does well, and what it doesn't. - 11093 words
• Cognitive load - 2024-10-26 - - There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code. - 21806 words
• The teacher's nemesis — Jack Vanlightly - 2024-10-26 - - A few months ago I wrote Learning and Reviewing System Internals - Tactics and Psychology . One thing I touched on was how it is necessary to create a mental model in order to grok a codebase, or learn how a complex system works. The mental model gets developed piece by piece, using a layer of ab - 5445 words
• Mapped: Retirement-Age Workers by U.S. State - 2024-10-26 - Growth in the 65 and older population, higher cost of living, and social factors have kept more retirement-age adults at work. - 3798 words
• React Compiler Beta Release – React - 2024-10-25 - The library for web and native user interfaces - 8864 words
• Self-documenting Code - 2024-10-25 - - Think back to the last time you looked at an unfamiliar block of code. Did you immediately understand what it was doing? If not, you’re not alone – many software developers, including myself, find it challenging to grasp unfamiliar code quickly… - 6208 words
• Sound Transit completes longest bridge in light rail work | Federal Way Mirror - 2024-10-25 - Trains to be tested in Federal Way as early as the end of this year. - 5479 words
• Massive $5 billion data center proposed east of Tri-Cities | Tri-City Herald - 2024-10-23 - It would rival the ones developed by Amazon Web Services in Oregon. - 5114 words
• (2) Stories of Good and Bad Feedback Dave Received From His Managers - 2024-10-22 - A few anecdotal stories of times I received feedback from the senior leaders in my life - 6923 words
• What made me love using terminal | Flavia Ouyang - 2024-10-20 - How I've configured my terminal to better suit my workflow and maximize productivity while keeping it visually appealing - 6139 words
• The expectation creates the result | Nathan Peck - 2024-10-19 - - Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence, the nature of human consciousness, and the challenging problem of alignment, both for artificial and human intelligences.
• A few tips on writing better comments for the code • Amanbolat's SWE Blog - 2024-10-19 - - Improve your code comments: Learn how to write clear, meaningful, and useful comments that benefit your entire team. - 3302 words
• Good tools are worth paying for • Dylan Fitzgerald - 2024-10-19 - - As an industry, we’ve long become accustomed (one might even say spoiled) on the no-cost availability of good tools. Those of us that came up with exposure to Linux, GNU, and the FOSS ecosystem in particular (not to mention the concurrent wave of peer-to-peer file sharing) are likely to have this mindset even more deeply entrenched. Have you ever paid money for a compiler? I have not (at least, that I can recall). - 4096 words
• (2) Achieve More by Doing Only One Thing a Day - 2024-10-19 - Too frequently, we focus on juggling the dozens of things vying for our attention, when we should think about what really matters. - 3972 words
• Home-Purchase Demand Destruction Accelerates, Prices Too High, Buyers’ Strike Deepens: Sales of Existing Homes Head for Worst Year since 1995 | Wolf Street - 2024-10-18 - 4817 words
• Maelstrom Software - 2024-10-18 - - 8969 words
• tc39/proposal-import-attributes: Proposal for syntax to import ES modules with assertions - 2024-10-17 - Proposal for syntax to import ES modules with assertions - tc39/proposal-import-attributes - 14680 words
• explainers-by-googlers/companion-windows: lightweight windows which accompany the user around a site - 2024-10-17 - lightweight windows which accompany the user around a site - explainers-by-googlers/companion-windows - 14931 words
• Ten ‘neighborhood centers’ proposed for West Seattle, and other changes in newly unveiled zoning maps | West Seattle Blog... - 2024-10-17
• We Are in Need of Renaissance People - Victor Davis Hanson - 2024-10-17 - - Modern society's focus on credentials has created a two-tiered system, where multi-talented individuals are criticized, and elites oversee a dependent underclass. - 10430 words
• 7 career advancing strategies - 2024-10-17 - Don't count on luck for your career management - 7422 words
• Ridership Patterns for RapidRide C Line – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-10-16 - King County Metro’s RapidRide C Line travels inbound from Westwood Village to South Lake Union. It passes through Roxhill, Fauntleroy, Gatewood, Seaview, Fairmount Park, Genesee, SODO, Pioneer Squa… - 4458 words
• Seattle Breaks Ground on West Coast’s First Residential Highrise of 2024 - The Urbanist - 2024-10-16 - # As a new 45-story apartment tower goes up at elephant car wash site, Seattle is building apartments at a rapid pace – but a slump may be on the way. - 14974 words
• (2) Tech the Heck? Archera - by Forrest Brazeal - 2024-10-16 - I warned you this would be a recurring feature - 7110 words
• Content-Blocking in Manifest v3 – text/plain - 2024-10-14 - - I’ve written about selectively blocking content in browsers several times over the last two decades. In this post, I don’t aim to convince you that ad-blocking is good or bad, instead f… - 4646 words
• (2) What Your Manager Won't Tell You: The Art of Managing Up with Wes Kao (Cofounder of Maven & altMBA) - 2024-10-12 - Chat with Wes Kao (Cofounder of Maven & altMBA) - 4712 words
• Dear CTO: it's not 2015 anymore - by Christine Miao - 2024-10-12 - With AI and big tech layoffs, engineering organizations have been put under a microscope like never before. Engineering leaders need to adapt to this new normal. - 11207 words
• Sound Transit board committee goes for West Seattle light rail ‘preferred alternative’ – tentatively | West Seattle Blog... - 2024-10-12
• Good Employees Follow the Rules. Great Employees Break Them. - 2024-10-12 - Because the rules are meant for those who aren't as smart and brave as you. Seriously. - 5993 words
• Lynnwood Link Brings Huge Ridership Boost to Community Transit’s Swift Network - The Urbanist - 2024-10-12 - # All three Swift Bus Rapid Transit routes operated by Community Transit saw double digit increases in ridership following the extension of light rail into Snohomish County, including a 36% jump for the Orange Line. - 7454 words
• J Line Breaks Ground, Delivering Bus and Bike Upgrades by 2027 - The Urbanist - 2024-10-12 - # The groundbreaking for the RapidRide J between Downtown, Eastlake, and the U District marks the last RapidRide project scheduled to open in Seattle this decade. - 12241 words
• King County Metro Faces Looming Fiscal Cliff - The Urbanist - 2024-10-12 - # King County Metro is projecting a significant budget shortfall by 2028 if its current spending plan is maintained, thanks to lagging sales tax revenue, increased costs, and ambitious fleet electrification plans. - 11133 words
• How Hard Should Your Employer Work To Retain You? – charity.wtf - 2024-10-12 - - Recently we learned that Google spent $2.7 billion to re-hire a single AI researcher who had left to start his own company. As Charlie Brown would say: “Good grief.” 🙄 This is an (incredibly!) extr… - 27886 words
• Amtrak Advances Major Seattle Rail Yard Expansion - The Urbanist - 2024-10-12 - # Amtrak is updating its Seattle rail yard to handle an expanded modern fleet of trains via a newly announced $300 million in funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. - 9259 words
• tummychow/git-absorb: git commit --fixup, but automatic - 2024-10-12 - git commit --fixup, but automatic. Contribute to tummychow/git-absorb development by creating an account on GitHub. - 7467 words
• Google break-up could turn Big Tech into Medium Tech - 2024-10-12 - The DoJ’s recommendations show how far the government is willing to go to shift the balance of power - 6210 words
• Handling 4 Challenges of High performance and Promotion - 2024-10-11 - Managing poor performance, getting unstuck, getting high-impact projects, and increasing executive visibility - 6924 words
• Prioritize Through Purpose – Below Water Level - 2024-10-10 - - Prioritization conflicts are exactly the situations when Product Managers must step away from traditionally accepted management tools and frameworks and look deeper into Purpose. In 2005 when I wen…
• Effect polymorphism fixes dependency inversion - 2024-10-08 -
• Observing | ruiper.es - 2024-10-07 - - 1280 words
• Stay in the gap | everything changes - 2024-10-07 - - The work is the work.
• Try, catch, but don't throw | Utku's Blog - 2024-10-06 - - The standard try-catch-throw approach to error handling in TypeScript is not type-safe, making it difficult to explicitly handle different kinds of errors in business logic. This might be okay in smal - 8937 words
• Cursor AI is god tier - 2024-10-06 - - I’d Pay $2,000 Out of My Own Pocket to Keep Using Cursor - The tab + context is next level.
• RAG systems have a recall problem, not a hallucination one - 2024-10-06 - - "As an AI language model, your RAG pipeline sucks and I'm pretty sure there's information you're not giving me..." - 5491 words
• Make your shell 370.52% faster with this easy trick (fix nvm startup times) - 2024-10-06 - Fixing slow shell startup times as a result of nvm.
• A simple way to deal with the principal threat to scalability - 2024-10-06 - - If you have a distributed system one of the main worries you probably have is scalability. Well, what is the principal threat to scalability in such systems is the conflict between transactions that are used to guarantee correct results in concurrent operations. Such conflicts are dealt with by concurrency control, either pessimistically via something like exclusive resource lock or optimistically via something like serializable snapshot isolation. Let me illustrate the threat with from the pessimistic point of view:
• Think like a product owner - Level Up by Ethan Evans - 2024-10-02 - My Senior Manager lesson - 5418 words
• Up Your Game to Influence Senior Leaders with Ethan Evans & Sue Bethanis - 2024-10-02 - Executive presence and balancing gravitas with grace - 4357 words
• .gitignore is inherently Sisyphean - 2024-10-02 - And how to roll the rock over the edge.
• The cold war between Google and Microsoft has 'gone hot' - 2024-10-01 - A long-standing feud between Google and Microsoft is spilling into public view once again. - 6291 words
• AWS CloudFormation Git sync now supports pull request workflows to review your stack changes - AWS - 2024-10-01 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS CloudFormation Git sync now supports pull request workflows to review your stack changes
• CodeQL: Eindhoven Quantifier Notation | Tech Blog - 2024-10-01 - - Tech blog on cyber security, android security, android development, mobile security, sast, offensive security, oscp walkthrough, reverse engineering. - 2990 words
• AWS CloudTrail launches network activity events for VPC endpoints (preview) - AWS - 2024-10-01 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS CloudTrail launches network activity events for VPC endpoints (preview)
• (2) 10 Reader Questions About Career Politics, Investing, Job Hopping, and AI (among others) - 2024-10-01 - Answering some reader questions on various topics. I love questions! - 9399 words
• AWS announces general availability for Security Group Referencing on AWS Transit Gateway - AWS - 2024-10-01 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS announces general availability for Security Group Referencing on AWS Transit Gateway

September 2024

• Szymon Kaliski — Replit Agent - 2024-09-30 - - IDE for Humans and LLMs
• Why You Can't Teach Leadership — Experience vs. Instruction - 2024-09-30 - I'm slightly exaggerating, as I do think there are some very specific things we can teach. But the majority of the leadership job is gained through the school of hard knocks. - 4867 words
• Do your hardest task first thing in the morning - 2024-09-29 - The most important skill I mastered as an Amazon VP - 7422 words
• KUOW - Building housing in downtown Seattle just got easier - 2024-09-29 - Soon, developers will have an easier time building apartments in downtown Seattle. That’s because the city council voted 8-1 to exempt residential projects there, along with hotels and research labs, from a time-consuming process called “design review." - 5726 words
• (2) The Elite's War on Remote Work Has Nothing to Do with Productivity - 2024-09-29 - It's about debt on zombie office towers. - 7204 words
• 4 Behaviors of Top CEOs - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2024-09-29 - Harvard study findings: Deciding with speed and conviction; Engaging for impact; Adapting proactively; and Delivering reliably - 9069 words
• JJinuxLand: Notion's Mid-Life Crisis - 2024-09-29 - Notion sat down on the curb, crushed his cigarette into the pavement, put his face into his hands, and sobbed. It felt good to finally let i...
• Don't Sleep on Single-agent Systems - 2024-09-29 - - This post discusses some of the benefits of single-agent systems, and contrasts them with multi-agent systems. - 8306 words
• Bytepawn - Marton Trencseni – Five ways to reduce variance in A/B testing - 2024-09-29 - I use toy Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate 5 ways to reduce variance in A/B testing: increase sample size, move towards a more even split, reduce variance in the metric definition, stratification and CUPED. - 14388 words
• Jeff Cole - Localless Development - 2024-09-29 - I write about building things. - 7171 words
• The origin private file system  |  Articles  |  web.dev - 2024-09-29 - - 22049 words
• Origin private file system - Web APIs | MDN - 2024-09-29 - The origin private file system (OPFS) is a storage endpoint provided as part of the File System API, which is private to the origin of the page and not visible to the user like the regular file system. It provides access to a special kind of file that is highly optimized for performance and offers in-place write access to its content. - 9467 words
• Implications of the West Seattle Link Cost – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-09-29 - Pundits claim West Seattle had been added to the ST3 plan by politicians envious that Ballard gets a light rail connection. It seemed easy to draw another line on the map, but now that Sound Transi… - 5330 words
• Consumer Income & Savings Rate Revised Massively Higher for 2 Years, Spending Revised Up Too. Stunning Numbers | Wolf Street - 2024-09-29 - 4236 words
• Why I stopped using LLMs - 2024-09-27 - - Aligning my actions with my values through conscious use of LLMs
• How to control a React component with the URL - 2024-09-26 - 11978 words
• Scaling Walmart's Online Grocery Team (from 1 market to 1000+ markets nationally) - 2024-09-22 - Experiment to Top Initiative: How to Get Strategic Leadership Buy-In, Engage Divisional Leaders, & Win Over Peers and Direct Reports - 9609 words
• Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO | Andreessen Horowitz - 2024-09-21 - In peacetime, it’s all about growth. In wartime, it’s just about surviving.
• The Age of Software Artisans - 2024-09-21 - - In this post, we explore the idea of software artisans and how the future of coding might resemble a return to a more hands-on, creative approach. Is writing software dead?.
• Netflix Job Analysis · AR - 2024-09-21
• A note on estimated reading times – Baldur Bjarnason - 2024-09-21 - - People have been writing a bit about “estimated reading time”, the feature where a link to something is accompanied by an estimate of how long it will take you to read it. - 4162 words
• Bottom-up vs top-down product management – Ernest Oppetit - 2024-09-21 - - By Robert Leighton in the New Yorker I like this definition of product management from Lenny’s newsletter: Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your t… - 4457 words
• (2) Scaling founder obsession (the F+1 problem) - 2024-09-21 - Thinking about the events behind Paul Graham's post and MrBeast's onboarding materials. - 3790 words
• AWS: Egress Traffic and Using AWS Services via IPv6 | neveragain.de teletype - 2024-09-18 - An overview of the available options for IPv6 egress traffic on AWS and a quick intro to using AWS services via IPv6
• Satya Nadella on Microsoft's 'productivity paradox': 85% managers think workers are slacking, 85% staff say... - 2024-09-18 - Satya Nadella also stressed on the need for industry leaders to develop soft skills to better manage their employees in a changing environment. 'We have this paradox on how you can see these things in two different ways. And the only way around it to me is you have got to use data. Dogma is not going to help,' he said.
• Announcing Storage Browser for Amazon S3 for your web applications (alpha release) - AWS - 2024-09-17 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with Announcing Storage Browser for Amazon S3 for your web applications (alpha release)
• Being Productive - 2024-09-17 - - Posts and writings by Julian Schrittwieser - 5224 words
• Sound Transit leader gives updates on Federal Way’s future light rail | Federal Way Mirror - 2024-09-15 - Federal Way Link Light Rail Extension expected to open in spring 2026. - 5276 words
• US targets trade loophole used by ecommerce groups Temu and Shein - 2024-09-15 - - Biden administration seeks to slow flood of cheap Chinese goods with proposed new rules around ‘de minimis’ exemption - 5141 words
• 2 Line Beats Ridership Expectations, 1 Line Has Second-Best Month Ever - The Urbanist - 2024-09-15 - # Ridership on the abridged Eastside-only 2 Line has surpassed agency expectations, with daily light rail boardings hovering around 6,000 between May and July. The Link 1 Line also posted strong ridership numbers this summer. - 9474 words
• Fall 2024 Transit Service Changes Include Big Shakeups Across Puget Sound - The Urbanist - 2024-09-15 - # Puget Sound bus networks are getting fall updates, with a major overhaul in store near Lynnwood Link stations and the new RapidRide G Line. King County Metro, Community Transit, and Sound Transit are rolling out changes on September 14. - 24997 words
• Metro Launches RapidRide G, Seattle’s Most Ambitious Bus Rapid Transit Project - The Urbanist - 2024-09-15 - # King County Metro's eighth RapidRide line, Madison Street's G Line, launches Saturday with some of the most robust speed and reliability features of any bus route in Puget Sound. - 10884 words
• SDOT Starts Planning for Multimodal Access to West Seattle’s Link Stations - The Urbanist - 2024-09-14 - # With construction on West Seattle Link's four stations set to start as early as 2027, the City of Seattle is starting to look at how people will access the stations via walking, biking, and transit on redesigned local streets. - 12144 words
• Making Things People Want vs. Making Things That Alter Thinking | rohan ganapavarapu - 2024-09-14 - - I recently rewrote the interests section of my blog to be more concise. The primary interest I wrote down was “making things that alter thinking at scale.” When I distilled what I believed to be one of my long-term goals I landed on that. Recently I thought about how this is both similar and different to YC’s goal of “Make something people want”. I find that successful startups do both. People want it and it changes the way people think.
• The emergence of LLM sympathy in our enhanced codebases - 2024-09-14 - - With the rise of LLM code generation, how are we these tools shaping the way that we work? - 2354 words
• The Undeniable Utility Of CSS :has • Josh W. Comeau - 2024-09-14 - Of all the latest and greatest CSS features, the “:has” pseudo-class wasn’t exactly at the top of my wishlist. Once I started using it, however, I kept discovering incredible things I could do with it. It’s now become a core part of my toolkit! In this blog post, I'll show you some practical real-world problems I solved using “:has”, as well as some wild experiments that blew my mind! - 24849 words
• Final EIS for West Seattle Link light rail extension released; Cost has now risen to more than $5 billion | Westside Seattle - 2024-09-14 - 5455 words
• Why I Prefer Exceptions to Error Values | CedarDB - The All-In-One-Database - 2024-09-10 - - Exceptions are often a better way to handle errors than returning them as values. We argue that traditional exceptions provide better user and developer experience, and show that they even result in faster execution.
• Safe Assignment | Alan Johnson - 2024-09-10 - - Alan Johnson's Personal Site - 64 words
• Do not mask API errors in UI | Starlite の世界へようこそ - 2024-09-10 - - Do not mask API errors in UI. Masking errors only confuses users even more and makes things harder to debug. - 5822 words
• Setting Goals as a Staff+ Engineer - InfoQ - 2024-09-09 - Sabrina Leandro discusses how to define your development journey as a staff+ engineer, figuring out what you should be working on, how to set your goals, and how to define your backlog of work. Sabrina's intent is to help folks realize you should be intentional about your work. - 29559 words
• The Serverless Illusion - The Architect Elevator - 2024-09-09 - - Abstractions can become illusions. Is Serverless one of them? - 15741 words
• I Made My Content 39% More Helpful With A Single Click - <huijer.co> - 2024-09-08 - - TLDR: I turned off all advertisements on my flagship website, in an experiment to regain lost rankings. Continue reading to see why I did this ... Read More - 9549 words
• War Room Wisdom for Software Developers - 2024-09-08 - Software TEAMWORK enhanced with military leadership tactics. Empower, communicate, succeed.
• Goodbye, WhatsApp | Ivan Montilla Miralles - 2024-09-08 - - I’ve deleted WhatsApp from my personal smartphone. I’m not saying I’m not using it anymore; I’m just saying I’ll now use it when I decide to, via WhatsApp Web, on both my smartphone and computer. - 3589 words
• Think small - 2024-09-08 - - Pete Millspaugh's digital garden
• A unified front for your team | Alejandro AR (kinduff) - 2024-09-08 - - The impact of a unified team in customer interactions - 1863 words
• Man in the Arena - 0xDEADBEEF - 2024-09-08 - - Hello, Internet. It’s been awhile since I have posted anything here - precisely 1,634 days or 53.68 months - but I am back. A lot has happened during this time but some notable events are - 2288 words
• Cities of Software · all things considered... - 2024-09-08 - - Photo by Adrian Schwarz on Unsplash Cities are an interesting way to think about Software. Cities have foundations, like infrastructure for cars, electricity. Housing for people to live and work. Stores to sell and buy goods. Also, Cities are often referred to as an organism. Just like a large organization, a department, or a team are an organism. But these organisms are building software. I first came across this idea in Mikio Braun’s post on Everyone Is Still Terrible At Creating Software: - 9750 words
• Emerging Personalized Economy - Chris Wood - 2024-09-08 - - Implications of the Emerging Personalized Economy - 5097 words
• Good decision-making is good process - 2024-09-08 - Define the problem in own terms, take perspectives, validate signal, decide when to decide, and execute. - 5484 words
• LogLogic/Chuvakin Log Checklist - 2024-09-07
• Logging at Zerodha - Zerodha Tech Blog - 2024-09-07 - - Our migration story from ELK to using Clickhouse and Vector for our logging pipeline
• Finding your weak spots - James Dunne - 2024-09-07 - - In 2018, I was coasting. I didn’t like it. Life was good, I was steadily employed as a senior developer. We had a good team. We were building valuable software for our customers. Everything seemed great. But I’d been coasting for a few years. I believed I could coast for a few years more (I was wrong) but I was uncomfortable. I needed to fix it. I went through books, articles, podcasts and more books.
• Are They a Customer? – Garrick van Buren - 2024-09-07 - - In my work with entrepreneurs, it’s not unusual to spend a substantial amount of time discussing who the customer for the product in question.  Yes, spending so much time on such a foundationa… - 1344 words
• The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise - Marc's Blog - 2024-09-07
• Why Engineers Need To Write - by Ryan Peterman - 2024-09-07 - - I hated writing in high school. - 2917 words
• The Deming Paradox: The Human Costs of Operational Rigour - Commoncog - 2024-09-07 - Is it possible to be data driven and operationally rigorous and still be human centric at the same time? Deming — who came up with these data techniques — believe that it is possible. I'm not so sure.
• Gartner Reprint - 2024-09-07 - Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems
• Gartner Reprint - 2024-09-07 - Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services
• A deep dive on forms with modern React | Epic React by Kent C. Dodds - 2024-09-07 - React 19 introduces terrific primitives for building great forms. Let's dive deep on forms for the web with React. - 218 words
• The Amazon Empire Strikes Back – Stratechery by Ben Thompson - 2024-09-07 - - Amazon’s logistics investment makes the company increasingly attractive to 3rd party merchants. - 13231 words
• Integration and Android – Stratechery by Ben Thompson - 2024-09-07 - - The most important takeaway from Google’s Pixel event is that it is Android that matters most, and Google’s integration with Android is worth preserving if the goal is spurring innovati… - 18298 words
• Intel Honesty – Stratechery by Ben Thompson - 2024-09-07 - The best way to both save Intel and have leading edge manufacturing in the U.S. is to split the company, and for the U.S. government to pick up the bill via purchase guarantees. - 20359 words
• Try to Fix It One Level Deeper - 2024-09-07 - - I had a productive day today! I did many different and unrelated things, but they all had the same unifying theme: - 2954 words
• The Art of Finishing | ByteDrum - 2024-09-07 - My endless battle with the "Project Hydra": why I can't seem to finish projects, and the strategies I'm exploring to finally complete what I start. A personal journey through productivity's thorniest challenge. - 13279 words
• Dark Mode Sucks - 2024-09-07 - - There I've said it. The decision by major tech companies to add native dark mode support to their operating systems is the biggest mistake in the last decade. Does it look like you're doing some cool hacks with Angelina Jolie? I guess. But does it look good? Meh. For very - 1454 words
• Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again | Elastic Blog - 2024-09-07 - Elastic announces the return of open source licensing for Elasticsearch and Kibana, adding AGPL as an option alongside existing licenses. This change reinforces our long-standing commitment to open so...
• Vivaldi 6.9 on Android: Easier than ever to make Vivaldi your own with revamped Settings Menu | Vivaldi Browser - 2024-09-07 - Vivaldi 6.9 on Android is here, bringing a completely revamped Settings Menu with improved categories and search, making it easier than ever for you to take control of your browser. - 4113 words
• (1) How to Use Engineering Metrics 📊 - by Luca Rossi - 2024-09-04 - - Let’s analyze the various types of metrics and how to design a minimum viable process to use them for good. - 25553 words
• You need a capture system - DeveloPassion - 2024-09-04 - - You need a capture system - DeveloPassion
• The Internet Archive Loses Its Appeal of a Major Copyright Case | WIRED - 2024-09-04 - - Hachette v. Internet Archive was brought by book publishers objecting to the archive’s digital lending library. - 6016 words
• You need a capture system - DeveloPassion - 2024-09-04 - - You need a capture system - DeveloPassion
• How to Simplify Component Imports with TypeScript Namespaces by sergiodxa - 2024-09-04 - The blog of sergiodxa - 2176 words
• How much code can Tanstack Query save? - 2024-09-04 - This post describes how adopting Tanstack Query can fail to reduce the size of the codebase in some cases.
• Middleware doesn't belong in the router - nicksin - 2024-09-04 - - 8604 words
• Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas - 2024-09-04 - If you have a project, an idea, a product feature, or anything else that you want other people to understand and have conversations about... give them something to link to! …
• Easy RAG for TypeScript and React Apps - 2024-09-04 - RAG is not just for Pythonistas - it's easy and powerful with TypeScript and React too - 158 words
• The web's clipboard, and how it stores data of different types - 2024-09-04 - Exploring the web's clipboard APIs, their limitations, and their history.
• AggregateError in JavaScript - 2024-09-04 - AggregateError helps you handle multiple errors at once in JavaScript. This makes your code easier to manage and more reliable. - 7985 words
• The Hierarchy of Whats — Ethan Lalakea Alter - 2024-09-04 - Everything is a What. Also, a Why. Also, a How. It's the Theory of Whelativity. - 8244 words
• Dissecting Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) for Amazonians & Non-Amazonians - 2024-09-03 - Chat with David Anderson (Former Amazon GM & Tech Director, now Author of the Scarlet Ink Newsletter) - 8175 words
• (1) No More Excuses: Trading Blame for Action. Practical Steps Towards Ownership Instead of Whining. - 2024-09-03 - I'll admit a lack of patience for people who prefer to make excuses when they're given advice. It's easier to make excuses rather than do the hard work. - 9264 words
• Lateral Thinking: examples of creative solutions - 2024-09-03 - - I like to think that problems are what's most worth obsessing on, and that the solution usually follows easily from a good understanding of a... - 12498 words
• The power of true engineering – Theo van der Donk - 2024-09-03 - - 7304 words
• take notes to understand your language | breadchris - 2024-09-03 - - Someone probably looked up one day and said, “That is the ‘sky’.” They told their friends, and then they told their friends. At some point, when anyone looked up at the vast expanse above them and needed a way to describe it, the word that came to mind was “sky.” Maybe there is something that you are looking at in your life that will have a similar story one day. It might not be as profound as naming “sky,” but it describes a service we use like “Google” or “Uber. - 2338 words
• Boundaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder | Plankton 🥦 Valhalla - 2024-09-03 - - Here we are, blissfully going about our lives, saying fancy things like "pass me the ketchup, please" and "the projections for our year-close budget ain't pretty, folks," and we're satisfied with that - 14021 words
• Brains, Fingers, and Crabs — Modes of Software Developer Operation | anderegg.ca - 2024-09-03 - - In the late 2000s, some friends and I started a small software development agency. It didn’t last very long because we were more interested in building things than making money, but it was quite a fun time. - 2412 words
• Can LLM's produce better code? | KiloBytes by KB - 2024-09-03 - - Introduction In my previous post, I tested a coding LLM on its ability to write React code. Specifically, I tried the currently leading open source model in the HumanEval+ benchmark leaderboard - DeepseekCoder:33b-instruct. I used this model in development for a few weeks, and published a subset of examples in the post. Even though I tried this on a relatively small problem size, there were some obvious issues that were recognisable to me, namely:- - 14490 words
• Sneaky React Memory Leaks: How useCallback and closures can bite you | Kevin Schiener - 2024-09-03 - Avoid performance issues caused by memory leaks in your React applications by understanding closures, useCallback, and best practices.
• Exposing Security Observability Gaps in AWS Native Security Tooling - 2024-09-03 - Explore the limitations and effectiveness of AWS IAM Access Analyzer in detecting publicly exposed resources across various AWS services. Learn about common misconceptions, deployment tips, and critical observability gaps in AWS native security tooling.
• Web performance, code splitting strategies, and a React case study - 2024-09-02 - Code splitting as a strategy to optimize web performance and a case study of a React application - 22964 words
• Webpack Bundle Splitting & Browser Caching - 2024-09-02 - How to use webpack code splitting and browser caching to improve performance - 9867 words
• Improving INP in React and Next.js - This Dot Labs - 2024-09-02 - A follow-up article on the new Core Web Vital INP outlining some techniques to improve your INP score in Next.js and React.
• Walking Maps – Jeremy Maluf - 2024-09-02 - - 4779 words
• The security implications of packages in front-end apps by Martijn Hols - 2024-09-02 - - The gist of the security implications of using third-party packages in front-end projects. - 7732 words
• (1) Technical Skills Are Overrated. Focus on Your Attitude. - 2024-09-02 - When interviewing, particularly for technical positions, many people over value their technical preparation, and don't consider the importance of personality and leadership preparation. - 7520 words
• How To Manage Dotfiles With Chezmoi - 2024-09-02 - Managing dotfiles can be daunting. This post provides concise steps that help you to manage your dotfiles using Chezmoi as painlessly as possible - 8464 words
• I Explored My Z Shell History. Here’s What I Found - 2024-09-01 - - As I was reading another interesting blog post about popular git config options, a curious thought crept into my mind: which git commands do I find myself using the most? This also eventually led me down a journey to explore my own terminal usage pattern throughout the day by using - 11962 words
• Learn Suspense by Building a Suspense-Enabled Library :: Building Better Software Slower - 2024-09-01 - - Suspense has been a feature in React since v16.6.0. Despite this, I haven’t seen much of it in action beyond limited applications of “suspense-enabled libraries”. The React team seems to think Suspense is so incomplete that the entire API remains undocumented. I think that purposefully hiding APIs in documentation is silly, but fine! I’ll play their game! Let’s build a Suspense-enabled library, and use it. We will peel back the curtain of Suspense along the way.
• Against Names - 2024-09-01 - - 6153 words
• What's Next? (2024 edition) | Tom's Blog - 2024-09-01 - - I have, as they say, some personal news to share. On Monday I (along with some very talented teammates, see below if you’re hiring) was laid off from Microsoft as part of a reorganization. Like my Moving to Microsoft post, I wanted to jot down some of the things I got to work on. For those of you wondering, the Planetary Computer project does continue, just without me. Reflections It should go without saying that all of this was a team effort. - 8835 words
• Be a High-Value Connector & Networker - 2024-09-01 - Chat with Andrew Yeung (Founder & Investor; ex-Google; ex-Meta) - 8942 words
• Workflow, from stateless to stateful - 2024-09-01 - - A (long) time ago, my first job consisted of implementing workflows using the Staffware engine. In short, a workflow comprises tasks; an automated task delegates to code, while a manual task requires somebody to do something and mark it as done. Then, it proceeds to the next task - or tasks. Here’s a sample workflow: The above diagram uses Business Process Model and Notation. You can now design your workflow using BPMN and run it with compatible workflow engines. Time has passed. Sta - 6555 words
• Contempt for the glue people – Surfing Complexity - 2024-09-01 - The clip below is from a lecture from 2015 that then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave to a Stanford class. Here’s a transcript, emphasis mine. When I was at Novell, I had learned that there were … - 1796 words
• How to save the day with Feature Flags - Taner - 2024-09-01 - Why deploying with feature flags makes me sleep better at night - 2924 words
• Do you *really* need to store all that telemetry? - 2024-09-01 - - In my last post I talked about why modern observability has become so expensive. At the end of the post I posit a question: What if by default we never send any telemetry at all? In this post I’m goin - 15152 words
• What is a Component Library and Should You Build Your Own? - 2024-09-01 - Before diving into building you're own component library from scratch, let's have a look at the different types of component libraries out there, and the benefits and drawbacks of using them.
• Common Causes of Memory Leaks in JavaScript | Trevor Indrek Lasn - 2024-09-01 - Identify and fix common JavaScript memory leaks (Node.js and Deno.js) - 40900 words
• How to get the benefit of a high-end fitness tracker without actually buying one – Daniel Frank - 2024-09-01 - - 3921 words
• (1) The death of the [modified] developer - by Forrest Brazeal - 2024-09-01 - It's not just juniors who've had their career yanked out from under them by AI. - 6398 words

August 2024

• Common Sense Refactoring of a Messy React Component | Alex Kondov - Software Engineer - 2024-08-31 - One thing I’ve learned from all the consulting I’ve done is that rewrites rarely lead to anything good. Almost in all cases, when you have an application…
• The Tyranny of Middle Management - 2024-08-31 - - 3867 words
• How to Optimize Your Career for Happiness - 2024-08-31 - - The relentless pursuit of success often means chasing after promotions, pay raises, and prestigious titles. But what if we shifted our focus from these traditional metrics and instead optimized our careers for happiness?
• Datadog is the new Oracle - Coroot - 2024-08-30 - See how Datadog leads in observability like Oracle in databases, and how open-source tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Coroot make it accessible and affordable - 100 words
• Avoiding premature abstraction with Unstyled React Components - 2024-08-30 - 11883 words
• Introducing XState Store | TkDodo's blog - 2024-08-30 - There's a new state manager in the game, and it ticks all my boxes ...
• Handling demanding leaders - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2024-08-30 - Remain calm and stick firm to your points - 6279 words
• RapidRide G Line Construction Complete – Bus Service Begins September 14 on a Transformed Madison Street - SDOT Blog - 2024-08-30 - The City of Seattle and partners celebrated the completion of the RapidRide G Line – Madison St Project at a ribbon-cutting in Capitol Hill.
• Workspace navigation with tmux+fzf - Anton Suprun - 2024-08-30 - - A brief overview of my workspace management flow - 1888 words
• Why Async Functions Don't Belong in Promise Executors - Kibibyte - 2024-08-30 - Understanding why passing an async function to the `new Promise` constructor is a mistake - 5091 words
• The CI Flake · HookRace Blog - 2024-08-29 -
• LLMs are bad at returning code in JSON | aider - 2024-08-29 - - LLMs write worse code if you ask them to return the code wrapped in JSON via a tool function call.
• kanfa [by Mac Budkowski] | Why niches matter - 2024-08-29 - - How niches move the humanity forward, why they are so pleasant to be in and how they create a space for us to shine.
• Prefer Function Updaters in State Setters | Kyle Shevlin - 2024-08-29 - React state can be updated in two ways: replace the `currentState` with the `nextState`, or transform the `currentState` to the `nextState` with a function. Prefer the function. - 8487 words
• How we cut token count by 11% and boosted success rate by 3.9% by using HTML instead of JSON in our LLM calls - 2024-08-29 - - TL;DR We started using HTML instead of JSON to represent possible actions that Skyvern could take and reduced our cost by 11.8% and increased our success rate by 3.9% What’s Skyvern? Skyvern is an open source AI agent that helps companies automate browser-based workflows with AI. - 4701 words
• (1) When top performers clash - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2024-08-29 - Harvard study on 4 types of team conflict: Here's what you can do about it - 5746 words
• 7 reasons to replace advanced search with filters so users can easily find what they need – Adam Silver – designer, London, UK - 2024-08-29 - - Adam Silver – interaction designer - London, UK
• How we reduced the size of our JavaScript bundles by 33% - Dropbox - 2024-08-29
• Concise explanations accelerate progress — Steph Ango - 2024-08-29 - - If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, rewor... - 1771 words
• (1) No One Wants to Be a Follower, But They Often Are: All About Mimetic Desire. - 2024-08-28 - If you're not careful, you'll find yourself working hard to achieve the goals of others. Think about your priorities, and decide if you're investing in the right places. - 6522 words
• On React Suspense’s throttling - 2024-08-28 - On React Suspense’s throttling - 8301 words
• An early scan of 2 Line ridership – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-08-28 - Commenter Lazarus pointed out that Sound Transit has released 2 Line (East Link Starter Line) ridership figures on its dashboard. Although there is no direct filter for a drill-down to just the 2 L… - 3088 words
• How to Delete a Service Worker - Benjamin Rancourt - 2024-08-27 - - Surprisingly, if you want to completely remove a service worker from a website, you need more than deleting the file on your server. Explanations below. - 2351 words
• How to Ask Useful Questions – Josh Kaufman - 2024-08-27 - - Asking useful questions is a skill, and it requires practice.
• (1) 🚀 Skyrocket your productivity - by Fran Soto - 2024-08-27 - 10 tools and processes I use every day for a huge productivity boost - 11455 words
• (1) Star Trek Made Me a Bad Leader (and Then a Good One) - 2024-08-26 - Captain Kirk Ruined Me: Be a more effective “starship Captain” by using the Navy’s “Command Negation” approach to delegation with your own “crew” - 14029 words
• Node.js Takes Steps Towards Removing Corepack - Socket - 2024-08-26 - Node.js is taking steps towards removing Corepack from its distribution, aiming for changes in the next major release. - 324 words
• Reimagining architecture principles - 2024-08-26 - - To me, it always seems strange that in a world that thrives on innovation and constant change, every architectural department tries to implement a rigid set of principles that stay in place for years. - 7332 words
• Engineers are not just builders · Jens Rantil - 2024-08-26 - - Some of the things that product owners do can, and should, equally be done by engineers. - 1053 words
• Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS | All Things Distributed - 2024-08-26 - - Marc Olson, a long-time Amazonian, discusses the evolution of EBS, highlighting hard-won lessons in queueing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. It's an insightful look at how one of AWS’s foundational services has evolved to meet the needs of our customers.
• ⭐️ Notes from Figma I: How We Succeeded In Design - 2024-08-26 - - No description. - 12878 words
• Tips from 8 months of TanStack/Router in production | Swizec Teller - 2024-08-26 - On my last day at Tia I wrote a master vision doc for our TanStack Router app. Here are the parts I can share.
• Synchronizing State In React - 2024-08-26 - A website containing blog posts related to the frontend. - 2865 words
• Good Refactoring vs Bad Refactoring - 2024-08-26 - Refactoring can make your code way better - or way worse. Here's how to avoid messing up your codebase when you refactor code.
• guychouk - 2024-08-26 -
• Work Enemies: Actions You Can Take to Protect Yourself From Bad Relationships - 2024-08-26 - You won't always get along with your co-workers. What can you do to protect yourself? - 8626 words
• Managing Latency is like Workplace Risk Mitigation | Kai Malcolm - 2024-08-26 - Stop moving your latency (and start solving it) - 9681 words
• 5 Archetypes of Knowledge-Intensive Applications - - 2024-08-25 - I write about ML and software engineering - 10468 words
• Replace Grammarly with open source LLM | by Anchen | Medium - 2024-08-25 - I have been using the self-hosted llama 30B model for local grammar check and translation because most of the smaller llama models are not… - 4056 words
• Building a highly-available search engine using SQLite | Vallified - 2024-08-25 - - 7462 words
• Announcement of Release - Module federation - 2024-08-25 - - Module Federation is a concept that allows developers to share code and resources across multiple JavaScript applications
• Monoliths are not dinosaurs | All Things Distributed - 2024-08-25 - - Building evolvable software systems is a strategy, not a religion. And revisiting your architectures with an open mind is a must.
• --Mike--: On "Software Engineering" circa 2023 - 2024-08-25 - I've been a programmer since the 1980s. I feel that the peak of the field was somewhere between 1995 and 2000. We had Windows 95/98, the Int...
• I Want to Love Azure, But They Make It Hard - 2024-08-25 - - 4594 words
• Does Prompt Caching Make RAG Obsolete? - Tim Kellogg - 2024-08-24 - - 3461 words
• Decoding: The crux move - Rick Sugden: Decoding Waves - 2024-08-24 - Hi, I'm Rick, welcome to my site! I'm a highly curious grad student in Medical Biophysics researching the biomedical potential of  consumer-grade brainwave devices. Currently interested in jiu...
• 15 Obsidian Plugins that I can't live without - 2024-08-24 - Ross Griffin - 15 Obsidian Plugins that I can't live without - Tutorials - 5738 words
• Limitations of AWS EC2 Image Builder Lifecycle Policies - DEV Community - 2024-08-24 - EC2 Image Builder Lifecycle Policies are a new feature that should help tidy up after the AMI build process. But it has a couple drawbacks for high traffic users. - 8630 words
• Weekly Review | Kaushik's Blog - 2024-08-24 - - Every week, I sit down on a Friday afternoon, at 2 PM, to do my Weekly Review. Well, almost every week. Uhm, 2 PM-ish. Fridays can be weird sometimes. I'v...
• Generating structured data with LLMs - Beyond Basics • rwilinski.ai - 2024-08-24 - Advanced techniques for improving speed, accuracy and cost of JSON generation with LLMs. - 9515 words
• A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps | Ars Technica - 2024-08-24 - - Sixteen years after the launch of Google Talk, Google messaging is still a mess. - 17966 words
• What can software developers really learn from SpaceX Raptor 3 engine? | Radan Skorić's personal site - 2024-08-24 - - On August 3rd, SpaceX revealed the Raptor 3 engine which looks stunning: They have achieved a very impressive sleek and simplified design while greatly increasing the specs. The difference is even more striking when seen compared to its previous iterations: - 5372 words
• Optimizing SPA load times with async chunks preloading | Matteo Mazzarolo - 2024-08-24 - - Improve the performance of client-side rendered SPAs by avoiding the waterfall effect caused by route-based lazy-loading. - 13706 words
• Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry - 2024-08-23 - My top 3 biggest productivity killers and my solutions to them + 🎁 BONUS: one additional: multi-tasking - 9614 words
• Kitchen Soap – On Being A Senior Engineer - 2024-08-23 - UPDATE: I’ve added a short section on the topic of sponsorship. I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially - 31318 words
• Toasts are Bad UX – Max Schmitt - 2024-08-23 - 1897 words
• Being on The Semantic Web is easy, and, frankly, well worth the bother - 2024-08-23 - Web 3.0 was not about the blockchain, thank god
• Levelup | e18e - 2024-08-22 - Ecosystem Performance
• Lessons learned switching to Rspack - Brian Birtles’ Blog - 2024-08-22 - NOTE: This post was published while Rspack’s latest version was v1.0.0-beta.4. Some details are likely to change as Rspack approaches its 1.0 release. Rspack is a Rust-based alternative to Webpack that promises to be faster and includes a few common conveniences too. After a year of trying, I’ve finally finished converting my two largest Webpack projects to Rspack. Here are some of the things I learnt along the way. - 15461 words
• RSS the hard way: Adventures with Astro Assets - Brian Birtles’ Blog - 2024-08-22 - There’s something depressing about a blog about blogging. I never wanted this to be one of those blogs. But I’ve struggled so much with Astro’s image feature these past few weeks that I really hope it will benefit others and amount to a bit more than one over-engineered RSS feed. - 21664 words
• Understanding Volta | Volta - 2024-08-22 - Understanding Volta
• What's new in DevTools, Chrome 128  |  Blog  |  Chrome for Developers - 2024-08-22 - Console insights go live in Europe, enhanced Network track and API to customize tracks in the Performance panel, and more. - 35908 words
• arthurfiorette/proposal-safe-assignment-operator: Draft for ECMAScript Error Safe Assignment Operator - 2024-08-22 - Draft for ECMAScript Error Safe Assignment Operator - arthurfiorette/proposal-safe-assignment-operator - 13811 words
• Ivan's reading list - 2024-08-22
• Page not found · GitHub Pages - 2024-08-22
• Search Engine's Blindspot: Continuity and Context | Anil Turaga's Blog - 2024-08-22 - - Nearly 35 years has passed from the advent of search engines. With 90% of the market share, Google search’s user experience has been relatively stagnant for a long time barring the recent AI Overviews feature. Most of the alternatives till a couple of years ago were still mimicking Google search experience but with more privacy guarantees and better control over ranking. With the recent breakthrough in Generative AI and some new solutions gaining traction, Search offerings now can be broadly bifurcated into two types: - 4035 words
• Anthropic sued for "large-scale theft" and training Claude AI with copyrighted content | Windows Central - 2024-08-22 - Three authors filed a lawsuit against Anthropic after Claude AI allegedly stole their copyrighted content in "large-scale." - 5707 words
• Chat-GPT plugin to co-write texts and strings | Create Admin Panels faster on Node and Vue with AdminForth Framework - 2024-08-22 - - Couple of days ago we released a plugin which allows you to co-write texts and strings with the AI. - 4602 words
• LLM Demand Is Currently Inelastic | Fernand Pajot's Blog - 2024-08-22 - - Yesterday (Aug 19 2024) Google drastically increased their free tier API limits for Gemini Flash, per this : In comparison, their limits on Gemini 1.5...
• Dependency Injection and Default Parameters | Kyle Shevlin - 2024-08-21 - Learn how to increase the flexibility and testability of your programs by passing dependencies in as function arguments alongside default parameters. - 7372 words
• You're doing state wrong | Nabil Tharwat - 2024-08-21 - - Boolean state variables are not always the answer. A platform-agnostic article about structuring UI state. - 5166 words
• The only two log levels you need are INFO and ERROR | nicole@web - 2024-08-20 -
• On finishing things - 2024-08-20 - - 6720 words
• Tracking and publishing my TILs - 2024-08-20 -
• KUOW - Why is Aurora Avenue crime concentrated in Seattle, not Shoreline? - 2024-08-19 - There’s general agreement that Aurora Avenue North is starkly divided at North 145th street — the border between the cities of Seattle and Shoreline. The main question is why. - 6367 words
• Trail Tunnel Added Back to 520 Lid Plans After WSDOT Reversal - The Urbanist - 2024-08-17 - #Ryan Packer August 16, 2024 A bike and pedestrian tunnel underneath 10th Avenue E has been restored after advocates fought a cost-costing move to drop it from highway lid plans in North Capitol Hill, - 9209 words
• How Seattle City Light Is Planning for Increasing Energy Demands - Powerlines - 2024-08-15 - Seattle City Light is preparing for increasing energy demands for its service area. The utility's 2024 Integrated Resource Plan progress report helps guide the way..
• Top Countries by Fossil Fuel Consumption in 2023 - 2024-08-15 - China and the U.S. account for nearly half of fossil fuel use. - 3555 words
• Where Did King County Metro’s Ridership Go? - The Urbanist - 2024-08-15 - #Doug Trumm August 14, 2024 A third of King County Metro's pre-pandemic transit ridership has yet to return, and many agencies are seeing stronger rebounds. Where did the bus riders go? - 14418 words
• Leaving Stripe: Parting Thoughts - by Aleks - 2024-08-13 - Goodbye Bazel, Hello Brazil - 11492 words
• Cloudflare has made it too easy to access your homelab on the internet - Kibibyte - 2024-08-13 - - Cloudflare Tunnels and Zero Trust: Hosting Homelabs Has Never Been Easier - 2987 words
• (1) Senior Engineer or Senior Citizen? How Can Vintage Tech Workers Age Like Fine Wine? - 2024-08-12 - Experience in some careers is viewed as universally positive, but that's not necessarily the case in tech. Why is that, and what can you do about it? - 9386 words
• dubrowin/AWS-Reasonable-Account-Defaults: CloudFormation template to create reasonable account defaults around Cost Surprise Alerting - 2024-08-12 - CloudFormation template to create reasonable account defaults around Cost Surprise Alerting - dubrowin/AWS-Reasonable-Account-Defaults - 10642 words
• Here’s how carefully concealed backdoor in fake AWS files escaped mainstream notice | Ars Technica - 2024-08-12 - Files available on the open source NPM repository underscore a growing sophistication. - 11257 words
• Why The Llama 3.1 Announcement Is Huge - Tim Kellogg - 2024-08-12 - - 4020 words
• Categories of leadership on technical teams | benkuhn.net - 2024-08-12 - - overall direction • people management • project management • technical leadership • example divisions of labor - 14314 words
• Don't Overplan, Do Prototype | Ali Khaleqi Yekta - 2024-08-12 - - Trying to reach perfection on paper is pure poison; prototyping is far more effective. - 3835 words
• A plea for the lost practice of information architecture - 2024-08-12 - - How the Winchester Mystery house shows us what we risk if we conflate agile with constant bottom-up iteration and don't do any information architecture. - 19519 words
• It's Hard to Strategize | Sam - 2024-08-12 - - My self-reflection on strategy - 4721 words
• Do not pass DTOs to UI components | Dario's Blog - 2024-08-12 - Blog by Dario Djuric: writing about development, DevOps, and technology.
• Bedframe - A Browser Extension Development Framework that takes you from prototype-to-profit faster - 2024-08-12 - - bedframe.dev - &lt;code&gt;Vite&lt;/code&gt; is the frontend world&#39;s ultimate improv partner! It&#39;s not &lt;code&gt;Vite&lt;/code&gt; vs &lt;code&gt;React&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Vite&lt;/code&gt; vs Vue or &lt;code&gt;Vite&lt;/code&gt; vs anything else. It&#39;s &lt;code&gt;Vit...
• Op-Ed: Here’s How We Can Fix Aurora Avenue – From People Who Might Know - The Urbanist - 2024-08-12 - #Ryan Packer March 23, 2024 Aurora Avenue should have a continuous design with safe sidewalks, crossings, bike lanes, and center-running bus lanes to speed up the E Line. Aurora Reimagined Coalition had a design that does all that. Fill out SDOT's survey to back the idea. - 7162 words
• Demographic Turning Points for the United States - 2024-08-12 - This report highlights projected demographic changes of slower growth, considerable aging, and increased racial and ethnic diversity.
• Part Assholes are Awesome - 2024-08-11 -
• Deep Cloning Objects in JavaScript, the Modern Way - 2024-08-09 - - It’s been a long time coming, but we finally now have the built-in `structuredClone` function to make deep cloning objects in JavaScript a breeze
• Critical AWS Vulnerabilities Allow S3 Attack Bonanza - 2024-08-09 - Researchers at Aqua Security discovered the &quot;Shadow Resource&quot; attack vector and the &quot;Bucket Monopoly&quot; problem, where threat actors can guess the name of S3 buckets based on their public account IDs.
• Optimizing All the Wrong Things · Musings of an IT Fossil - 2024-08-09 - - Over the years I’ve oscillated between reading quite a bit and reading not much at all. Lately I’ve been trying to read a lot more and the book I’m currently reading is called “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot”. Well while escorting my wife to a doctor’s appointment this morning I read a chapter that I found particularly striking as it spends most of it’s time dissecting this famous Donald Knuth quote: - 8554 words
• CrowdStrike: Risk assessment is better off at the sharp end · Jens Rantil - 2024-08-09 - - I think the CrowdStrike incident is a great example of centralized risk management gone wrong. - 4339 words
• Building an Gmail Auto Labeler With LLMs: A Step-by-Step Guide - 2024-08-09 - Learn how to build an email classifier using affordable Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4-mini and Ollama. Automate your inbox management with machine learning. - 11236 words
• New – HTTP/3 Support for Amazon CloudFront | AWS News Blog - 2024-08-09 - - Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service, a network of interconnected servers that is geographically closer to the users and reaches their computers much faster. Amazon CloudFront reduces latency by delivering data through 410+ globally dispersed Points of Presence (PoPs) with automated network mapping and intelligent routing. With Amazon CloudFront, content, API requests […] - 9251 words
• Why we left Fly.io - Chris Arderne - 2024-08-09 - -
• (1) Be a High-Impact Employee - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2024-08-09 - Do work your manager values - 5458 words
• Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers, And They Don't Know What To Do About It - View from the Wing - 2024-08-08 - - Airlines use up to four digits for flight numbers. That means they can have up to 9,999 flights (since there’s no flight zero), and no one comes close. American Airlines operates around 6,700 daily flights including its American Eagle regional services. So they should have plenty of room to grow! Except they don’t. American Airlines, Delta, and United are running out of flight numbers, and nobody knows what to do about it. - 4435 words
• npilk // If you have to optimize, it isn't good enough - 2024-08-08 - - Success is determined by your initial conditions, not whatever improvements you can make on the margin.
• lori's blog - Why I Lost Faith in Kagi - 2024-08-08 - Issues with Kagi's AI focus, finances and leadership
• “Why aren’t the designers and engineers sitting together?” — featherless software design - 2024-08-08 -
• TBM 293: Where More Effective Product Teams Spend More (and Less) Time - 2024-08-08 - When trying to understand where a team or company is at, one of the first things I do is talk to people about how they spend their time and energy. - 4881 words
• Cloud Q2 Review: Google Soars and Amazon Roars but Microsoft Snores - Acceleration Economy - 2024-08-08 - AWS and Google Cloud thrived in Q2, whereas Microsoft's growth slowdown and CEO Nadella's failure to discuss security woes raise big concerns. - 8224 words
• Costco rolling out new membership scanners. Here's why | FOX 13 Seattle - 2024-08-08 - Get ready for a new shopper entry process at the retail giant. - 4658 words
• Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy - 2024-08-05 - Why do startups typically fail? It turns out that "avoiding those things" is already a plan for success. - 23465 words
• How to be discontent | Jo Goh - 2024-08-04 - - How to stay in the Trough of Discontent - 5164 words
• Why I'm Excited About Local-First Software Page - 2024-08-04 - - Local-first software is a new approach to building applications that prioritize the user experience and data ownership. It's exciting because it simplifies the development process and makes applications more reliable. - 3389 words
• 6 Best Practices for Infrastructure as Code in DevOps | HackerNoon - 2024-08-04 - Take a look at the benefits of implementing this practice and some of the best practices you should follow in your DevOps pipeline.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Dart Problem - 2024-08-04 - - programming | probability | writing | physical culture
• About MADR | MADR - 2024-08-04 -
• Up-Down-Up Directions of Management - by Luke Congdon - 2024-08-04 - Career arcs of Learning, Managing, and Leading - 11164 words
• Please Stop Using Barrel Files | TkDodo's blog - 2024-08-04 - Why you probably shouldn't be adding index.ts files everywhere
• My Obsidian Note-Taking Workflow | ssp.sh - 2024-08-04 - A Vim-Inspired Approach to Efficient Note Management with Obsidian and Markdown - 17475 words
• Amazon's Graviton Has Evolved Into A Formidable CPU Contender: Graviton1 To Graviton4 Benchmarks Review - Phoronix - 2024-08-04 - 2893 words
• 📦 How ESM Broke Discord - 2024-08-03 - - Last week my Discord client on Ubuntu stopped working, seemingly out of the blue. Little did I know it was related to the highly controversial JavaScript module debate: CommonJS vs ESM. Timeline A quick breakdown of the timeline was as follows: * May 7th - GitHub releases a major version of - 5234 words
• Bob Kettle Alleges Safe Street Upgrades Hinder Emergency Response, Lacking Evidence - The Urbanist - 2024-08-03 - #Ryan Packer August 2, 2024 Seattle Councilmember Bob Kettle has asserted that projects intended to improve traffic safety can negatively impact emergency response. The data to back it up is not there. - 11460 words
• Spokane Poised to Abolish Parking Mandates in Urbanist Reform Package - The Urbanist - 2024-08-03 - #Doug Trumm August 2, 2024 Spokane is advancing a package of urbanist-minded reforms that would make on-site parking optional for new buildings. It's part of a broader effort to spur homebuilding and reduce car dependency in the Lilac City. - 13585 words

July 2024

• (1) The end of the Everything Cloud - by Forrest Brazeal - 2024-07-31 - Why is AWS deprecating a bunch of services all of a sudden, and what does it mean for you? - 8159 words
• (1) "Klingon Promotions" - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2024-07-30 - Be the obvious replacement - 4577 words
• Architecture is like a path in the woods | Swizec Teller - 2024-07-30 - You're doing too much. Sit back, relax, see how people *want* to use the code. THEN build the abstraction.
• DRY – the common source of bad abstractions | Swizec Teller - 2024-07-30 - Swizec reveals the hidden pitfalls of overusing the DRY principle in coding, leading to bad abstractions. Discover how to write adaptable, efficient code that avoids these common traps.
• Seattle’s Waterfront Bike Path Won’t Open Until This Winter - The Urbanist Ryan Packer July 26, 2024 - 2024-07-27 - #Ryan Packer July 26, 2024 Seattle's long anticipated bike path along a newly remade waterfront won't open until this winter, even as other elements come online. The Overlook Walk is poised to open early this fall. Ryan Packer July 26, 2024 - 8528 words
• Are you looking for someone to develop your idea? Take a few minutes and read this. - AI Powered B2B SaaS - 2024-07-27 - Having ideas is very cool. Everyone has ideas. And I really like ideas. But do you know what I like even more? Those who develop and make them happen. “Man, I have an idea for an app that will revolutionize the X market.” “I have an idea here that will solve the Y problem.” “My...
• Devops Like You’re A Feature Engineer – roady's rants - 2024-07-27
• Nikolov & Zeller: Misrepresentation of Critical Satellite Data by IPCC | Tallbloke's Talkshop - 2024-07-27 - - 1. Introduction The 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6) concluded “It is very likely that well-mixed GHGs [greenhouse gases] were the main driver of tr… - 22065 words
• Accountants Should Do Hackathons! - Tim Kellogg - 2024-07-27 - 3993 words
• Beyond Clean Code | Tobeva Software - 2024-07-27 - - Layers of Optimization
• July 26, 2024 Ryan Packer Seattle Looks to Rescue Sound Transit’s 4th Avenue Transit Street Plan - The Urbanist - 2024-07-27 - Ryan Packer July 26, 2024 Ryan Packer July 26, 2024 With the loss of the SoDo Busway for Sound Transit light rail expansion, 4th Avenue S in SoDo will have to accommodate dozens of additional buses per hour. The Seattle Department of Transportation is pushing for a plan that won't worsen safety on the street. - 12090 words
• RapidRide Future and Prioritization – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-07-24 - A bus lane for RapidRide G, opening September 14. Photo by SDOT Photos. Following major cuts to RapidRide expansions due to budget constraints posed by the pandemic, the King County Council asked M… - 10974 words
• This Pattern Will Wreck Your React App's TS Performance | Total TypeScript - 2024-07-23 - Improve React TypeScript performance by replacing type & with interface extends. Boost IDE and tsc speed significantly. - 194 words
• (1) Emergencies create opportunities - 2024-07-23 - Stand out by owning a company crisis - 5197 words
• How Frugality Creates Innovation in Products and Apparently Movies - 2024-07-23 - Frugality isn't simply about saving money. It's about focusing your attention on what matters. - 5715 words
• Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again – Luc van Donkersgoed's Notes - 2024-07-22 - I’m an AWS Serverless Hero, principal engineer at an AWS centric logistics company, and I build and maintain the AWS News Feed. It’s fair to say that I am very interested in everything AWS does. Bu…
• Dataviz is Hierarchical - 2024-07-22 -
• Supercharge Your Visual Studio Code with These Must-Have Extensions - 2024-07-22 - - Supercharge Your Visual Studio Code with These Must-Have Extensions | Indispensable extensions for visual studio code in javascript development. - 3169 words
• Kamalaharris.org redirects to joebiden.com… for now | Henry Josephson - 2024-07-21 - - Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you might’ve noticed that Joe Biden has announced that he’s stepping out of the 2024 presidential race, and that he’s endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, as his replacement. - 2043 words
• andrewducker | A modest proposal on avoiding massive international computer failures - 2024-07-21 -
• Sound Transit Doubling Sounder North Service This Fall with Four Runs/Day - The Urbanist - 2024-07-21 - Sound Transit's Sounder N Line between Everett and Seattle will see four round trips starting September 14, finally returning to pre-pandemic levels of service. - 8378 words
• sbensu: High Variance Management - 2024-07-21 - - How should you manage a team that is trying to achieve results out of the ordinary?
• You need a capture system - DeveloPassion - 2024-07-21 - - You need a capture system - DeveloPassion
• Sociable Tests: Integration tests without the pain! - DEV Community - 2024-07-21 - I have been known to complain about how slow and painful to debug SpringBoot integration tests can... - 10301 words
• Why prefer unit testing through layer entrypoints? | Garrett D Bates - 2024-07-21 - - Status Quo There is significant artistic variance on how to craft tests which provide developers quick and useful feedback. A common point of contention is the number of files which should be included within these quick and useful tests. The most popular strategy is to have a single file under test at a time. - 2549 words
• Why package by feature first and then by layer? | Garrett D Bates - 2024-07-21 - - 2066 words
• Vertical Slice Architecture - 2024-07-21 - Many years back, we started on a new, long term project, and to start off with, we built the architecture around an onion architecture. Within a couple of months, the cracks started to show around this style and we moved away from that architecture and towards CQRS (before it had - 3670 words
• (1) You Should Be a Product Owner — Plus a Story of Dave Being a Jerk - 2024-07-21 - Stepping outside your job role is a critical behavior for senior leaders. But everyone should consider their job as their area of specialty, not their only focus. - 9114 words
• sbensu: We need visual programming. No, not like that. - 2024-07-21 - - Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?
• Always Measure One Level Deeper - 2024-07-21 - This is a great paper (CACM 2018) by John Ousterhout. Ousterhout is well known for his work on log-structured file system, tcl/tk, Raft, a... - 12743 words
• Amazon is being sued over its ubiquitous 'Buy Now' button - 2024-07-21 - The e-commerce giant wants employees to stop checking in, grabbing coffee, and leaving - 164 words
• How to enable OpenTelemetry traces in React applications | Red Hat Developer - 2024-07-21 - Learn how to enable OpenTelemetry traces in React applications and make them observable in this 10-step demonstration.
• Code Reviews Do Find Bugs - 2024-07-21 - - 7181 words
• Tanner Linsley on X: "I'm *very* thankful that React rolled back the v19 suspense gate and were willing to work with us. I think the future is as bright as ever. Now, this is where I want to go next: I'm increasingly concerned how much React is pushing render-as-you-fetch (hoisting+preloading) as" / X - 2024-07-21 - 4179 words
• Why parenting makes you human | Jose M. - 2024-07-20 - - A family in my environment has recently lost their child in a terrible accident. I cannot imagine what those parents must be going through, but it has made me reflect on what it means to be a parent. In this semi-digital world, we’re losing touch with what makes us feel fully alive, what makes us feel, cry, laugh, and bond. What makes us human. Some experiences can keep you in touch with that human side: art, an honest hug, faith, a good book, your first kiss, a genuine laugh, or losing someone you love. - 2404 words
• Is Crowdstrike the Final Straw? | Gavin D. Howard - 2024-07-20 - - Crowdstrike and Microsoft brought the world down today. Is that the final straw before society cracks down on us?
• Breakthrough Loop - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2024-07-19 - 5-steps to rapid career growth and great relationships - 5392 words
• Anthropic Announces Free Claude AI Chatbot For Android - 2024-07-19 - Anthropic launched a Claude AI chatbot for Android that lets users access advanced conversational AI capabilities - 7485 words
• (1) The case for conferences in 2024 - by Forrest Brazeal - 2024-07-18 - COVID and the end of ZIRP weirded everything. Are companies still funding travel for professional development, and is it still worth doing? - 10625 words
• Mercurial is simply too good — A Bit - 2024-07-17 - - It has always bothered me how much our ways of being are based on copying and using what's popular, rather than learning and doing what a... - 2479 words
• Writing GUI apps doesn't have to be painful - 2024-07-16 - Ramblings
• Self hosting a Copilot replacement: my personal experience - 2024-07-16 - - Being able to run a Large Language Model locally also means to be able to use existing models (fine tuned for coding) to implement a self hosted solution to replace GitHub Copilot. In this post I will talk about my personal experience. - 4810 words
• Amazon at 30: what next for 'The Everything Company'? - 2024-07-16 - Can Amazon sustain its rapid growth since 1994 - or will rivals or regulators cut it down to size? - 5429 words
• My pet theory of how great software gets startedAndrew Quinn's TILs - 2024-07-16 - - (Inspired by yungporko’s Ask HN post, which got me thinking.) Pretty much every community, dojo, workplace, subculture, scene you can imagine in the modern day had a software sub-scene embedded within it. It can be as small as “that guy who does our Excel”, or as large as the scene itself . This is owing to the fantastic generality of software as a way to make almost anything more efficient, but we won’t go on that tangent now. - 1791 words
• The error monitoring tool I want | Flytrap - 2024-07-16 - - An exploration of the error monitoring landscape, and how I think it should look like - 4923 words
• FOLLOWUP: Progress at Lincoln Park South Play Area | West Seattle Blog... - 2024-07-16
• Amazon GenAI Services - Last Week in AWS Blog - 2024-07-16 - I was in New York this week for the AWS Summit, and while it's always great to catch up with readers (thanks to those of you who came out to the - 7264 words
• Hack Your Notes: Building a LLM-Powered Obsidian Plugin with Ollama | Nick Herrig - 2024-07-15 - - Let's build Scribe, an Obsidian plugin that rewrites your notes into a template using local LLMs - 6615 words
• When I Realized I Was Not That Guy | Kwaku's thoughts - 2024-07-15 - - A discussion about a design question on the DevCongress slack today brought back a very funny but revealing period in my life so I decided to write about it! So earlier in 2022, I had just started diving into the world of low level engineering. Fascinated by all these talks made by engineers who had done crazy things in the CS world, I could not wait to get my hands dirty. At the time I was building Remixify, which did not really do so well, because there was zero promo for it and just when I was about to release it, Heroku took away the free tier and I said flip it. It’s rotting on my GitHub somewhere at the moment. At this point, I was tired of building Remixify, I felt it was not stimulating enough, at the time. Or I was just bored, cause I asked myself, why would anyone want remixed versions of songs on their Spotify playlists in the first place? Maybe a handful, but was not encouraging enough to continue. I tweeted on my account for project ideas, and a friend of mine, Ahornam, sent me a link where someone was trying to build something similar to sqlite, with a well laid out approach and everything. It was written in C, and I barely know C, so I set out to build something similar in Go. I can’t even lie, it was a fun experience. I encountered so many problems when I was trying to port the solution to Go, and also trying to understand what exactly was going on in the tutorial. - 6005 words
• Darius Foroux - On Thoughts and Thinking Better - 2024-07-14 - What does it mean to be thinking better? Friedrich Nietzsche explained it well in his book, The Gay Science. - 4196 words
• Web Workers, Comlink, Vite and TanStack Query | johnnyreilly - 2024-07-14 - Web Workers are a great way to offload work from the main thread. Comlink is a delightful way to communicate with Web Workers. TanStack Query is an awesome way to bring them together. - 7483 words
• Visual testing: The greatest trick in UI development - 2024-07-14 - - Get more confidence with less maintenance - 9250 words
• Is it ok to pass setState as a prop in React? - 2024-07-14 - No, it's not It's possible to pass setState as a prop in React. However, it's not the recommended way to deal with updating state triggered by child components. Passing down setState makes it hard to reason about the state of the component. State m... - 4041 words
• New JavaScript Set methods | MDN Blog - 2024-07-14 - - New JavaScript Set methods are landing across browsers. Learn about sets, how you can use these methods to compare different sets, create new sets with specific properties, and more. - 7800 words
• Announcing TypeScript 5.5 - TypeScript - 2024-07-14 - - Today we’re excited to announce the release of TypeScript 5.5! If you’re not familiar with TypeScript, it’s a language that builds on top of JavaScript by making it possible to declare and describe types. Writing types in our code allows us to explain intent and have other tools check our code to catch mistakes like typos, - 46627 words
• Where is the sandbox in your code base? - 2024-07-14 - - I was watching Casey Muratori and the Primeagen the other day, and they were talking about the high-level architectural design of the core data inside of Primeagen's game. What Casey says sounds counter-intuitive for anyone from a traditional OOP software background. He suggests not committing to an organization of data - 8964 words
• Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly | benkuhn.net - 2024-07-14 - - non-trust is reasonable • trust lets collaboration scale • symptoms of trust deficit • how to proactively build trust - 8074 words
• (1) Initial thoughts about the Attempted Assassination on President Trump - 2024-07-14 - Not a chance YouTube will let me talk about this - 3391 words
• My Frustration With Tech - Chris Wiegman - 2024-07-13 - - I’ve written about it before but I still say that, for all its faults, the best computing stack I ever had was when most of our data was in Google. Others have come close but that was, by far, the most convenient combination of features and access. I realize most people don’t mind using multiple […] - 3003 words
• How to lie about latency | Open Broadcast Systems - 2024-07-13 - - 8667 words
• Adding Friction - by The Five 9's Newsletter - 2024-07-11 - Today, we're diving into an interesting topic: friction in development processes. I recently had a conversation with Tom about this, and it brought some new perspectives to light. An Initial Confusion During a call with our engineering team, our CEO Tom suggested adding a bit of friction to our processes. This was strange because I always want to remove friction to make things smoother and faster. Velocity is crucial for us— Tom harps on how we want to move quickly and efficiently. So, why would we want to add friction? - 4593 words
• The Programmable Web - 2024-07-11 - - Today’s app development ecosystems resemble the creative contexts for writers and photographers pre-web and pre-iPhone. - 3055 words
• RAG Trick: Embeddings are Spheres - Tim Kellogg - 2024-07-11 - - 5000 words
• Jerk - 2024-07-10 -
• Jan-Piet Mens :: When my systems send me instructions - 2024-07-10 -
• 17 Libraries to Become a React Wizard 🧙‍♂️🔮✨ - DEV Community - 2024-07-10 - React is getting better, especially with the latest release of React 19. Today, we're going to dive... - 35658 words
• Metro Charts Slow RapidRide Expansion, with R Line Slipping to 2031 - The Urbanist - 2024-07-10 - A long-planned RapidRide line on Rainier Avenue has been delayed to 2031, as Metro starts the process of identifying the next round of RapidRide lines to implement. Slow timelines are leaving a daily ridership boost of 19,000 on the table. - 13485 words
• Always Optimize the Feedback Loop - 2024-07-09 - Speed, I am Speed. -- Lightning McQueen Some thoughts about the impact of feedback loops in startups and software. Parts: Intro Framework Ob... - 6166 words
• Scaling the Practice of Architecture, Conversationally - 2024-07-09 - - Scaling architecture through a structured series of conversations
• 6 Mechanisms Which Drive Personal Career Success - 2024-07-09 - These mechanisms relate to your ability to focus on your priorities, drive your career forward, and network over the years. Small but critical tools you can use to make career progress. - 10351 words
• Using an LLM and RAG to Wring Insights From My Posts - 2024-07-09 - - I’ve been using large language models - LLMs - and retrieval-augmented generation - RAG - at work for over a year now. I use it to write code, to refine my ideas and writing, and we have been building products on top of it. It’s long overdue fo... - 3676 words
• Extrinsic Hallucinations in LLMs | Lil'Log - 2024-07-08 - - Hallucination in large language models usually refers to the model generating unfaithful, fabricated, inconsistent, or nonsensical content. As a term, hallucination has been somewhat generalized to cases when the model makes mistakes. Here, I would like to narrow down the problem of hallucination to be when the model output is fabricated and not grounded by either the provided context or world knowledge. There are two types of hallucination: In-context hallucination: The model output should be consistent with the source content in context. - 42040 words
• 10. SOM synthetic monitoring | Open Software Design | Upmo - 2024-07-08 - The inside scoop on our technical story
• CDK: how to customize 3rd-party L3 constructs | theburningmonk.com - 2024-07-08 - If you use CDK, you should be using L3 constructs. But it can be difficult to customize 3rd-party L3 constructs... Let me show you how! - 3809 words
• Architecture at multiple scales · Jens Rantil - 2024-07-08 - - Architecture is a fractal concept. - 1130 words
• Tools for innovation in tech · Jens Rantil - 2024-07-08 - - A list of some tools that can be used to foster innovation within tech organizations. - 9217 words
• How LLMs Learn: What We Know, What We Don't (Yet) Know, and What Comes Next - 2024-07-08 - - To be, or not to be, that is the question - 36868 words
• Seattle traffic slowed a whole lot in 2023 | The Seattle Times - 2024-07-07 - Despite a high proportion of remote and hybrid workers, Puget Sound-area traffic got tougher. Here are the worst trouble spots and travel times. - 8346 words
• Walkthrough - Part 2 - AWS Solutions Constructs - 2024-07-06 - This tutorial walks you through how to modify the "Hello Constructs" app created in .
• Improved browser features for desktop and Vivaldi Mail 2.0 amped up with new functionalities | Vivaldi Browser - 2024-07-05 - Big Vivaldi Mail update with prefetching, previews, and quick replies. Vivaldi 6.8 also includes real-time tab memory usage, improved address field, and more. - 20407 words
• Putting the Brakes on E-Bikes – Energy Institute Blog - 2024-07-05 - New tariffs on e-bikes will hurt the environment and our cities. I recently returned from a trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts and was astounded by the number of cyclists riding along on the city’s e… - 6854 words
• Updates to Ad Blocker and more personalization options. | Vivaldi Browser - 2024-07-05 - New ways to personalize the browser, address bar, Start Page, and more. Improvements made to the Ad Blocker and Bookmark nickname matching. - 4709 words
• Workers overview  |  Articles  |  web.dev - 2024-07-05 - How web workers and service workers can improve the performance of your website, and when to use a web worker versus a service worker. - 6355 words
• Cross-Tab Communication in JavaScript using a SharedWorker - Adocasts - 2024-07-05 - In this lesson we'll be going over how to do cross-tab communication using a SharedWorker. SharedWorkers are Web Workers that are sharable across browser-instances (tabs, windows, ... - 17379 words
• (1) Leading vs. Winning — Leaders Grow Their Team - 2024-07-04 - Focusing on leading, rather than winning, creates significantly better results for you and your team. - 4816 words
• It's time to abolish the builder pattern in Rust - 2024-07-04 - - This post is part of my Summer of Rust 2024 serie: weekly (or more) quickies about how to write great Rust code so you will be ready to rock at the end of the summer and find a new exciting job 🤘 Dont forget to Subscribe (Email &amp; RSS) Who - 4452 words
• Sonnet is the opposite of lazy | aider - 2024-07-04 - - Claude 3.5 Sonnet can easily write more good code than fits in one 4k token API response.
• Are dashboards dead? Not quite. They just haven’t evolved - SquaredUp - 2024-07-04 - Dashboard tools need to provide operational intelligence for all, and that is a whole world away from the dashboards of the past. - 40 words
• The Future of Generative Interfaces - 2024-07-04 - - July 3, 2024 - 6032 words
• D-Star - 2024-07-04 - - Open-source data warehouse for unstructured data
• Chaos Engineering in Frontend Development: A Comprehensive Guide to Enhancing Application Resilience | Omid Farhang - 2024-07-04 - In the dynamic world of web development, ensuring the resilience and reliability of frontend applications has become increasingly critical. As user expectations soar and application complexity grows, developers must adopt robust strategies to maintain high-quality, fault-tolerant systems. Enter Chaos Engineering – a discipline traditionally associated with backend systems and infrastructure, now making significant inroads into frontend development. This comprehensive guide explores how applying Chaos Engineering principles to frontend applications can dramatically enhance their resilience, improve user experience, and help teams build more robust web applications. - 10453 words
• Get Started with the Chaos Toolkit - Chaos Toolkit - The chaos engineering toolkit for developers - 2024-07-04 - Chaos Toolkit - 14302 words
• TDD CANNOT Work - 2024-07-03 -
• Seattle’s Population Nears 800,000 in Latest State Tally - The Urbanist - 2024-07-02 - Seattle grew by 18,500 residents in one year to a total of 797,700, according to recently released state figures. Meanwhile, Tacoma surpassed 225,000, Redmond crossed 80,000, and Bellevue hit 155,000 in those population estimates. - 7685 words
• Using GPT and GenAI models - Ritza Handbook - 2024-07-01 - - 2557 words
• (1) 6 Behaviors of Lazy People That Create Career Success - 2024-07-01 - Not all lazy behaviors are valuable, and setting the right (productive) tone with your co-workers is important. But certain lazy traits are valuable, and should be encouraged. - 10306 words
• Amazon Web Services dark patterns - 2024-07-01

June 2024

• Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites - 2024-06-30 - - In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites
• Perception dictates reality - 2024-06-30 - The shallowest parts of your reputation will travel the farthest - 6612 words
• Prefer Noun-Adjective Naming | Kyle Shevlin - 2024-06-30 - - English grammar puts the adjective before the noun, but when it comes to file or function naming, I think you should do the opposite. - 1771 words
• Prefer Multiple Compositions | Kyle Shevlin - 2024-06-30 - The flexibility of JavaScript and React means there are lots of ways to achieve the same result. Let's consider why we might choose one way over another when it comes to React. Specifically, when to choose a more verbose solution with composition over the DRYest code possible. - 7516 words
• ECMAScript 2023 feature: symbols as WeakMap keys - 2024-06-30 - - In this blog post, we take a look at the ECMAScript 2023 feature “Symbols as WeakMap keys” – which was proposed by Robin Ricard, Rick Button, Daniel Ehrenberg, Leo Balter, Caridy Patiño, Rick Waldron, and Ashley Claymore.
• AWS’ Trainium3 chips likely to consume 1kW of power, company to adopt cold plate cooling - DCD - 2024-06-29 - Company moving to liquid cooling for high-density chips - 2911 words
• Perf is not enough - 2024-06-27 - - Are database benchmarks still relevant ? Let's understand why it's a poor way to choose a database.
• We need to be the historians of our own software - 2024-06-27 - - If we want to shape the future of our codebases, we need to understand the past and the people who made the choices that got us here. - 8145 words
• Implementing "Suggested Destinations" in a few lines of code - Ayende @ Rahien - 2024-06-27 - - Today I got in my car to drive to work and realized that Waze suggested &ldquo;Work&rdquo; as the primary destination to select. I had noticed that before, a... - 5283 words
• The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in America, June 2024 Update. San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, Portland, Denver, Dallas, Las Vegas still below 2022 Peak | Wolf Street - 2024-06-27 - 5308 words
• From Chaos to Clarity: My Journey with Obsidian - 2024-06-25 - How I got more organized and productive with ObsidianMD, SyncThing and NeuraCache - 10076 words
• I Demoed Too Early - KeppyLab - 2024-06-25 - - 1075 words
• People Don’t Understand OOP – Sigma's Blog - 2024-06-25 - - 1398 words
• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity - 2024-06-25 - 27031 words
• How to compose JavaScript functions that take multiple parameters (the epic guide) - 2024-06-24 - Function composition is beautiful. It lets us create elegant function pipelines. And when everything lines up, the data flows like maple syrup over pancakes. But what happens when the functions don’t line up? What if some of those functions expect more than one argument? What do we do? - 28542 words
• Updates from the 102nd TC39 meeting - DEV Community - 2024-06-23 - There were several items on the agenda, this post focuses on feature proposals and their progress... - 1590 words
• Using Arktype in Place of Zod - How to Adapt Parsers - DEV Community - 2024-06-23 - Ever since I started using Zod, a TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library, I've... - 8119 words
• Extension methods make code harder to read, actually - 2024-06-23 -
• On the Diverse And Fantastical Shapes of Testing - 2024-06-22 - - My #2 problem with arguing testing pyramids vs honeycombs is the disparate definitions of unit test
• Amelia Wattenberger - 2024-06-22 - - Amelia Wattenberger's personal website - 5163 words
• Simple sabotage for software · Erik Bernhardsson - 2024-06-22 - - How to sabotage software productivity, in the style of CIA - 7425 words
• Automated Chaos Testing on the Front-end - 2024-06-21 - As front-end developers, we don’t often hear about Chaos testing. A project related to Twitch front-end availability led us to research the exciting field of Chaos engineering, pioneered by Netflix. Chaos engineering is the science of optimizing the resiliency of a software system by simulating failures and measuring the impact of these failures on the system. These simulations help anticipate real world issues before they happen, and ensure our systems can degrade gracefully.
• (1) Senior to Staff Engineer - Alex Ewerlöf Notes - 2024-06-21 - What are the similarities and differences? What are the criteria for promotion? And some tools and techniques that come in handy. - 22228 words
• Boris Cherny's Blog - 2024-06-20 - - Coming back to JavaScript and TypeScript after a few years neck deep in Python and Hack, I kept hitting a number of new, cryptic errors when running NodeJS code in my dev environment:
• Is my Amazon Prime membership still worth the money? - 2024-06-20 - I reviewed the Prime perks that I do — and don't — use, to see if it's worth keeping around for another year. 
• Less meetings, more focused work - Alex Ewerlöf Notes - 2024-06-19 - Applying ideas from computer performance optimization and reliability engineering to improve organizational productivity - 3386 words
• Managers Should Focus More On Setting Expectations - 2024-06-19 - - My tales as a technical founder, manager, and software engineer. - 2304 words
• Grow a Pair – The Coding Craftsman - 2024-06-19 - - I recently needed to merge a code change. I wasn’t a code owner of the specific repo, so I put my merge request in front of the code owners. It was a small lexical change, based on the curren… - 2662 words
• Neatnik Notes · Gotta block ’em all - 2024-06-19 - - Neatnik Notes - 5454 words
• Latency, Tail Latency and Response time in distributed systems - 2024-06-19 -
• wtb: Progressive SPAs - 2024-06-18 - - I've been using React a long time at this point, and it's by far my favorite approach to building a UI - interactive or not. Most of that time has been spent at Sentry, but whenever I start a new project, I still reach for React. I want to talk a little about what I'd love to see the React ecosystem adopt, and where I see some of the gaps with approaches today, particularly around the slow evolution of Single Page Applications. - 56 words
• The Problem with OpenTelemetry - 2024-06-18 - I regularly complain about OpenTelemetry, so with an aim to be a less useless contributor, today I'm putting pen to paper. If you're an implementor, I ask you to read this and take away the personal bias you might have towards your work, and instead look objectively at the feedback being given. - 36 words
• Your code style does matter actually | Epic Web Dev - 2024-06-17 - You may be babysitting JavaScript syntax. It's annoying and you don't have to. Fix your formatter!
• Quickly Visualize your AWS Costs · Bits and Cloud - 2024-06-17 - One of the most underappreciated APIs in AWS is the Cost Explorer API - specifically the GetCostAndUsage API. In essence, this API lets you fetch the same information you can get through the Cost Explorer GUI - but without the difficult UI/UX. This short blog post shows how you can leverage this programmatic access to the Cost Explorer to quickly build up powerful visualizations of your AWS costs directly from the CLI - and all you need is ce:GetCostAndUsage permissions. - 8981 words
• Why Senior Employees Need to Audit and Verify Things for Themselves — It's Not (Only) That We Don't Trust You - 2024-06-17 - As a junior employee, you learn everything firsthand. As you grow in seniority, you begin to learn things second and thirdhand. How do you audit to ensure you still get firsthand knowledge? - 6645 words
• 67 Weird Debugging Tricks Your Browser Doesn't Want You to Know | Alan Norbauer - 2024-06-14 - Advanced browser parlor tricks - 11458 words
• People riding e-bikes and scooters on King County trails are no longer unknowingly breaking the rules – Seattle Bike Blog - 2024-06-13 - An outlaw riding an e-bike on a King County trail. Here’s some good news you didn’t know you needed: The King County Council has legalized riding Class 1 and 2 e-bikes as well as electr…
• Navigator: sendBeacon() method - Web APIs | MDN - 2024-06-13 - - The navigator.sendBeacon() method asynchronously sends an HTTP POST request containing a small amount of data to a web server. - 5738 words
• Slack Combines ASTs with Large Language Models to Automatically Convert 80% of 15,000 Unit Tests - InfoQ - 2024-06-12 - Slack's engineering team recently published how it used a large language model (LLM) to automatically convert 15,000 unit and integration tests from Enzyme to React Testing Library (RTL). By combining Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) transformations and AI-powered automation, Slack's innovative approach resulted in an 80% conversion success rate, significantly reducing the manual effort required. - 5767 words
• The Wrong Abstraction — Sandi Metz - 2024-06-11 - - I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction." &nbsp;My RailsConf 2014 "all the little things" talk included a section where I asserted: &gt; duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction And in the summary, I went on to advise: &gt; - 6033 words
• AHA Programming 💡 - 2024-06-11 - - The dangers of DRY, the web of WET, the awesomeness of AHA.
• What's the most serverless way to wait for a slow HTTP response? | theburningmonk.com - 2024-06-11 - What happens when you need to wait for a slow HTTP response (> 15 mins)? And what's the most serverless way to do this? - 4546 words
• William Ha Law | Remember When You Named Your 20 Year Old Girlfriend As a Beneficiary? He Didn't Either. - 2024-06-09 - - William Ha Law is a digital first estate planning law firm based in Whittier, California in Los Angeles County offering services throughout the state.
• Christian Bromann | Component Testing with SafeTest vs. Cypress vs. WebdriverIO - 2024-06-09 - - Netflix's recent launch of SafeTest, a component testing tool that gained rapid attention on social media, prompted a detailed comparison with Cypress by our friend Gleb Bahmutov, inspiring me to also evaluate it against WebdriverIO.
• Regarding Audible | Brandon Sanderson - 2024-06-09 - - Hey, all. Brandon here, with what I consider to be some pretty exciting news. Many of you may remember when I wrote last year about my worries regarding aud ... - 7664 words
• Fed Balance Sheet QT: -$107 Billion in May, -$1.71 Trillion from Peak, to $7.26 Trillion, Lowest since December 2020 | Wolf Street - 2024-06-08 - 7549 words
• 3 new features to customize your performance workflows in DevTools  |  Blog  |  Chrome for Developers - 2024-06-08 - Learn about the latest features to help you declutter the Performance panel and focus on the information you need most - 8954 words
• Increase Your Luck - 2024-06-07 - - To increase your luck, expand your luck surface. Roll the dice more often and you will roll more sixes. Here are some strategies... - 4305 words
• Writing is hard, so I got help - 2024-06-07 - - I'm not a native English speaker. I make grammar mistakes, and I write convoluted sentences. This can muddy my message. I can nag colleagues and friends to proofread my prose, but I want to be mindful of their time. I decided to find a tool to help me write better English instead. After a quick search, I reviewed four solutions: DeepL Write, Hemingway, LanguageTool, and Grammarly. Another alternative I didn't explore was running an LLM locally or on a server because of the hardware requirements. Let's explore what problems I'm trying to solve, the level of privacy and security I can expect from these tools, and how well they perform according to my subjective gut feeling. - 19680 words
• Vjeux » 12 Years at Meta - 2024-06-07 -
• "Help, I see a problem and no one is prioritizing it!" | nicole@web - 2024-06-07 -
• Measuring Patterns To Boost Productivity · @jimmyislive - 2024-06-07 -
• Spring Rites - 2024-06-07 - - A caution against annotation-based web frameworks
• (1) Burnout and Layoffs — Approaches to Managing Overwork and Limited Resources - 2024-06-07 - Layoffs have left many teams underresourced. The inevitable result is employees feeling stressed, and working long hours. Here are some approaches to improving your situation. - 8577 words
• Introvert to Director — Leading in Your Unique Way - 2024-06-07 - My path to Director would have surprised a younger Dave. I had a particular view of what being a leader was, and I felt my personality didn't match. I was wrong. - 5026 words
• How to learn the most about a candidate from a single interview question - 2024-06-07 - High-signal-to-noise interview questions inspired by my 150+ podcast guests - 8723 words
• Aristotle — How to live a good life - Ralph Ammer - 2024-06-07 - 2400 years ago Aristotle found out how to be happy. His Nicomachean Ethics is an operating manual for a good life.
• Agents aren’t all you need - Parcha - 2024-06-07 - - Lessons from Parcha's Journey automating compliance workflows
• Yes, you too, reader, should believe you may be world-class – Daniel Frank - 2024-06-07 - - 9064 words
• ongoing by Tim Bray · Parable of the Sofa - 2024-06-07
• You'll regret using natural keys - 2024-06-07 - Beating another dead horse.
• What Emacs got right, or how I wish modern apps were more like a 50 year old text editor - 2024-06-07 - - 7873 words
• Robert A. Heinlein - Wikipedia - 2024-06-06
• Core Competencies | Jon Finerty - 2024-06-06 - - I have a few beliefs. Things that even if they aren’t true, I wish they were and I try to act accordingly. - 3115 words
• Sneaky React Memory Leaks II: Closures Vs. React Query | Kevin Schiener - 2024-06-06 - How to spot and fix memory leaks in React Query caused by closure scopes.
• Sneaky React Memory Leaks: How useCallback and closures can bite you | Kevin Schiener - 2024-06-06 - - Avoid performance issues caused by memory leaks in your React applications by understanding closures, useCallback, and best practices.
• Embracing Slow Networks: Improving User Experience | Epic Web Dev - 2024-06-06 - How web devs can tackle high latency networks and enhance UX and the role React Server Components plays in this.
• What's more important: Big results or great team? - 2024-06-06 - How to balance short-term business results with longer-term team development - 3184 words
• The Problem With Relay Fragments And Conditional Rendering • Andrei Calazans - 2024-06-06 - - GraphQL's fragments always fetch irregardless if the consuming component renders or not causing over-fetching - 2374 words
• It’s a process; not a product – Terence Eden’s Blog - 2024-06-06 - - 2185 words
• What I learned from ambitious rich kids - 2024-06-06 - What I observed from growing up knowing lazy rich kids vs meeting ambitious rich kids.
• Thirty Percent Feedback - 2024-06-06 - My favorite tool for getting on the same page about feedback - 6507 words
• Why Chatbots Aren’t Working - Plus - 2024-06-06 - - Four reasons chatbots are not the right interface for AI - 5193 words
• Debugger.godMode() - 2024-06-06 - - Let's bring back the classic tradition of hacking programs with a debugger
• I used to write - by Julien Danjou - Continuous Rambling - 2024-06-06 - Then I stopped. - 3396 words
• I tried React Compiler today, and guess what... 😉 - 2024-06-05 - Investigating whether we can forget about memoization in React, now that the React Compiler is open-sourced. - 27635 words
• King County Will Finally Allow E-bikes on Regional Trails, May Expand Hours - The Urbanist - 2024-06-05 - King County's trail network is a great resource for getting around without a car, but outdated rules limiting access are getting overhauled to allow greater use. - 8145 words
• How to be a man: The 9 qualities of masculinity | Ed Latimore - 2024-06-04 - - All boys must develop these nine qualities of a masculine man to achieve their greatest potential. They are the passage into manhood. - 22182 words
• How and why to make a /now page on your site | Derek Sivers - 2024-06-04 - 2618 words
• Tom Blomfield — Taking Risk - 2024-06-04 - I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK's top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of... - 43587 words
• How we’ve saved 98% in cloud costs by writing our own database - 2024-06-04
• S3 Is Showing Its Age - by Chris Riccomini - 2024-06-04 - I'm squarely in the trough of disillusionment with S3. - 5208 words
• Amazon Bedrock announces new Converse API - AWS - 2024-06-04 - Discover more about what's new at AWS with Amazon Bedrock announces new Converse API
• Use tools with an Amazon Bedrock model - Amazon Bedrock - 2024-06-04 - You can use the Amazon Bedrock API to give a model access to tools that can help it generate responses for messages that you send to the model. For example, you might have a chat application that lets users find out out the most popular song played on a radio station. To answer a request for the most popular song, a model needs a tool that can query and return the song information.
• Even more Opentelemetry! - 2024-06-04 - - I continue to work on my Opentelemetry demo. Its main idea is to showcase traces across various technology stacks, including asynchronous communication via an MQTT queue. This week, I added a couple of components and changed the architecture. Here are some noteworthy learnings; note that some of them might not be entirely connected to OpenTelemetry. Here’s an updated diagram. New components appear in violet, and updated components appear in green. I want to be able to add more comp - 9301 words
• Changing How Others Perceive You. Most Importantly, Those Who Dislike You. - 2024-06-04 - If you've found yourself on someone's bad side, what strategies can you use to turn things around? - 9721 words
• Making EC2 boot time 8x faster - 2024-06-03 - It's possible to cut EC2 boot time from 40 seconds to 5 seconds by combining several optimizations like root volume streaming, instance warm pools, and instance resizing.
• An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them - SparkToro - 2024-06-02 - On Sunday, May 5th, I received an email from a person claiming to have access to a massive leak of API documentation from inside Google’s Search division. - 33279 words
• Nextcloud for photos: using cheaper object storage | Will Webberley - 2024-06-02 - Setting-up a Nextcloud instance with an object storage backend. Could this be an alternative to Google Photos? - 8136 words
• Moving Beyond Type Systems | Vhyrro's Digital Garden - 2024-06-02 - - Is another programming revolution possible? - 24022 words
• tmux is worse is better | Andrew Quinn's TILs - 2024-06-01 - - tmux (short for “terminal mux” (short for “multiplexer”)) is i3 for your terminal. Oh, it’s so much more than that, and I recently discovered with some joy that it is installed by default on OpenBSD, but its fundamental value add to any programmer who has to SSH into servers more than once a week is it allows you to split your screen up into multiple independent shells without needing a graphical environment at all. - 3780 words
• Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal | Andrew Quinn's TILs - 2024-06-01 - - There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online. - 4769 words
• Prompting for Business using Llama 2 | by Jerry Cuomo | Medium - 2024-06-01 - An Art of A.I. Series Article by Jerry Cuomo… Check out the podcast by the same name - 7192 words
• Redefining Career Specialization - 2024-06-01 - - Just becoming the best programmer is too hard. Becoming the best ruby programmer is hard, but not as hard. Becoming the best Ruby on Rails backend developer is a little easier... - 4050 words

May 2024

• The best have intuition - 2024-05-31 -
• Turn It Up or Turn It Down - adrianhoward.com - 2024-05-31 - - TL;DR: Instead of selling an activity, sell the triggers and cues that show the _need_ for that activity. Help the organisation see when they need to turn it up. Or turn it down.
• React 19 lets you write impossible components | Mux - 2024-05-30 - What can you do with Server Components and Actions in React 19? Let’s talk about how React 19’s features are a big deal, even for a simple marketing site.
• (1) I made a new cartoon thing for you to try - 2024-05-28 - also, Google Cloud does something very good - 4465 words
• Marko Živanović | Some productivity metrics are evil - 2024-05-27 - - You have the company, the vision, the product, and the plan to improve it and make it more feature rich.
• At some point, JavaScript got good - jonbeebe.net - 2024-05-27 - Years ago, I'm not sure anyone liked JavaScript, but since ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) things have been steadily improving to the point where today the language is (dare I say) actually pretty good. - 9541 words
• My favorite decision making frameworks - by Lenny Rachitsky - 2024-05-27 - Templates and guides to help you make better decisions with less drama - 8019 words
• 7.3 Billion People, One Building — Wait But Why - 2024-05-27 - - This isn't gonna be pleasant for anyone. - 17693 words
• Things I remind myself when working with others | passo.uno :: Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti on Technical Writing - 2024-05-27 -
• Linting code for LLMs with tree-sitter | aider - 2024-05-27 - - Aider now lints code after every LLM edit and automatically fixes errors, using tree-sitter and AST-aware code context.
• Adding Keyboard Shortcuts to a 24 Year Old Government Website with Userscripts - 2024-05-26 - - Writing userscripts to optimize my data entry workflow with the FDA's 510k database.
• Enshittification Is A Feature, Not A Bug - 2024-05-26 - Enshittification is a term coined last year1 by Corry Doctorow to describe the unpreventable decay of platforms, providing services of increasing price and d... - 8092 words
• Orange Line Is an Early Hit, Community Transit Plans Further Expansion - The Urbanist - 2024-05-26 - The Swift Orange Line bus rapid transit route debuted in March and will connect to Lynnwood Link light rail when it opens in September. Already Community Transit saw a 23% ridership bump in its first month of service. - 11953 words
• SDOT Sprints Toward the End of the Move Seattle Era - The Urbanist - 2024-05-26 - The Seattle Department of Transportation's project delivery is ramping up in 2024. What does that tell us about where the department is heading under a new levy? - 11615 words
• Sound Transit Board Rejects Chamber-Backed SLU Station Alternatives - The Urbanist - 2024-05-26 - Today, Sound Transit ruled out late-breaking South Lake Union station alternatives for Ballard Link. Major business lobbied hard for the late "shifted west" additions, but it wasn't enough to win over the board. - 8707 words
• Sound Transit Proposal Would Curb Out-of-Scope Costs, but Boardmembers Push Back - The Urbanist - 2024-05-26 - The Sound Transit Board is set to vote on betterments policy reform, limiting local jurisdictions' ability to foist costs on the agency. But some boardmembers are accusing the agency of "bullying" and are seeking to water down the proposal. - 15885 words
• Thinking Big and Small - Jim Nielsen’s Blog - 2024-05-26 - - Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web. - 2476 words
• Pitfalls of best practices | Elvis Chidera - 2024-05-25 - - Good advice comes with a rationale so you can tell when it becomes bad advice. If you don’t understand why something should be done, then…
• Why is Anthropic breaking compatibility with OpenAI? | memothon - 2024-05-25 - - The Claude API has a few features that are very similar to functionality in OpenAI's API, but break compatibility in subtle ways. Image inputs You must send ...
• Levy Proposal Would Add Only 10 Miles of New Protected Bike Lanes - The Urbanist - 2024-05-25 - After building over 40 miles of protected bike lanes since 2015, the City of Seattle only promises around 10 additional miles through 2032. The potential for extra projects depend on additional funding beyond the mayor's levy proposal. - 10431 words
• Slack Trains Some of Its AI-Powered Features on User Messages, Files | PCMag - 2024-05-22 - Slack feeds user content, messages, and uploads to its machine learning models. All users are opted-in by default. - 3950 words
• The Self-Driving IDE is Coming - 2024-05-22 - I’ve got something new for you today. At least, it’s new to me, and hopefully it’s new to most of you as well. It is a powerful idea that is emerging in the Coding Assistant space, as we build out the Cody experience and learn our way around this new world. - 28628 words
• Tools without config 🛠📦 - 2024-05-21 - TL;DR/Spoiler alert: I'm working on a tool at PayPal called paypal-scripts and a personal one called kcd-scripts. You should try it too!
• (1) "You're doing this all wrong" - Amazon SVP - 2024-05-21 - How to get promotion advocacy - 8195 words
• (1) A tale of two clouds - by Forrest Brazeal - 2024-05-21 - Customer obsession vs customer obfuscation - 8154 words
• A Better Lesson – Rodney Brooks - 2024-05-19 - - 6008 words
• GitHub - endojs/endo: Endo is a distributed secure JavaScript sandbox, based on SES - 2024-05-19 - Endo is a distributed secure JavaScript sandbox, based on SES - endojs/endo - 3285 words
• Will Seattle Embrace Middle Housing in Single Family Zones Despite Weak Proposal? - The Urbanist - 2024-05-19 - Seattle needs to allow more housing in today's single family zones if it's serious about its housing crisis. Strict building size restrictions need to go. - 10805 words
• How I use principles to develop engineering strategies. - 2024-05-19 - Colin Campbell Toronto Software Engineering Leadership Programming Development Consulting Coding Awesome Freelance Best - 10698 words
• Skipping ahead to the problems - by Oz Nova - 2024-05-19 - Balaji's simple technique for highly effective self-teaching - 4206 words
• High Agency in Software Engineering – Joe de Moraes - 2024-05-19 - - If you were stuck in a third world prison and had to call one person to try and bust you out of there — who would you call?— Jeff Bezos High agency is essentially the art of overcoming obstacles. I…
• LLMs are not suitable for (advanced) brainstorming – piaoyang - 2024-05-18 - - This may be obvious to many people already, but I recently thought about this in a few scenarios and figured it may be valuable to articulate it clearly. One note before the main discussion is we s… - 5102 words
• (1) Create Career Success: 11 Key Phrases for Your Workplace - 2024-05-16 - How others perceive your performance and your work is heavily influenced by your communication skills. Influencing others is key to long-term success. - 8795 words
• React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason - 2024-05-16 - The evolution of software development over the past decade has been very frustrating. Little of it seems to makes sense, even to those of us who are right in the middle of it. - 17389 words
• Paying People in Equity and Dividends - 2024-05-16 - Since the beginning of 2024, Gumroad has raised $180,178 from our global team of hourly freelancers, at the same $100M valuation we used for our 2021 crowdfunding round. - 234 words
• Sorry. My heart says yes, but my schedule says no. - 2024-05-16 - - Dear Friend, Thanks for reaching out and connecting. It is likely that you, your idea, your company, or your proposition is awesome. Unfortunat - 38147 words
• Collaborative Assistants - Jeremy Philemon - 2024-05-16 - - Assistants can collaborate by assuming roles and communicating with each other.
• Array.reduce() is Goated 🐐✨ - DEV Community - 2024-05-16 - The title says it all 🐐. I want to talk about my all-time favorite javascript array method:... - 19209 words
• A Wonderfully Simple Heuristic to Recognize Charlatans - 2024-05-15 - Since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation. - 5932 words
• Sabbatical Wrap | Matt Mullenweg - 2024-05-15 - Today is my first day post-sabbatical, getting back in the swing of things with Automattic. W.org, all the things. What a unique experience! I found the lead up to the sabbatical and planning proc… - 4010 words
• (1) Create your 10-year plan - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2024-05-15 - Welcome to Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see the benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager. Bill Gates said: - 5853 words
• building a plugin system for the web | breadchris - 2024-05-15 - - The Figma Plugin System Figma is a design tool that has become the industry standard, similar to how Photoshop became the defacto for photo editing. When everyone uses one tool, it only follows that there will be functionality that different groups of people need that isn’t immediately supported. To bridge the gap in functionality, a plugin system is the go-to solution for letting people extend a system how they see fit. - 4710 words
• The Universe of Discourse : Well, I guess I believe everything now! - 2024-05-15 - - From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
• The Impact of All-or-Nothing Thinking in Software Engineering – Joe de Moraes - 2024-05-15 - - All-or-nothing thinking is a mental trap holding you back from becoming a better software engineer. It explains why you expand project scopes to cram in every possible feature. It explains why you …
• New preprint and Monitoring Time Between Events | Andrew Wheeler - 2024-05-15 - - Will be a long post today, have some updates on a preprint, quotes on Flock cameras, an upcoming webinar, plus some R analysis examples of monitoring time between rare crime events. Pre-print on JT… - 15334 words
• How I Tricked AWS CloudFormation To Power An API - 2024-05-13 - Creating a free, serverless and scalable API ... the wrong way - 8007 words
• (1) Reckless Bias for Action — A Tale of Immaturity and Impatience - 2024-05-13 - Bias for Action has long been one of my favorite leadership principles. Not just because it's a critical leadership skill, but because I'm quite impatient. - 9685 words
• static vs dynamic types | breadchris - 2024-05-13 - The debate between statically and dynamically typed languages has always been a hot topic in software development. Designing types for a problem can feel like solving a puzzle—fun for some and frustrating for others. But the real question is: Do you know how to represent the domain? While the alpha engineer may claim they do, understanding a domain comes from observing patterns over time. The challenge in business, where code is most commonly used, is collecting and understanding the data needed to define these types accurately. - 3463 words
• Focus on one thing, and one thing only | Happiness Machines - 2024-05-13 - - In today’s world, it’s impossible not to be distracted, but focus on what matters the most to you and only you. - 2425 words
• My 12 Favorite Problems - by Ted Gioia - The Honest Broker - 2024-05-13 - A dozen things that drive my writing, research, thinking & actions - 21222 words
• Is There a Recent Crisis in Men? - by Sebastian Jensen - 2024-05-13 - Modernity, not men. - 8987 words
• How to get kids to read for fun: People who work on middle-grade books have some ideas. - 2024-05-12 - It’s not the pandemic. It’s not (only) the Devices. So what causes the “decline by 9”? - 10882 words
• The best way to have complex discussions — CQ2 - 2024-05-12 - We love complex, deep discussions. We've seen or been part of many discussions — strategic discussions at work, discussions on AI alignment, on technical design documents, etc. For us, the most frustrating issues with complex discussions are (1) impulsive responses and (2) lack of structure.
• Can I email… Support tables for HTML and CSS in emails - 2024-05-12 - Support tables for HTML and CSS in emails
• Development notes from xkcd's "Machine" - 2024-05-12 - How we designed xkcd's massive rube goldberg machine game in 3 weeks. - 17629 words
• Dancing on the Shoulders of Giants – Aneesh Sathe - 2024-05-11 - - In today’s professional landscape, standing “on shoulders of giants” (OSOG) through education, training, and experience is commonplace. Fast-moving industries like semiconductors,…
• When to use target="_blank" | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks - 2024-05-11 - - Anchor links1 may have a target attribute which controls what happens when that link is clicked. One of the possible values of that attribute is _blank, which - 7594 words
• Where are the A/B tests for opening links in new tabs? – Cloud Four - 2024-05-11 - It's been nearly twenty years that we've been discussing whether or not to open outbound links in new tabs or windows. Could it really be true that no one has run an A/B test on it? - 1621 words
• Arguments for opening links in a new tab or window – Cloud Four - 2024-05-11 - A significant percentage of web professionals believe that opening outbound links in new tabs or windows provides a benefit to site owners. Why? - 2311 words
• TypeScript: undefined and null are nothing and should keep being nothing — Domain Specific Language - 2024-05-11 - - If you use nothing in place of something, not much good will come of it. Warning bells should start ringing when a program uses undefined or null in place of something. Let me explain what I mean.
• Seattle’s first protected intersection opens at Thomas St and Dexter Ave N in South Lake Union - SDOT Blog - 2024-05-11 - We’re opening a new protected intersection at Thomas St and Dexter Ave in South Lake Union, part of several street improvements in the area.
• Quickstart - Scratch Data Documentation - 2024-05-10 - 1485 words
• Scratch Data - 2024-05-10 - - From the "not my job" department
• Large Language Models, Open API, View Models and the Backend for Frontend Pattern | johnnyreilly - 2024-05-10 - - To integrate LLMs with APIs, there is a need for the LLM equivalent of view models and the backend for frontend pattern. This discusses it in the context of Semantic Kernel. - 8816 words
• Announcement of Release - Module federation - 2024-05-09 - Module Federation is a concept that allows developers to share code and resources across multiple JavaScript applications
• Let me tell you a story - Byte Tank - 2024-05-09 - - How communicating about things that don't physically exist are one of Human's greatest superpowers - 5059 words
• The agony and ecstasy of Costco - 2024-05-09 - - Is Costco one of the great institutions of the modern era, or does it just suck? On the one hand it's a business admired (if you're someone who admires businesses) by pretty much everyone. It’s the third largest retailer in the world, treats its employees better than most, always - 2568 words
• The Vary HTTP header - 2024-05-09 - - I try to constantly deepen my knowledge of HTTP and REST. Recently, I stumbled upon the list of all registered HTTP Headers. This post is dedicated to the Vary HTTP Header. The problem Two years ago, I wrote about web resource caching server-side. The idea is to set up a component between the client and the upstream to cache previously computed results to avoid overloading the latter. Depending on your infrastructure and requirements, this component can be a reverse proxy or an API Gateway. H - 2946 words
• How good products have unintended consequences – noemi titarenco - 2024-05-09 - 3531 words
• Link Ridership: March 2024 – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-05-09 - Sound Transit ridership data for March 2024 was released earlier this week, with Link ridership jumping 25% from February to a total of 2.61 million boardings, making March 2024 the second-highest … - 1526 words
• Daniel Sada Caraveo – Developer productivity is 99% perception – Software, Notes & Culture - 2024-05-09 - - Software Development Engineer, I work on sync technologies and storage solutions for services that have millions of users. I empower people to be more productive. - 4878 words
• From Tmux to Kitty • Andrew Haust - 2024-05-09 - - Andrew's personal homepage on the internet
• (1) Closed as unhelpful: an elegy for Stack Overflow - 2024-05-09 - It's the end of an era. - 7890 words
• Executive Presence: How to get "it" - 2024-05-08 - Welcome to Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see the benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager. Do you have “Executive Presence?” - 6022 words
• (1) A Non-Coding Engineering Manager is One Thing, But What About Non-Technical? - 2024-05-07 - A hotly debated topic is how technical an engineering manager needs to be. I dive into the topic, including ways a non-technical leader can learn. - 10629 words
• Keep the logs for retrospective analysis - 2024-05-07 - - Development logs are an important part of any project because they allow us to track progress, detect problems, and investigate incidents. Remember the value and advantages of development logs, and preserve as many logs as possible.
• Cool URIs can be ugly - Markus Unterwaditzer - 2024-05-05 -
• Harrell Adds $100 Million to Transportation Levy Proposal, Sends to City Council - The Urbanist - 2024-05-05 - Responding to pushback that his $1.35 billion levy proposal was too small and car-focused, Mayor Harrell added another $100 million in pedestrian, bike, and transit investment. - 12131 words
• Urbanists Rally to Sway Seattle Growth Plan - The Urbanist - 2024-05-05 - Comment on the draft Seattle Comprehensive Plan by May 6. Housing advocates have urged the City to adopt the "Housing Abundance Map" rather than keep exclusionary zoning. - 11928 words
• Context is a key ingredient for engineers - 2024-05-04 - - My tales as a technical founder, manager, and software engineer. - 2308 words
• Identifiers are better off without meaning - 2024-05-04 - - Once at Last.fm we had an integer overflow in anidentify field. I can’t recall where exactly. But I do remember thatthe inconvenience of having a bunch of Ha... - 5117 words
• Environmentally, you’ve got to hand it to Sauron – Clamsplaining - 2024-05-03 - - And now for something completely non clam-related…a speculative essay about LOTR as an environmental allegory, drawing on my posts to social media last week that clearly struck a nerve. I&#82… - 4237 words
• LLMs Can't Do Probability - Brainsteam - 2024-05-03 - - I built an experiment to show what happens when you ask an LLM to behave in a certain way a certain percentage of the time.
• Keeping dependencies up-to-date by Martijn Hols - 2024-05-01 - - The gist of keeping dependencies up-to-date. When to update, how to update, and what to update first. - 6472 words
• Amazon CodeWhisperer is now called Q Developer and is expanding its functions | TechCrunch - 2024-05-01 - Amazon has rebranded CodeWhisperer, its AI-powered coding assistance tool, and upgraded it with several new features.
• Ideas and Execution | Chase Adams - 2024-05-01 - - 5692 words

April 2024

• How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode | by Maciej Pocwierz | Apr, 2024 | Medium - 2024-04-30 - - Imagine you create an empty, private AWS S3 bucket in a region of your preference. What will your AWS bill be the next morning? - 5010 words
• Introduction to Response Streaming with AWS Lambda - Presidio - 2024-04-30 - Lambda has a size limit of 6MB on request and response payloads for synchronous invocations. This impacts the transmission and reception of data from a - 5162 words
• bitdrift - Real-time observability - 2024-04-30 - - bitdrift Capture provides real-time views into mobile experiences, without breaking the bank
• Introducing Amazon Route 53 Profiles - 2024-04-29
• masterpointio/terraform-aws-nuke-bomber: :airplane: :cloud: A Terraform module to create a bomber which nukes your cloud environment on a schedule - 2024-04-29 - :airplane: :bomb: :cloud: A Terraform module to create a bomber which nukes your cloud environment on a schedule - masterpointio/terraform-aws-nuke-bomber: :airplane: :cloud: A Terraform module... - 5000 words
• Answer the Unasked Questions — A Guide to Proactive Communication - 2024-04-29 - When you're asked questions — do you literally answer just those questions, or do you try to answer the root question behind them? - 8487 words
• The Importance of Maybe | zephyrtronium - 2024-04-29 - - The Maybe or Option type is too important to relegate to the same syntax as other type constructors. - 4871 words
• Don't get hit with the pendulum: DevOps shifted too far left – Software Blog - 2024-04-29 - - You probably wouldn’t be surprised if I told you modern networking based on open source projects like Istio, SPIFFE, Cilium and others (See my paper about the CAKES stack) are typically consumed by what we now call “platform engineering” teams. You’ve probably heard the term platform engineering or seen some nice write-ups on it (like the one from my industry colleague Daniel Bryant). - 5262 words
• Announcing TypeScript 5.5 Beta - TypeScript - 2024-04-26 - Today we are excited to announce the availability of TypeScript 5.5 Beta. To get started using the beta, you can get it through NuGet, or through npm with the following command: npm install -D typescript@beta Here’s a quick list of what’s new in TypeScript 5.5! - 39087 words
• Frank Hampus Weslien - 2024-04-25 - - Every application is either a tool or a workflow.
• Seven ways to build effective platform teams | LeadDev - 2024-04-25 - Platform teams are important for establishing the foundational layers of a company’s product. How can yours be more effective? - 10000 words
• How to Juggle Priorities: Decide Which Balls Are Glass and Which Are Plastic - 2024-04-25 - - You can't keep all your balls in the air all the time but that's ok! Learn how to decide which to drop and which to keep in the air. - 7663 words
• Generate code for declarative language instead of programming language - 2024-04-25 - - Code Generation AI is all the rage these days. But is generating code for programming languages like JavaScript and Python the right path to take? I think not. I think we should be generating code for declarative languages like Excel or SQL. What's the difference, you ask? In declarative languages, you express what your intention is. For example, in Excel, you can use SUM() to add all the line items and calculate the order amount. If the quantity of a line item changes, it will automatically recalculate the line item amount and then invoke SUM() to recalculate the order amount. But in imperative languages like JavaScript or Python, you instruct the computer on how to calculate the order amount. You would implement a function to add the line items as the order amount. Anytime the quantity of a line item changes, it is your job to call the function and recalculate the order amount. Why is this important? If you are asking AI to generate code for your requirements, you are essentially expressing your intent. So, expressing it in a declarative language seems natural. This will help the person who gave the requirement to understand the code generated by the AI. On the other hand, generating code for a programming language seems like the worst form of leaky abstraction (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/). "Leaky abstraction" describes a scenario where attempts to simplify a system end up requiring users to understand its underlying complexities to troubleshoot it. Code generation can automate the creation process. But, the resulting code can be a puzzle even to a skilled developer who is debugging it. The person who gave the requirement will most likely not understand any of it. So, why do AI companies generate code like this? I guess it comes down to the availability of training data for AI. There are a lot of open-source projects in JavaScript or Python, so it is easy to train AI with it. But open-source projects in Excel are almost non-existent. So, the unavailability of training data might be the primary reason behind the direction these code generation AI companies are taking. At Neartail, we are taking a middle road. We have created a declarative language using JavaScript syntax so that we could train the AI as well as make it understandable to business owners. Will other AI companies realize the perils of leaky abstraction and change its course? Only time will tell.
• Logging – Effect Docs - 2024-04-25 - Explore the power of logging in Effect for enhanced debugging and monitoring. Learn about dynamic log level control, custom logging output, fine-grained logging, environment-based logging, and additional features. Dive into specific logging utilities such as log, logDebug, logInfo, logWarning, logError, logFatal, and spans. Discover how to disable default logging and load log levels from configuration. Finally, explore the creation of custom loggers to tailor logging to your needs.
• I "lied" to my teams about work expectations - 2024-04-25 - Welcome to Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. It wasn’t intentional but it happened. What was the lie? I "honestly" told employees: "We don't care where you work or how long, as long as you get your work done." - 3245 words
• Why Amazon Prime could get more expensive - 2024-04-25 - Brace yourself for more new fees and surcharges on top of regular subscription fees.
• Why reorgs happen and why the true reason is always hidden - 2024-04-23 - Video clip with Rahul Pandey - 4166 words
• Congratulations to the PartyRock generative AI hackathon winners | AWS News Blog - 2024-04-23 - The PartyRock Generative AI Hackathon wrapped up earlier this month. Entrants were asked to use PartyRock to build a functional app based on one of four challenge categories, with the option to remix an existing app as well. The hackathon attracted 7,650 registrants who submitted over 1,200 projects, and published over 250 project blog posts […] - 3854 words
• Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice? - Marc's Blog - 2024-04-22 -
• Career Growth: Who is going to do it? — Shahinism - 2024-04-22 - - I found this essay by Nicola Ballotta quite interesting. A retrospective of his 25 years professional life, and how he could improve it, ... - 3287 words
• You're Poisoning Yourself in that Toxic Work Environment - 2024-04-22 - I believe in working through challenges, communicating clearly with those we don't get along with, and taking control of our careers. And yet, some situations can't be fixed. - 7560 words
• Llama 3 vs. GPT-4 vs. Gemini Pro - 2024-04-20 - - Msty is simplest way to use local and online LLMs. Its chat interface packed with powerful features make it easy to use LLMs. Run Ollama models such as Mixtral, Llama2, Qwen, or online models such as GPT-3, GPT-4, Mistral, Gemini, Groq, Claude, and more. - 7900 words
• 10x Engineers vs -10x Burdens - 2024-04-20 - - I've been reflecting on our engineers’ diverse impact on our projects and the true meaning behind labels like "10x engineer". Over the years, many
• West Seattle swing bridge shutdown to bring slowdowns, truck detours, free rides | The Seattle Times - 2024-04-20 - Historically, about 10,000 vehicles cross the low bridge per day, plus a few hundred people walking and bicycling, who can total 1,000 on warm days. - 4056 words
• Saying the hard thing - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2024-04-20 - TED 2024 Day 3 Lesson: The courage to speak up - 7238 words
• Measuring personal growth - 2024-04-20 - My founder friends constantly think about growth. They think about how to measure their business growth and how to get to the next order of magnitude scale. If they’re making $1M ARR today, they think about how to get to $10M ARR. If they have 1,000 users today, they think about how to get to 10,000 users. - 6268 words
• Why Ordinary Blogs Usually Suck - 2024-04-20 -
• Why Dolphin Isn't Coming to the App Store - oatmealdome.me - 2024-04-20 - - Two weeks ago, Apple modified their App Store guidelines to allow retro game emulators in the App Store. This week, Delta, a multi-system emulator that was previously only available via AltStore, was released on the App Store. Since these events happened, we've been asked many times if we will submit… - 3261 words
• Improving our Jest execution time by 300% - 2024-04-19 - The official website of Cameron G. Gould
• Real employee ownership in a company - 2024-04-18 - TED 2024 Day 2 Lesson: Employee-Owners - 6350 words
• Automatically reset forms after action finishes by acdlite · Pull Request #28804 · facebook/react - 2024-04-17 - This updates the behavior of form actions to automatically reset the form's uncontrolled inputs after the action finishes. This is a frequent feature request for people using actions and it aligns ...
• Is there such a thing as good gatekeeping? - 2024-04-17 - Make things as accessible as possible, but don't pretend hard things are easy - 7714 words
• Timothy Delille - 2024-04-16 - Personal Website
• Voice is (mostly) a Bad UI | Shubham Jain - 2024-04-16 - - Humane's AI Pin is in the news and unsurprisingly, it's been universally [panned by reviewers](https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1779641280110161957). I don't have anything to add there. I appreciate the courage to invent a new paradigm, but there are no excuses for shipping something so pointless after raising hundreds of millions. What I want to discuss is voice as an interface. Movies like Her have led us to believe that voice is the ultimate user interface. Why bother with a keyboard and mouse, when you can just "talk it out." Just a few days ago, I heard about a talk where someone was claiming that it's only a matter of time before every app becomes a voice interface that uses AI agents to accomplish tasks. I can't help but think that these assumptions carry only a surface-level understanding of the human mind. Of course, voice as input is nowhere near as polished today, but let's assume it does become so in the near future. Is Voice poised to take over as the universal interface? I don't believe that for many reasons. 1. **Voice is inherently incapable of representing abstract thoughts:** When we use tools we heavily use our subconscious mind and abstract thoughts. For eg, writing and researching. Both of these activities heavily use those abilities. I won't be able to finish any article if I have to narrate everything. That's because while sometimes I have sentences fully formed in my brain, more often, I only have bits and pieces and I have to take time to string them together. I have to search for the right words, link the right ideas, or find the right research. Voice exercises part of the brain that belongs to the 'consciousness' category, which limits these capabilities. 2. **Voice makes quite a few things harder not easier:** Theoretically, saying, "order an Uber to airport" seems like the easiest way to accomplish the task. But is it? What kind of Uber? UberXL, UberGo? There's a 1.5x surge pricing. Acceptable? Is the pickup point correct? What would be easier, resolving each of those queries through a computer asking questions, or taking a quick look yourself on the app? Another example is food ordering. What would you prefer, going through the menu from tens of restaurants yourself or constantly nudging the AI for the desired option? Technological improvement can only help so much here since users themselves don't clearly know what you want. 3. **Voice is privacy invading:** Most humans are quite self-conscious and they don't want to be seen as in public making requests to a computer. Hell, even with friends or a partner, it might get awkward. It's not just about suspicious requests, people can get paranoid about being judged even for banal ones. Checking messages, for example. This could post questions in mind like: "How frequently this guy wants to check his messages?", "Doesn't he have anything else to do?". 4. **UI is preferable to understand the limits of software**: UI is not a hinderance, it helps us understand the capabilities of software. For eg, Google Maps. Say you want a route that isn't narrow or bad or a route that takes you through beautiful surroundings. It won't be able to do that because it doesn't have that data. Nor, without the UI it'd be easy to discover that you can check the traffic conditions between two locations for a certain departure time. 5. **Users don't like talking all the time:** Using voice to accomplish simple tasks like setting a timer or an alarm is okay, but to accomplish everything can quickly become annoying. We don't even realize how many micro-tasks we accomplish throughout the day by familiar interfaces. Checking calendar, emails, messages, browsing. Of course, some of these tasks are a way to kill time, but killing time, too, is an important part of our culture, which isn't going anywhere. 6. **Voice can't resolve real-world ambiguities:** There can be tons of ambiguities in an instruction that can't be easily resolved by a voice-only interface. For example, say you want to sell 500 shares of a certain company, which amounts to 50% of your holdings. But, it was a mistaken assumption, 500 shares represent 100% of your holdings. AI won't be able to sense what you want to accomplish because it can't read your brain. Of course, you can make the same mistake on UI, but it would be more difficult since there's visual feedback about your action. An audio confirmation prompt won't be that effective as it's not easy to visualize the numbers in your head. ------------------------------------------ Overall, I am not convinced Voice is the future. There are too many inherent problems in not having a screen you can interact with. And even if you add a screen, Voice makes it harder to achieve many things that can be done more easily with a better UI. I don't think, even if AI was perfectly capable of understanding human voice and had zero latency, we would reach a future that Humane is envisioning. - 4807 words
• How to Estimate Projects Without Being Absolutely Hosed - 2024-04-16 - Employees are often distrustful of their business partners when they're asked to give estimates. Instead, build your communication skills to take advantage of the estimation process benefits. - 8768 words
• On dependencies and resilience - Sebastian Ingino - 2024-04-15 - - There are more than 2.1 million NPM packages and over 500,000 PyPI projects. I'm worried that this might have implications on how we run software companies. - 15407 words
• Lessons learned: AWS AppSync Subscriptions - 2024-04-15 - In this article we will get a bit more deeper into mechanisms of AppSync Subscriptions because even though they are documented in the AppSync documentation we couldn't see or understand some of the behaviours. - 7185 words
• AWS Amplify Is A Grift - 2024-04-15 - - Something something Amplify is bad - 13009 words
• CJS Equivalency - 2024-04-15 - Some musings on CJS vs ESM and how to support old code - 2635 words
• Platformonomics - Follow the CAPEX: The Clown Car Race Checkered Flag - 2024-04-15 - Oracle, left. IBM, right. We’ve used capital expenditures (CAPEX) to separate the clouds from the clowns for over a decade. Clouds consume copious CAPEX. Clowns confabulate. It is time for another …
• Amazon CEO: Don't Wait for Us to Launch a ChatGPT Competitor | PCMag - 2024-04-13 - Google has Gemini. Microsoft has the in with OpenAI. Where is Amazon? In a new shareholder letter, CEO Andy Jassy explains why the company's 'random' approach will win in the end. - 2805 words
• Dogs Will Always Bark - Part I - You Make I Check | Conrad Akunga, Esquire. Code - 2024-04-12 - - If you have not already, you will, inevitably, run into a system that has a concept of a maker and a checker. - 2920 words
• Build & SHOW Your Weird Idea - 2024-04-10 - - Not sharing the weird thing might be a real act of selfishness. - 1224 words
• sbensu: Lieutenants are the limiting reagent - 2024-04-10 - - Why don't software companies ship more products? Why do they move more slowly as they grow? What do we mean when we say "this company lacks focus"?
• “Them” — and how they’re always screwing up - 2024-04-10 - You can't be a leader if you treat co-workers as "them". - 5503 words
• Why AWS Supports Valkey | AWS Open Source Blog - 2024-04-09 - AWS is committed to supporting open source Valkey for the long term. We are adding Valkey support to our ElastiCache and MemoryDB managed database services and contributing to the open source Valkey project. - 6721 words
• Amazon's series of ongoing micro-layoffs is puzzling - 2024-04-09 - Welcome to Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. What can leaders learn by observing this unusual approach? First, this post is not about the people being let go. Layoffs are terribly disruptive to the lives of the impacted employees and families. - 7470 words
• Tegowerk - Reject minimalism - 2024-04-09 - - You’ve heard this one, I’m sure: Buy experiences, not things. Have you noticed how it’s always delivered with more than a hint of smug condescension? How it always seems to be a value judgment on the way you live your life? It seems to me that the advice is almost always coming from two types of people: the extroverted, or the terminally online. The extrovert wants you to travel. Travel is the magic panacea to all of life’s problems. - 3047 words
• Community Transit Set To Eliminate Special Commuter Fares - The Urbanist - 2024-04-09 - With riders connecting to light rail instead of using direct bus connections to downtown, Community Transit is phasing out its $4.25 commuter fare. Fares will be a flat $2.50 across the agency's system. - 7802 words
• The threat to open source comes from within - 2024-04-08 - These are personal opinions and should not be construed as thought leadership - 12054 words
• Expose Platform APIs Over Wrapping Them - Jim Nielsen’s Blog - 2024-04-08 - - Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web. - 11375 words
• Ask for Permission to Ask | Kezie's Blog - 2024-04-08 - - One of the most valuable lessons I've learned when it comes to fundraising or selling is to always ask for permission to make your pitch upfront. This approa...
• How Google takes the pain out of code reviews, with 97% dev satisfaction - 2024-04-07 - A study of Google's code review tooling (Critique), AI-powered improvements, and recent statistics - 13542 words
• 🎠 AWS CDK 101 - 🚄 Cloudwatch Metrics Filter with Dimensions and Alarms connected to ChatOps - DEV Community - 2024-04-07 - 🔰 Beginners new to AWS CDK, please do look at my previous articles one by one in this series. If in... - 19893 words
• You don't have to type faster to type faster. | The aBreevy8 Blog - 2024-04-07 - - It's true. If you look up "how to type faster" on Google, you're bound to come across countless articles that typically either suggest changing from QWERTY t...
• Convincing People Not To Touch Hot Stoves Is Easy – Sherman On Software - 2024-04-07 -
• Cows and Carbon for Dummies - Ben Hunt - 2024-04-07 - - It is popular to claim that cattle are bad for the environment, and the best thing we can do for the planet is to eat a plant-based diet. So let’s look at the carbon cycle, specifically as it applies to grazing cattle, and try to see how cows can be a net GHG emitter. I’m […] - 3587 words
• Why is observability so expensive? - 2024-04-07 - - It’s no secret that observability costs are top of mind for many organizations in the post-zero interest rate phenomenon (ZIRP) era (see here, here, and here for example discussions, though similar se - 10525 words
• In search of a Search Engine, beyond Elasticsearch: Introducing Zinc - 2024-04-07 - - Prabhat Sharma's blog on AWS, Cloud, ML, AI and technology
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Projects – Sherman On Software - 2024-04-07
• How I improved our CI build time from 24mins to 8mins and reduced costs by 50% | Owais - 2024-04-07 - - If you like fast CI builds, hate having to wait for an eternity for CI to complete a build after you open a PR, and love reducing infra costs, read on. - 22735 words
• Everything in software monitoring is dead, apparently | Last9 - 2024-04-07 - - Chasing shiny new toys, as always ;)
• Some Modest Criticisms of the Internet Archive - 2024-04-07 -
• Do Repeat Yourself - 2024-04-06 - - One of the first things we teach aspiring software engineers is the principle Don't Repeat Yourself. While this is a very useful rule of thumb, it doesn't apply in every case. In this post we will discuss when it does not. - 4504 words
• Fed’s QT Going Forward: the Treasury Maturity Schedule & Roll-off under Current QT Plan, and How a New QT Plan Might Fit | Wolf Street - 2024-04-06 - 6646 words
• Fed Balance Sheet QT: -$1.53 Trillion from Peak, to $7.44 Trillion, Lowest since February 2021. The BTFP Plunged by $34 Billion | Wolf Street - 2024-04-06 - 9003 words
• Bellevue City Council All But Abandons ‘Bike Bellevue’ Network - The Urbanist - 2024-04-06 - By being crystal clear that most councilmembers don't support reallocating existing street space to create new bike corridors, the Bellevue City Council effectively rejected the network its transportation department created. - 14016 words
• Over 70% of Drivers Are Speeding in WA School Zones, Illustrating Speeding Epidemic - The Urbanist - 2024-04-06 - One of the "fatal four" behaviors seen in traffic crashes is becoming widely seen on Washington roadways, but fixes will likely need to happen at the local level, not in the legislature. In the fall of 2018, the City of Mercer Island and the Mercer Island School District celebrated completion of a brand new safe - 13361 words
• What to Look for in Seattle’s Next Transportation Levy - The Urbanist - 2024-04-06 - With a transportation levy going to ballot this fall, advocates want at least 50% of investments to be dedicated toward pedestrian, bike, and transit upgrades. They also want the City to go big, with a levy of at least $1.7 billion, but the Mayor appears set to go smaller. - 14143 words
• Bob Kettle Moves to Keep Cars Clogging Pike Place - The Urbanist - 2024-04-06 - Whether the city should stay out of the business of making Pike Place Market's main corridor more pedestrian friendly was put front and center this week by Councilmember Bob Kettle, who proposed an amendment seeking to starve the idea of funding. - 10390 words
• Washington’s State Transportation Budget Faces Multiple Time Bombs - The Urbanist - 2024-04-06 - The final piece of the decades-long replacement of the SR 520 bridge will move forward thanks to funding authorized this year, but Washington State's overall transportation budget is on rockier ground. - 13858 words
• Daily Paid Parking Is Coming to Some Sound Transit Lots - The Urbanist - 2024-04-06 - Up to 10 Sound Transit-owned parking facilities -- including at all Link station parking facilities -- could see daily paid parking begin around the time that the Lynnwood Link Extension opens. - 8876 words
• Sound Transit Speeds Up Delivery of 10 Link Cars to Handle Crowds - The Urbanist - 2024-04-06 - The 10 extra light rail vehicles will be put into service in early 2028 and help ease crowding as Sound Transit operates the 1 Line from Federal Way to Lynnwood. - 8041 words
• Federal Way Approves Big Catalyst Development Near Light Rail - The Urbanist - 2024-04-06 - A long-vacant Target store is set to become home to around 1600 homes by the early 2040s under an agreement moving forward in Federal Way. - 9962 words
• You Can Have an Open Source Personal Assistant in 2024 - 2024-04-06 - - Smart assistants should be more than just heavily commercialized products, we need private, conversational assistants that can genuinely help us get things done. All the pieces seem to be there right now if we put them together... - 5305 words
• Performance insights: Engineering for high performance | Penna - 2024-04-06 - - The performance of our projects is a byproduct of the process we adopt developing it - 15684 words
• Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change ‹ Literary Hub - 2024-04-06 - - “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” –Georgia O’Keeffe * Someone at the dinner table wanted to know what everyone’s turning point on climate was, which is to say she w…
• Job scheduling with tmux | John McBride - 2024-04-06 - - Tmux is one of my favorite utilities: it’s a terminal multiplexer that lets you create persistent shell sessions, panes, windows, etc. all within a single terminal. It’s a great way to organize your shell sessions and natively give you multi-shell environments to work in without having to rely on a terminal program for those features. You’d think in a world of modern applications and fancy terminals like iTerm 2 and Kitty, you wouldn’t need such a utility. - 11115 words
• Writing maketh the 10x Developer. More so the 10x development team. - 2024-04-06 - - Writing is thinking. Software is peoples' thoughts on repeat. Developers who can pen their thoughts clearly multiply their impact. This matters even more in group work. Common sense rules; no literature major necessary. - 12896 words
• Fat tails are weird – Piekniewski's blog - 2024-04-06 - - If you have taken a statistics class it may have included stuff like basic measure theory. Lebesgue measures and integrals and their relations to other means of integration. If your course was math heavy (like - 14630 words
• Asking for help is a core developer skill — Rami James - 2024-04-05 - Asking for help is a core skill for a developer. Those who can not learn it will limit their potential. - 9986 words
• Amazon Looks To Shed Empty Offices As E-Commerce Giant Expands Near Seattle HQ - 2024-04-03 - Dual Move Reflects Corporate America's Lack of Sense of Workplace Demand Consensus
• How to metric. This article will teach you how my… | by Dave Smith | Medium - 2024-04-02 - - This article will teach you how my software engineering teams have learned to cut through the lies and uncover the glorious truth that your… - 11681 words
• Chat is poor UX for most users. - 2024-04-02 - - Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have rapidly become commonplace tools. They’re the most transparent AI application I can think of, users know they’re interacting with an AI. Despite that, I see chat as a complex and difficult user experience for most applications. It’s similar to interacting - 3110 words
• Discover Exactly Why Insisting on High Standards is a Thorny Issue - 2024-04-01 - Amazon's brutal culture of high-standards and transparency creates great results, and sometimes hurt feelings. And I'm not sure the latter is avoidable. - 6713 words

March 2024

• The top 7 software engineering workflow tips I wish I knew earlier 🧰 | by Jordan Cutler | Medium - 2024-03-31 - Your time matters. - 8631 words
• Home | RDS' margin is EC2's opportunity - 2024-03-31 - Analyzing AWS markup on RDS - 2629 words
• Tell the LLM the business context - 2024-03-31 - - Employees do better when they have more business context. The same is true of LLMs! To do its best work, the LLM needs to know why it’s being prompted, where its input came from, how its output will be used, and how its output will be judged. Many prompters try to tell the LLM how to achieve some task, but it’s often better to just give it the business context.
• The Importance of Documenting Your Work – Denny and the Jets - 2024-03-31 -
• Don't Think and Write, They Say - Aether Mug - 2024-03-31 - - Online writing beyond bowel movements. - 12191 words
• Tell the LLM the business context - 2024-03-31 - - Employees do better when they have more business context. The same is true of LLMs! To do its best work, the LLM needs to know why it’s being prompted, where its input came from, how its output will be used, and how its output will be judged. Many prompters try to tell the LLM how to achieve some task, but it’s often better to just give it the business context.
• If You Don’t Plan Your Time, Someone Else Will - 2024-03-30 - Most people are stingy with their money and generous with their time. We cut coupons, split checks, and debate whether we should buy a 99-cent app. However, when it comes to our time and attention, we give it away to anyone who wants it without thinking twice. - 6286 words
• First time right, with software development - 2024-03-29 - - Applying first time right during the software development life circle. - 5551 words
• Using Tmux and Tmuxinator - 2024-03-28 - I have been using tmux for the past few months and it has become one of my favorite programming tools. I love the window management for keeping my...
• You Are Beautiful – Daniel Frank - 2024-03-28 - 3617 words
• A Beautifully Productive Terminal Experience | Mike Buss - 2024-03-28 - - I highlight the benefits of using the command line for developers and suggest a combination of iTerm 2, Zsh, Prezto, Tmux, and Tmuxinator for a productive setup. I also discuss the features and advantages of each tool, as well as how they can be combined to improve development workflows. - 10331 words
• Iterator helpers · V8 - 2024-03-28 - - Interfaces that help with general usage and consumption of iterators. - 7234 words
• Community Transit ridership increased 23% in 2023 | Community Transit - 2024-03-27 - If you rode the bus, took a vanpool, or took a DART paratransit ride in 2023, you are part of the nearly 7.1 million boardings that increased Community Transit ridership by 23% over the previous year.
• Developer Growth Is Rare | Thinking Sideways - 2024-03-27 - Most developers improve very little over time. Hence, it is unlikely that a non-performing team will improve with more experience. - 5781 words
• Why Continuous Improvement Rarely Works | Thinking Sideways - 2024-03-27 - Continuous improvement rarely works because many problems are caused by underlying systemic reasons. Things will only improve when these reasons are addressed. - 6521 words
• The rush to reach West Seattle – Seattle Transit Blog - 2024-03-27 - Last week Sound Transit revealed more details about three grandiose new stations in West Seattle, one hugely upgraded SODO station, and a big cable-stayed (“suspension”) bridge over the… - 4977 words
• Time is Limited - 2024-03-27 - - It's sad to accept it, but time is limited. - 4600 words
• The new CEO | martian r3d - 2024-03-27 - Today I remembered—for no reason I can think of—a man whose name I now cannot remember, but who once gave me an atom of hope for the business world. I met him—it must have been in… - 2229 words
• Why is the old Rainier building wrapped in white plastic? - 2024-03-27 - The EPA found toxic chemical compounds in the paint of the old Rainier Brewery building, and a cleanup process is now underway. - 2087 words
• Two Types of Composition | Kyle Shevlin - 2024-03-27 - Not only is "composition" a confusing word, but there is more than one way to do it. Let&apos;s break those ways down into two types and learn about "nesting composition" versus "merging composition". - 8767 words
• Wealth from a corporate job is a recipe, here's how to play that game well - 2024-03-26 - Corporations pay what they feel they must for the skills they think they need most. To get paid the most, you must figure out what skills they think they need and optimize demonstrating them. Now, this is only if maximizing your pay is your main goal. - 7617 words
• Mobile Opportunity: How does Amazon think about devices? - 2024-03-26 - A bad dialog box made me wonder today about the limits of Amazon’s business model. The dialog box was on the Kindle Paperwhite, my preferred...
• A Day in the Life of a Software Development Manager with 14 Direct Reports - 2024-03-26 - A story of too much work, too many reports, and perhaps too much ambition. - 11667 words
• TS Reset - Official Docs | Total TypeScript - 2024-03-26 - Learn how to use TypeScript to level-up your applications as a web developer through exercise driven self-paced workshops and tutorials hosted by TypeScript wizard Matt Pocock.
• Comparing ECMAScript Modules and CommonJS - 2024-03-26 - We compare ECMAScript Modules (ESM) and CommonJS and use them in TypeScript and Node.js - 7073 words
• The top 7 software engineering workflow tips I wish I knew earlier 🧰 | by Jordan Cutler | Medium - 2024-03-24 - Your time matters. - 8641 words
• I Hate Sexy | umagp - 2024-03-24 - - Okay, I don’t actually hate sexy, I’m just not into “sexy” businesses. If I’m rolling into a pitch with a pair of shades saying, this is the “hottest new thing - like sex but with computers”, I’ve done something wrong. After working for and with many startups, the things I am most interested in are businesses that don’t ooze sex appeal. I like businesses that enable positive changes or facilitate important aspects of our life.
• The Cost of Accidental Complexity in Development | Backendhance - 2024-03-24 - Discover how Accidental Complexity in software development can lead to increased time and financial expenses and learn strategies to mitigate it. Understand how unnecessary complexities creep into IT projects, distinguish them from Essential Complexity, and explore how efficient team management can boost productivity.
• Trust in SaaS – Dan Palmer - 2024-03-24 - - Personal site and blog
• Yusuf Aytas - The Path to Leadership - 2024-03-23 - - Yusuf Aytas - Leadership - The Path to Leadership
• How web bloat impacts users with slow devices - 2024-03-22
• Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown | Netcraft - 2024-03-22 - A staggering 12.6 million domains on TLDs controlled by Freenom (.tk, .cf and .gq) have been shut down and no longer resolve, leading to a significant reduc ...
• ynqa/jnv: interactive JSON filter using jq - 2024-03-22 - interactive JSON filter using jq. Contribute to ynqa/jnv development by creating an account on GitHub.
• DuckDB as the New jq - Paul Gross’s Blog - 2024-03-22 - Recently, I’ve been interested in the DuckDB project (like a SQLite geared towards data applications). And one of the amazing features is that it has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies. This means it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table, among many other formats.
• Why Are (Most) Sofas So Bad? - Dwell - 2024-03-22 - The most important piece of furniture in your home is in need of assistance. How did we end up here? And how can we fix it?
• Soul of the New Apps – T blogs - 2024-03-22 - - The apps that dominate our daily lives have been smoothly sliding LLMs into our dm-s. ChatGPT, Bard, Microsoft’s has Copilots, WhatsApp’s Meta AI, SnapChat My AI, X permium+’s Gro…
• Best Practices for Writing Tests with React Testing Library | ClarityDev blog - 2024-03-22 - Properly written tests not only help prevent regressions and buggy code, but in the case of React Testing Library, they also improve the accessibility of components and the overall user experience. In this post, we'll explore how to get the most out of your React Testing Library tests. I'll provide a collection of what I consider to be best practices and tips on how to avoid common mistakes with React Testing Library.
• GoblinTools - Neil Turner's Blog - 2024-03-20 - If you sometimes find doing things overwhelming, or need help converting some disparate thoughts into something coherent, then GoblinTools may help you. It was recommended to me by someone on Mastodon some time ago; sadly I’ve lost track of who tooted or boosted it onto my timeline because it was a while ago and I’ve ... Read more
• The Importance of Innovating On Content – The Write to Roam - 2024-03-20
• Type system of the React compiler - 2024-03-20 - The post describes how the type system of the React compiler is implemented and used
• Reporters | Guide | Vitest - 2024-03-19 - Next generation testing framework powered by Vite
• From Jest to Vitest - Migration and Benchmark - DEV Community - 2024-03-19 - In this post join me as I migrate my project’s test runner framework from Jest to Vitest, and check...
• Announcing TypeScript 5.3 - TypeScript - 2024-03-19 - Today we’re excited to announce the release of TypeScript 5.3! If you’re not familiar with TypeScript, it’s a language that adds type syntax to JavaScript to bring type-checking. Type-checking can catch all sorts of issues like typos and forgetting to check for null and undefined.
• Announcing TypeScript 5.4 - TypeScript - 2024-03-19 - - Today we’re excited to announce the release of TypeScript 5.4! If you’re not familiar with TypeScript, it’s a language that builds on top of JavaScript by making it possible to declare and describe types. Writing types in our code allows us to explain intent and have other tools check our code to catch mistakes like typos,
• Modules: Packages | Node.js v21.7.1 Documentation - 2024-03-19
• TypeScript: Documentation - Modules - Theory - 2024-03-19 - How TypeScript models JavaScript modules
• TypeScript 5.0: new mode bundler & ESM - DEV Community - 2024-03-19 - In TypeScript 5.0, 2 new features were released: moduleResolution:...
• PWA's Are Finally Looking Good - André Woodley Jr. - 2024-03-19 - - In the past, I was very dismissive of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). I felt they were slow, buggy, and provided poor user experiences compared to native apps. As an iOS developer, I'll admit I was...
• Claude vs GPT - by Maxwell Tabarrok - Maximum Progress - 2024-03-19 - Claude does less but does it better
• The insatiable hunger of (Open)AI • Wim Vanderbauwhede - 2024-03-19 - - The energy and compute resource needs of AI are entirely unsustainable.
• How I take notes, AKA 'Add an Index to Your Notebook' · Josh Thompson - 2024-03-16 - - A photo guide to how I take notes in a physical notebook
• Vitest vs. Jest: Choosing The Right Testing Framework - 2024-03-14 - Jest and Vitest are both testing frameworks for Javascript. Learn more about their differences, benefits, and challenges to pick the right framework for you.
• About being happy – reflections and thoughts. - Zettl Fine Arts - 2024-03-14 - - paintings, graphics, calligraphy by Friedrich Zettl
• LukeW | The More Features You Add... - 2024-03-14 - - As Dave Fore once said: "features are the currency of software development and marketing." Spend time in any software company and you'll begin to echo that sent...
• Stories of Three Employees Requesting Raises. Lessons on Increasing Your Income. - 2024-03-11 - Asking for a raise is not as simple as phrasing it politely. There are costs involved.
• Seattle council president on getting workers back to the office: 'We have to build those numbers up' – GeekWire - 2024-03-10 - Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson speaks at the "State of Downtown" event hosted by the Downtown Seattle Association at the Seattle Convention
• I Want Whatever the BLS is Smoking - 2024-03-08 - Job numbers are laughable
• "Work smarter, not harder!" - 2024-03-08 - Level Up Career Community Event: On March 11 (Monday), watch Ethan live coach a real client (Director of PM at a big tech company), on the topic "How can I manage my time and energy against my work and non-work goals?" See how executive coaching works and learn alongside Ethan’s client.
• Interesting ideas in Observable Framework - 2024-03-08 - Mike Bostock, Announcing: Observable Framework: Today we’re launching Observable 2.0 with a bold new vision: an open-source static site generator for building fast, beautiful data apps, dashboards, and reports. Our …
• Kagi + Wolfram | Kagi Blog - 2024-03-08 - Building a search engine is hard.
• First principles thinking vs second order thinking - 2024-03-07
• The Builder's Guide to Better Mousetraps - Marc's Blog - 2024-03-07 -
• The Hidden Cost of Using Managed Databases - InfoQ - 2024-03-07 - - The rising popularity of managed relational databases brings hidden costs and informed decisions are crucial for optimal use. This article shows the importance of monitoring service expenses, revising default settings, and understanding operational constraints, considering limitations like reduced flexibility and observability.
• WA Legislature passes 3 initiatives a session winds down | The Olympian - 2024-03-06 - Lawmakers still have to tackle budgets, find compromises on bills before March 7.
• AWS just went nuclear – and more hyperscalers could follow - 2024-03-06 - The data center industry is facing power constraints in major markets With the grid unable to keep up, T5’s COO believes data centers will need to generate their | Data center builder T5 says nuclear could become the go-to for on-campus power generation.
• Top economist says it will be years before housing market unfreezes | Fortune - 2024-03-06 - “Lock-in effect” pushes a housing market recovery to years away
• Amazon Bedrock adds Claude 3 Anthropic AI models - 2024-03-06 - Amazon Bedrock expands its model selection with Anthropic’s industry-leading Claude 3 family, with the first model available today.
• Seattle Releases Comprehensive Plan with Growth Target Lower Than Bellevue - The Urbanist - 2024-03-06 - While Bellevue is projecting 225,000 additional residents by 2045, Seattle is anticipating a more modest 200,000 for its comprehensive planning purposes. In its new draft plan, Seattle adds fourplex zoning across most, but not all of the city, plus 24 "Neighborhood Centers" and one new urban center with more intensive zoning changes.
• The prestige recession – Yancey Strickler - 2024-03-06 - - My first career was as a music critic. It started with writing for Pitchfork in some of the first years of the site. It was brief – I wasn’t very good and Ryan let me go – but I loved it …
• Amazon Continues Looking Forward (Rating Downgrade) (NASDAQ:AMZN) | Seeking Alpha - 2024-03-06 - Amazon.com Inc. is focused on improving customer experience by delivering items faster and reducing costs. Learn why I rate AMZN stock a hold.
• How to increase the productivity of our organizations | Adam Trojanczyk - 2024-03-05 - - Jeżeli w naszych organizacjach nadal będziemy skupiać się na tym, by większość naszych zadań realizować w standardowy sposób, nie zwiększymy produktywności.
• SVG charts from scratch in 2024 (rewriting AWS visualization core in vanilla js) | by Danny Chahla | Feb, 2024 | Medium - 2024-03-04 - Purpose: You will be able to make your own charts by the end of this. Needing truly, zero dependencies, using just vanilla js.
• Being Intentional in 2024 - Blog - 2024-03-03 - - I put on quite a bit of weight over COVID. Stuck in lockdown with little else to do, I quickly picked up a nasty habit of snacking. The cupboard and fridge were so accessible and readily stocked with all manner of tasty food. With nothing better to do, I would go grab a bite anytime I was hungry or bored or thirsty or anything. And of course, with all of this, I began to balloon in weight, despite wanting to remain healthy.
• What does sponsorship look like? | Lara Hogan - 2024-03-03 - - Illustration by Catt Small
• Making Use of Code Coverage | Epic Web Dev - 2024-03-03 - Dive into the contentious world of code coverage. Learn its nuances, pitfalls, and practical applications for modern web app testing
• Seattle Is Building a Citywide Bike Network That Cannot Handle Its Own Popularity - The Urbanist - 2024-03-03 - Seattle's climate plan calls for doubling bicycling, but SDOT is not building its bike facilities to handle the load. To bike to Climate Pledge Arena, home of two of Seattle's professional sports teams as well as dozens of concerts per year, from Downtown Seattle, people using the city's flagship protected bike lane on 2nd Avenue
• Bikeshare and Scootershare Booms in Seattle, with Lime Leading the Pack - The Urbanist - 2024-03-03 - Lime is riding high, as other micromobility operators retool or pull out of Seattle. Seattle’s dockless bikeshare and scootershare program continues to boom, collectively reaching a new high of nearly five million rides in 2023. That works out to more than 13,000 rides per day. The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has touted the versatility
• oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: How the Economy Changed: There's No Bargains Left Anywhere - 2024-03-03 - What changed in the economy is now nobody can afford to get by on working-class wages because there's no longer any bargains. The econ...
• Azure's Browser Bias - Matt White | SWE - 2024-03-03 - - Mostly programming.
• LLM Quantisation Weirdness :: Giles' blog - 2024-03-03 -
• Halo on Paramount Plus is the ultimate battle between story and lore - Polygon - 2024-03-03 - Wiping the slate clean had to be done
• Do You Need to Teach Your Child to Read Before 1st Grade? - Simply Charlotte Mason - 2024-03-03 - Do you need to teach your child to read before 1st Grade? The answer may surprise you!
• From Syntax to Semantics - 2024-03-02 - - How LLMs are moving software engineering from a syntax-driven world to a semantics-driven one.
• Amazon releases new 5.16.7 update for the Kindle - Good e-Reader - 2024-03-02 - Amazon has just released a new firmware update for modern Kindle e-readers, including the latest Paperwhite, Scribe and base model Kindle. There are no new features or functionality. Instead, this is more of a maintenance patch. The change log cites Performance improvements, bug fixes, and other general enhancements. The last patch introduced a whole host of new features for the Kindle. Settings have been updated for easier discovery and device and reading settings adjustment. A new “Date and time” setting under “Device options” is available to manually or automatically set your local date and time for those of. If you
• Troy Hunt: Thanks FedEx, This is Why we Keep Getting Phished - 2024-03-02 - I've been getting a lot of those "your parcel couldn't be delivered" phishing attacks lately and if you're a human with a phone, you probably have been too. Just as a brief reminder, they look like this: These get through all the technical controls that exist at my telco and

February 2024

• The Managerial Menace - eugyppius: a plague chronicle - 2024-02-27 - Back in August, the Wall Street Journal ran a long article on the insane spending of American public universities, with special emphasis on their proclivity for expensive building projects. This is an issue very close to my heart. I spent over a decade in American academia, at several different very wealthy institutions, and every semester of my experience was marred by major, highly disruptive, noisy and openly unnecessary building. Most of these schools have a long line of extravagant projects planned generations into the future. They routinely tear down structures thrown up mere decades ago, only to replace them with larger and newer architectural monstrosities double or triple the original size. They are constantly ripping up squares and walkways only to repave and re-landscape them with ever more elaborate modern sculptures, fountains and hedges. The last school I worked for spent 18 months “improving” the lawn in front of my office building. Among other things, they dug a massive winding trench through it, which they filled with water to make an artificial creek. Then they planted weird reeds everywhere and constructed various bridges so pedestrians could traverse their fake wetland. They turned a modest grassy area with a few simple brick walkways into a monstrous muddy outrageously expensive eyesore.
• Package dependency hell — Rami James - 2024-02-27 - - Intentionally or otherwise, I've been blowing up my life since last summer. It’s been less than ideal. We'll get to why in a second, but first, let's talk about everyone's favorite awful programming language and the impact of package managers, their packages, and the endless toil they create.
• Staff engineer communities — No Idea Blog - 2024-02-27 - - There haven’t been a lot of community structures or resources for Staff+ engineers. That’s changing.
• Cycle lanes grow in popularity once they are installed, study finds – but policymakers warned that “paternalistic” promotion of active travel schemes heightens opposition | road.cc - 2024-02-27 - The report called on policymakers to “pre-bunk common misconceptions” about cycle lanes, while noting the failure to “join the dots” between active travel projects and climate action
• The end is Gemi-nigh - by Forrest Brazeal - 2024-02-27 - Commentary!
• Designing Personal Software - 2024-02-26 -
• Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You - 2024-02-26 - - The widely used Python package cryptography changed their build system to use Rust for low-level code, which caused an emotional GitHub thread. Enthusiasts of 32-bit hardware from the 1990s aside, a vocal faction stipulated adherence to Semantic Versioning from the maintainers, claiming it would’ve prevented all grief. I will show you not only why this is wrong but also how relying on Semantic Versioning hurts you – the user.
• Write Right Now: How Engineers Can Innovate, Influence, and Lead in Business - Scott Willeke - 2024-02-26 - - Managers and marketers have more say on the software that you write than you do, but why? It’s easy to shrug and move on to the next incremental
• Globally Distributed Object Storage with Tigris · The Fly Blog - 2024-02-26 - Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
• When AWS invariants aren’t [invariant] | Aidan Steele’s blog (usually about AWS) - 2024-02-26 - tl;dr
• Detecting Manual AWS Actions: An Update! - 2024-02-26 - An updated version of how to detect manual AWS actions from employees
• Managing Up — Stories and Guidelines for Working with Senior Leaders - 2024-02-26 - You could rephrase 'managing up' as how to work with important people so that they want to work with you more, not less. This is a key skill for career growth for obvious reasons.
• Announcing The Urbanist’s 2024 Advocacy Agenda - The Urbanist - 2024-02-26 - Focused on housing abundance and sustainable transportation, our 2024 advocacy agenda runs the gambit from comprehensive plan updates to transit upgrades and a safety-first Move Seattle Levy renewal.
• Scheduling Internals - 2024-02-26 -
• Unified diffs make GPT-4 Turbo 3X less lazy | aider - 2024-02-26 - - GPT-4 Turbo has a problem with lazy coding, which can be signiciantly improved by asking for code changes formatted as unified diffs.
• Framing is Everything - 2024-02-26 - - We're framing differently, and living in different worlds because of it
• That will never change. Not here. - 2024-02-26 -
• Read the docs like a book - Aaron Francis - 2024-02-26 - - Reading the docs straight through, like a book, can provide outsized benefits for your career.
• David Mayilian | The Missing Pirate Manual - 2024-02-26 - A beautiful, simple, clean, and responsive Jekyll theme for academics
• Frameworks Cover Up Skill Issues, And That's a Good Thing | jakelazaroff.com - 2024-02-26 - - The world is poorer when friable foundations lead to crumbling creations. But it is poorer still when we are so concerned with the foundations that we never create at all.
• All Different Variants - Blog of the Dad - 2024-02-26 - - In the earlier posts I’ve described some of the basic ideas behind CSPs: how the problems are represented using variables and constraints, how the solver searches for a solution by building up the search tree, how heuristics guide the search, and how constraint propagation helps eliminate parts of the search space that will not contain solutions. In this post I will look at how modeling the problem itself can have a significant influence on how quickly the solver is able to find a solution.
• ARCHITECTURE.md - 2024-02-26 - - If you maintain an open-source project in the range of 10k-200k lines of code, I strongly encourage you to add an ARCHITECTURE document next to README and CONTRIBUTING. Before going into the details of why and how, I want to emphasize that this is not another docs are good, write more docs advice. I am pretty sloppy about documentation, and, e.g., I often use just simplify as a commit message. Nonetheless, I feel strongly about the issue, even to the point of pestering you :-)
• Introduction | WebContainers - 2024-02-26 - WebContainer API is a browser-based runtime for executing Node.js applications and operating system commands. It enables you to build applications that previously required a server running.
• Life isn’t a lottery ticket - 2024-02-26 - - Make luck a remnant of design
• WHAT I LEARNED WORKING AT A MICHELIN STAR RESTAURANT | culinarycrush - 2024-02-26 - - In April and May 2023, I worked at two Michelin star restaurants in Copenhagen. I had worked briefly in restaurants before (mainly in the context of ramen) but this was my first time (aside from my own pop-ups) cooking in a fine dining setting. Predictably, restaurant life was intense. Time moves d
• You Will Never Be A Full Stack Developer | Seldo.com - 2024-02-26 - - or, Career Advice For The Working Web Dev I have been thinking a lot about the thing we call "the stack", one of many vague concepts web developers use when describing themselves. People call themselves "frontend", "backend" and "full stack" but there's no real consensus on what any of those mean. What is the stack? Part of the problem is that the "stack" is enormous: it includes at a minimum HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But how deep do you go? There are many server-side languages, ther
• 3 questions that will make you a phenomenal rubber duck – Dan Slimmon - 2024-02-26 - - As a Postgres reliability consultant and SRE, I’ve spent many hours being a rubber duck. Now I outperform even the incisive bath toy. “Rubber duck debugging” is a widespread, tong…
• Cost per Request | Garrit's Notes - 2024-02-26 -
• What Basel IV Means for U.S. Banks - 2024-02-25 - Basel IV is the informal name for a set of proposed international banking reforms building on the Basel I, Basel II, and Basel III accords.
• Safe and Sensible - Deployment and Launch with Reduced Risks | LaunchDarkly - 2024-02-25 - If you're skeptical of how concepts like shipping faster and testing in production can actually improve your end result and create a safer overall release process, read on.
• Failure Recovery: Strategies for Recovering From Failed Deployments | LaunchDarkly - 2024-02-25 - Failed software deployments don't have to be a nightmare. Learn three proven strategies for rapidly recovering from failed deployments while limiting the impact on end-users.
• Safe and Sensible - Deployment and Launch with Reduced Risks | LaunchDarkly - 2024-02-25 - If you're skeptical of how concepts like shipping faster and testing in production can actually improve your end result and create a safer overall release process, read on.
• Progressive experimentation with feature flags - Azure DevOps | Microsoft Learn - 2024-02-25 - Learn how to use feature flags to progressively experiment with new features using the production environment.
• Feature Flags: Speed and Safety - 2024-02-25 - Learn how the strategic implementation of feature flags can increase the speed of safety of software deployment, and how to seamlessly integrate them.
• musings - craig.banach.dev - 2024-02-25 - - Craig Banach - Personal Site
• 6 lessons on how Amazon and Twitch pivoted to grow rapidly - 2024-02-23 - Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) pitched itself to small sellers as outsourcing their messy storage and shipping problems. It started slow. Then sellers who adopted it saw unit sales jump. Their products came in Amazon boxes and shipped via Prime. Customers did not care who sold it to them, they cared that it looked and felt like Amazon.
• Winnie Lim » the uncomfortable phase of learning - 2024-02-22 - - I have begun strength training for the first time in october last year. I had three personal training sessions before I traveled to japan, and when I got back there was a huge covid wave so I decided to train on my own instead. I just put on a n95 mask and use the machines,...
• Stack: Using branded types in validators - 2024-02-22 - If you have a more specific type than what you can express with Convex validators, you can still document that at the type level in Convex by casting ...
• Selecting hardware for a server - 2024-02-22
• UI = f(statesⁿ) | daverupert.com - 2024-02-22 - “UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…
• UI = f(statesⁿ) | daverupert.com - 2024-02-22 - “UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…
• tc39/proposal-arraybuffer-transfer: Proposal to add ArrayBuffer.prototype.transfer - 2024-02-22 - Proposal to add ArrayBuffer.prototype.transfer. Contribute to tc39/proposal-arraybuffer-transfer development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Global state with XState and React | Stately - 2024-02-22 - How to use XState to manage global state in React
• Global state with XState and React | Stately - 2024-02-22 - How to use XState to manage global state in React
• Node.js Community Debate Intensifies Over Enabling Corepack by Default and Potentially Unbundling npm - Socket - 2024-02-22 - - The Node community is wrestling with the decision to enable Corepack by default, which has sparked a debate about the potential of removing npm from the Node.js binary.
• Vite 6 · vitejs/vite · Discussion #15886 - 2024-02-22 - We're starting a discussion to gather early feedback from the downstream ecosystem and users about their needs for Vite's next Major. Before commenting, please review current open issues and check ...
• This Week In React #174: ReactLabs, React-Strict-DOM, Forget, Remix, Hono, Redwood, Isograph, SafeTest, React-Aria, RN 0.74 RC, Reanimated, RNGH, Expo, RN+TV, VisionCamera, Hermes, TC39, LLRT, Vite... | This Week In React - 2024-02-22 - Hi everyone!
• awslabs/llrt: LLRT (Low Latency Runtime) is an experimental, lightweight JavaScript runtime designed to address the growing demand for fast and efficient Serverless applications. - 2024-02-22 - - LLRT (Low Latency Runtime) is an experimental, lightweight JavaScript runtime designed to address the growing demand for fast and efficient Serverless applications. - awslabs/llrt
• Immutable array updates with Array.prototype.with  |  Blog  |  web.dev - 2024-02-20 - Learn how to use this new method to update an array without mutating the original array.
• Tech the Heck? - CloudTruth - by Forrest Brazeal - 2024-02-20 - This is the weirdest email you will get today
• A Personal Story of a Mistake, and My Evolving View of Diversity and Inclusion - 2024-02-19 - It has taken years for me to realize that not being overtly biased is not the pinnacle of inclusion, and hiring as many women engineers as possible is not the pinnacle of diversity.
• My First Time Audit – Rob Rock - 2024-02-19 -
• All My Best Debugging Tips | Jake Worth - 2024-02-19 - - This is a list of all the best debugging tips I’ve picked up over the years. Some of these might seem obvious, yet we forget them when it counts. Debugging is a…
• Be Original, I Beg You - Evan Coopersmith - 2024-02-19 - - Be Original, I Beg You - Evan Coopersmith
• Cracking a “Developer Tools Killer” script… | Christian Heilmann - 2024-02-19 -
• Consider Right-Page-Only Note-Taking - 2024-02-19 - - A functional writing experience
• On actionable and actually useful logs | Lanre Adelowo - 2024-02-18 - - Responding to responses about my earlier thoughts on overlogging
• Solve the boring problems, and win | Pith & Pip - 2024-02-18 - - Build something nice to have, and people will drop it when the budget's tight. Build something people have to have, and they'll keep using it as long as it fits their needs.
• Version Interfaces, Not Implementations | Gavin D. Howard - 2024-02-17 - - In which I steal the thunder of a smart man and write a blog post for him showing that we should not version implementations, but interfaces.
• You won't scale | Go Make Things - 2024-02-17 - - One of the more common myths I try to debunk around vanilla JavaScript and simpler approaches to web development is that they don’t scale (they do, actually). So I really enjoyed this post on Mastodon from tante… You won’t grow to Google/Amazon scale. It’s fine. Just build a simple solution you can maintain. I really wish this was the norm in our industry. I’m thankfully starting to see the pendulum swing back away from overly complex solutions.
• Better Benchmarks Through Graphs - Marc's Blog - 2024-02-15
• Method Shorthand Syntax Considered Harmful | Total TypeScript - 2024-02-15 - - Using the method shorthand syntax for function annotations in TypeScript can result in runtime errors. It is recommended to use object property syntax instead.
• - Fuck You, Show Me The Prompt. - 2024-02-15 - - Quickly understand inscrutable LLM frameworks by intercepting API calls.
• A Lannister Always Pays His Technical Debts - 2024-02-14 -
• Seattle-area light rail lines' schedule changes, explained - Axios Seattle - 2024-02-14 - Some projects are delayed, but a partial line will open soon on the Eastside.
• Generate diagrams programmatically - 2024-02-13 - - This article demonstrates how to generate diagrams programmatically with D2.
• Are you ever afraid? Worried? - 2024-02-13 - Do you spend more of your time worrying about what could go wrong at work and in your life than you do planning what can go right? More time than enjoying success? I have and often I still do. Yet I've come to realize that being afraid has held me back far more than it should have.
• GPU Cloud Economics Explained – The Hidden Truth - 2024-02-13 - - CPU vs GPU Cloud Differences, TCO Model, PUE, Hyperscalers Disadvantage
• Amazon’s Cloud Crisis: How AWS Will Lose The Future Of Computing - 2024-02-13 - Nitro, Graviton, EFA, Inferentia, Trainium, Nvidia Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Handicapping Infrastructure, AI As A Service, Enterprise Automation, Meta, Coreweave, TCO
• How to draw beautiful software architecture diagrams - 2024-02-12 - Part 1 of a series of articles on simple steps to follow to achieve functional beauty for your software architecture diagrams.
• How AI Is Shifting Developer Culture and Work at GitHub - The New Stack - 2024-02-12 - Inbal Shani, chief product officer, explains what surprising trends GitHub has seen since introducing Copilot.
• Seattle property taxes among top 5 most expensive in big U.S. cities | The Seattle Times - 2024-02-11 - The median property tax paid by Seattle homeowners in 2022 was around $6,800. From 2010 to 2021, it rose a whopping 89%. Columnist Gene Balk digs into the data.
• J. Carlos Roldán / Semantic programming - 2024-02-11 - - I believe we are at the threshold of a new programming paradigm. As the latest advancements in AI make it more accessible and closer to a self-hosted utility, we are entering a world in which developers can articulate what they want to achieve in simple natural language terms. I call this paradigm semantic programming.
• Is Amazon Web Services (AWS) a Liability for Amazon? | The Motley Fool - 2024-02-11 - AWS was one of the company's worst-performing segments in the fourth quarter.
• ChatGPT for Coding Tasks: Best Practices | 16x Engineer - 2024-02-11 - - Learn the best practices on using ChatGPT to complete coding tasks more efficiently.
• Architecting LLM Powered Software | Nasir Shadravan - 2024-02-11 - - The first wave of LLM apps were famously looked down upon as “gpt wrappers”. Single prompt templates generating simple text. But if you’re building an AI first application, you need an AI design approach. And that’s the moat. You combine the engineering approaches to create a new generation of software. A software that is more natural and more human. Or can process human generated knowledge. There is a lot of hype around AI and Large Language Models.
• That Time I Accidentally Terminated 600 Instances - 2024-02-11 - - That Time I Accidentally Terminated 600 Instances - Otherwise known as
• Glue — Talk by Tanya Reilly. Tanya Riley from Squarespace gave an… | by Arvind Kunday | And Further | Medium - 2024-02-11 - Tanya Riley from Squarespace gave an amazing talk on 11th July “Being Glue” at the Software Art Thou run by Zendesk. It originated from an…
• Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech - 2024-02-11 - I spent a fair portion of my adult life working for large tech companies. In all my interactions with peers, no other topic caused as much cynicism and angst as the question of performance management — that is, the labyrinthine processes the companies follow to decide who to fire and who to reward for exemplary work.
• Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat - 2024-02-11
• How To Write Stuff No One Else Can – The Write to Roam - 2024-02-11 -
• Why tech is magic - 2024-02-11 - - Why I feel tech is magic and how I think about making more magic.
• I is for Intent — Acko.net - 2024-02-11 - - Why your app turned into spaghetti
• leontrolski - CMD-click manifesto - 2024-02-11 -
• (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup · Jack's home on the web - 2024-02-10 - - Assortment of technology startup infrastructure recommendations
• IaC wars - by Forrest Brazeal - Good Tech Things - 2024-02-08 - Would you rather fight one horse-sized YAML template or 1,000 YAML template-sized horses?
• Why Knowledge Management Doesn’t Work - The New Stack - 2024-02-08 - AI-powered chatbots give users instant access to common information without interrupting your experts.
• #0165: Broad work vs deep work. Finding a balance between remote and in-person work | by M@ | Medium | Medium - 2024-02-08 - - Finding a balance between remote and in-person work
• Angel investing, how I would pick the next Amazon - 2024-02-08 - Q&A with Grace Gong (Founder & Host @ Smart Venture Podcast | LinkedIn Top Voice)
• Are LLMs not truly "generative"? – Metal Whale's blog - 2024-02-08 - - Discussion about the generative capability of autoregressive LLMs
• Mean() vs Min() when aggregating running time measurements – vilvoiu.ro - 2024-02-08 - - While reviewing a colleague&rsquo;s work I had a knee-jerk reflex to complain about the use of min() as an estimator for the running time of a program. Specific
• Platformonomics - Follow the CAPEX: Cloud Table Stakes 2023 Retrospective - 2024-02-08 - - Tl;dr: Cloud CAPEX is once again both exciting and revealing! Previous retrospectives: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 plus earlier/other CAPEX musings. Capital expenditures (CAPEX) are ol…
• Why Is Big Tech Still Cutting Jobs? - The New York Times - 2024-02-08 - - Profits are up and the economy is strong. But the tech industry faces two challenges — dealing with a frenetic work force expansion in the pandemic and building A.I.
• Seattle among worst downtown traffic in U.S. - Axios Seattle - 2024-02-07 - Traveling 6 miles through downtown now takes over a minute longer than it did in 2021.
• Finding New Mountains to Climb - 2024-02-07 -
• Objective – zug zug says - 2024-02-07 - - After a particularly difficult one-on-one with a stubborn direct, Jay took a moment to reflect and center himself. The report’s claim, though posed at him abrasively, had actually been interesting …
• Why doctors in America earn so much - 2024-02-06 - A mismanaged training system has artificially depressed the supply of medics
• React Libraries for 2024 - 2024-02-05 - Discover the essential React libraries for 2024! Navigate the vast ecosystem effortlessly with this curated list. Empower your React projects with these powerful tools for seamless development of large-scale applications ...
• My Ego Is My Enemy. Your Ego Is Your Enemy. · Preslav Rachev - 2024-02-04 - - Acknowledge that you don't have all the answers.
• I tried generative AI on lots of data and we're not quite there yet | Swizec Teller - 2024-02-04 - - Lessons learned from running GPT-4 on lots of data using the same task.
• Why DDATs? - Starting Point - 2024-02-04 - - Developer Driven Automated Tests are beneficial, but not cheap. They are good value for the effort!
• Issue 46: Is Being Well Read Actually a Thing? Pt III: The Well-Read Archetypes - 2024-02-04 - - On being well read within, without, by mastery
• How to stay junior forever - Dmitry Kudryavtsev - 2024-02-04 - - A step by step guide for staying junior forever
• Generating code was never the hard part - Nick Scialli | Senior Software Engineer - 2024-02-04 - - The one about generative AI
• 6 rules when making data dashboards - Michal Charemza - 2024-02-04 - - Use these rules to help you make decisions when designing and making dashboards
• Reduce Long Term Customer Churn From Data Growth – Sherman On Software - 2024-02-04 -
• Never Underestimate Support and Knowing your Customer — Nick Janetakis - 2024-02-04 - - I had a recent interaction with a security and surveillance camera supplier that left me pleasantly surprised.
• Colored Functions Are Good, Actually - 2024-02-04 - - In defense of colored functions.
• Introduction to Chaos Engineering in Serverless Architectures - 2024-02-04 - - Chaos engineering is a proactive methodology that intentionally introduces controlled disruptions and failures into a system to uncover weaknesses, enhance resilience, and ensure robust performance in the face of unforeseen outages. Everything fails, all the time — DR. Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon This is the mantra we developers need to repeat every time we plan a distributed system, and this is precisely why chaos engineering is so important. In this blog post, you will learn about chaos engineer
• The Perfect Mediocre - 2024-02-04 - - My tales as a technical founder, manager, and software engineer.
• Tool Invocation – Demonstrating the Marvel of GPT's Flexibility · Thought Box - 2024-02-03 -
• Intel’s Humbling – Stratechery by Ben Thompson - 2024-02-03 - Intel under Pat Gelsinger is reaping the disaster that came from a lack of investment and execution a decade ago; the company, though, appears to be headed in the right direction, as evidenced by i…
• Coldstarts with the AWS Javascript 3.502 SDK - Speedrun - 2024-02-02 - An extension to GitHub Markdown to build tools directly into your documentation
• Azure sneakily hides cheaper option in it's UI | Adolfo Ochagavía - 2024-02-01 - - Recently a friend had to set up some cloud infrastructure on Azure. He was trying to create a VPN Gateway through the web UI, but couldn’t find the “Basic” tier (the cheapest on Azure). The only available options started at more than $100 / month! He later stumbled upon this support request (archived), where a Microsoft employee shamelessly explains what’s going on: the Basic SKU is no longer available in Azure portal.
• Spotify's audiobook leap raises concerns for Audible CEO - Good e-Reader - 2024-02-01 - Amazon's Audible is feeling the heat as Spotify, the music streaming giant, takes a giant leap into the ever-expanding world of audiobooks. The concerns were unveiled during an internal all-hands meeting this week, where Audible CEO Bob Carrigan addressed employee inquiries about the company's focus on competition rather than customer needs, according to a recording obtained by Business Insider. In response to the query, Carrigan acknowledged the impact of Spotify's recent foray into audiobooks, especially with the launch of free audiobooks for its premium subscribers. Describing Spotify's move as a 'classic tech company freemium approach,' Carrigan emphasized the need for

January 2024

• Moving away from CDK - 2024-01-31 - - You might’ve heard that we are working on a new version of SST (called Ion), that’s not based on CDK. In this post we’ll talk about why we are moving away from CDK and what’s going to change.
• Continuous Integration - 2024-01-31 - Every developer integrates their work into mainline at least every day.
• The art of good code review - 2024-01-31 - - This post is an extension to a talk I gave recently at work. It was arranged at short notice and the audience were experienced engineers, so I kept it brief and tried not to be patronising. But the feedback afterwards was quite positive and there were some questions too, so here's the extended version for anyone interested. Note that our team conducts pre-merge reviews, and some of the suggestions are specific to that context. I actually prefer post-merge reviews, but am yet to persuade everyone I work with that they're better. Oh, and trigger warning: this post contains opinions.
• Aiming High, my path towards principal engineer - 2024-01-31 - I’m probably going to transition this blog into a personal blog and rethink the content strategy for this platform some day. However, I’m helping a handful of people grow as engineers with a few of my clients, and my #1 goal in life is helping other engineers grow into their best self.
• Automattic’s Big Re-Org | Matt Mullenweg - 2024-01-30 - - Considering I am going on sabbatical in 83 hours and passing the CEO torch to Toni Schneider until I return in May, it seemed like a perfect time to do a giant re-org! Just kidding. But we did int…
• grgv.xyz - 2024-01-29 -
• Microretros · Jens Rantil - 2024-01-29 - - Quick feedback in meetings.
• Mean vs. median · Jens Rantil - 2024-01-29 - - The median bell curve is mean.
• MTTR is the wrong metric · Jens Rantil - 2024-01-29 - - We have been measuring Time to Recovery the wrong way all along.
• There is way too much serendipity — LessWrong - 2024-01-29 - As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry. …
• You're Gonna Need A Bigger Browser - 2024-01-29 -
• Lukas Rosenstock's Blog - 2024-01-29 -
• The Bun Shell | Bun Blog - 2024-01-29 - The Bun Shell is a cross-platform shell that allows you to run shell scripts in JavaScript & TypeScript
• Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers - 2024-01-29 - Lessons learned from a year of startup life.
• ddanieltan.com - Why I like Obsidian - 2024-01-28 - A tool that helps me manage pretty much everything
• Starting with No: Why Most People Shouldn’t Be Managers | by Sivan Hermon | Jan, 2024 | Code Like A Girl - 2024-01-28 - - Why the desired title won’t give you what you’re looking for
• We have used too many levels of abstractions and now the future looks bleak - 2024-01-28
• Time Management – Paolo Belcastro - 2024-01-28 - I want to share the system that dramatically increased my well-being and productivity over the past two years. I want to be candid too, and completely honest: time management has never been my fort…
• There are three types of meetings. - 2024-01-28 - - I have a system – a survival mechanism, really – for classifying, planning, and executing meetings in a way that helps keep me sane at work.
• How Gong builds product - by Lenny Rachitsky - 2024-01-28 - Co-founder and chief product officer Eilon Reshef on autonomy, OKRs, design partners, prioritizing, interviewing, and more
• PureComponents vs Functional Components with hooks - 2024-01-28 - Looking into PureComponent and the problem it solved, how it can be replaced now in the hooks & functional components world, and discovering an interesting quirk of React re-renders behavior
• Web Workers are not the Answer | Dagster Blog - 2024-01-28 - A tale of overstretched logs, counterintuitive web worker behavior, and ultimately a troublesome cursor issue.
• Great achievers are versatile, here's how to increase your versatility - 2024-01-28 - In this post, I emphasized the value of focus and I continue to believe that both focus and prioritization are keys to maximum success (as well as ongoing sanity). However, there is a difference between focusing to get something done by avoiding distractions and only being able or willing to do a limited set of tasks.
• Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 - 2024-01-28 - Last year I wrote about my initial experiments with DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image generation model. I’ve been having an absurd amount of fun playing with its sequel, DALL-E 3 recently. …
• EU is a counter-weight for tech regulation - Can's blog - 2024-01-28 - - Everybody is annoyed by the cookie pop-ups. But the regulation behind it, GDPR, and similar tech regulations by the European Union are actually a good thing. …
• Killing Community @ marginalia.nu - 2024-01-28 - This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general. I think the model demonstrate how the ’enshittification’ process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on a venture capital model. An online community can be like a village, where you have familiar faces, collective experiences, shared values and so forth.
• Finish your projects - 2024-01-28 - Starting a project can be full of excitement, hope, and blissful productivity. Finishing that last ten percent, however, can feel like too much. Here’s how to get past that and actually finish.
• Riders Want More Sounder Service, But Will They Get It? - The Urbanist - 2024-01-28 - Sounder riders want weekend trips and a fuller weekday schedule, an agency report shows, but governing board priorities are holding back near-term potential.
• CEOs are mandating return to office because they need instant gratification – Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io - 2024-01-28 - - All measures of productivity indicate that working from home results in a boost. But no one measures the CEOs need for instant gratification.
• I hereby pardon all junior engineers - 2024-01-27 - - Shortsighted engineering practices have eroded public trust in technology. We can reclaim that trust by building better things together.
• Have You Been Ignoring Implicit Feedback, Letting Your Career Pay the Price? - 2024-01-27 - Implicit feedback is the subtle feedback you likely receive regularly. Don't let it escalate to explicit feedback. I spend time translating subtle feedback to what it really means.
• Avoid these 7 Key Mistakes for Maintaining a High-Performing Team - Frederik Today - 2024-01-27 - Want a high-performing team? Avoid these key errors, from unclear expectations to neglecting development. Elevate your leadership for a more productive and innovative team.
• We Forgot Frontend Basics. Usually, I say that it is not so bad… | by Pavel Pogosov | Jan, 2024 | Stackademic - 2024-01-27 - - Usually, I say that it is not so bad, skillful hands can do almost everything. However, recently I have noticed some things that changed my…
• How SingleFile Transformed My Obsidian Workflow - 2024-01-27 - - SingleFile
• Strong Opinions, Loosely Held - A Problematic Idea - 2024-01-26 - - A discussion of "strong opinions, loosely held" and a proposed alternative
• 5 CSS snippets every front-end developer should know in 2024  |  Articles  |  web.dev - 2024-01-26 - Toolbelt worthy, powerful, and stable CSS you can use today.
• How to have hard conversations - 2024-01-25 - Community member event: On January 25, Ethan will do a live career talk and Q&A on the topic “How Being Unreasonable Drove Me to Amazon VP”. If you want to attend live and/or get the video recording become a newsletter paid subscriber (community member).
• Thank private solar for no daytime load shedding, not Eskom - Moneyweb - 2024-01-25 - In recent days, there hasn’t been an instance of solar PV generating less than 1 300MW during daylight hours.
• The Query Options API | TkDodo's blog - 2024-01-25 - v5 brought a new, powerful API, especially if you're using React Query with TypeScript...
• Good LLM Validation is Just Good Validation - Instructor - 2024-01-25 - Enhancing OpenAI function calling with Pydantic
• New client-side hooks coming to React 19 - 2024-01-25 - Data fetching and form handling are about to get easier in React, and not just in SSR apps.
• "Here's the sad state of the cloud" - by Forrest Brazeal - 2024-01-22 - also, 10% off new guidebooks!
• We removed advertising cookies, here’s what happened | Product Blog • Sentry - 2024-01-22 - This is not another abstract post about what the ramifications of the cookieless future might be; Sentry actually removed cookies from our…
• I will dropkick you if you refer to an LLM as a Librarian – Librarian of Things - 2024-01-22 - - I am on Team LLMs are Cultural Artifacts. I am not on Team “AI Rights”.
• Console-to-Code: AWS’s this service is game changing. | by TechStoryLines | Dec, 2023 | Medium - 2024-01-22 - Hey there, exciting news from Amazon Web Services! They’ve just rolled out something cool called AWS Console-to-Code, and it’s like a magic…
• 2024 Guide to Goals for Software Engineers - 2024-01-22 - Lessons on goals done right from a software engineer who hated goals
• Generalists are rare gems | Dmytro Krasun - 2024-01-20 -
• yantra-core/Sutra.js: A JavaScript behavior tree library for easily creating and managing complex behavior patterns - 2024-01-20 - A JavaScript behavior tree library for easily creating and managing complex behavior patterns - yantra-core/Sutra.js: A JavaScript behavior tree library for easily creating and managing complex beh...
• It's About Time! - Marc's Blog - 2024-01-19 -
• Amazon’s iRobot deal will be blocked by EU — Report - 2024-01-19 - The ecommerce giant was told the deal was likely to be rejected at a meeting Thursday with officials from the European Commission, according to people familiar with the matter.
• What is Scalability Anyway? - Marc's Blog - 2024-01-19 -
• Scrollbars are becoming a problem - 2024-01-18 - Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
• South Africa’s biggest solar battery now online — with more power than an old Eskom coal power station - 2024-01-18 - The battery storage system is fed from 540MW of solar energy generated by nearly 1 million panels spread over three plants covering 879 hectares in the Northern Cape.
• The Library is a Superpower | anderegg.ca - 2024-01-18 - - I volunteer with a great local program. Through it, I help connect newcomers to the local tech scene. One of the standard pieces of advice I give is: get a library card.
• Slack Migrates to Cell-Based Architecture on AWS to Mitigate Gray Failures - 2024-01-18 - - Slack migrated most of the critical user-facing services from a monolithic to a cell-based architecture over the last 1.5 years. The move was triggered by the impact of networking outages affecting a single availability zone, causing user-impacting service degradation. The new architecture allows incrementally draining all the traffic away from the affected availability zone within 5 minutes.
• Why Engineers Need To Write - by Ryan Peterman - 2024-01-17 - - I hated writing in high school. It wasn’t objective like my favorite subjects, math and science. It also didn’t help that we had to write about old, hard-to-understand literature like Shakespeare. But my perspective on writing changed once I started working full-time as a software engineer.
• Web Performance Calendar » Fastest Way of Passing State to JavaScript, Re-visited - 2024-01-15 - Revisiting a study of the fastest way to parse large chunks of JSON such as those often used in SPA-type applications to set up state.
• Data Storage and Indexing | Nate's Notes - 2024-01-15 - - Part 2 of my DDIA series. Let's dig into how Databases store and index our data.
• Yusuf Aytas - The Power of Consistency - 2024-01-15 - - Yusuf Aytas - Leadership - The Power of Consistency
• NPS, the good parts - apenwarr - 2024-01-14 - - The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a statistically questionable way to turn a set of 10-point ratings into a single number you can compare with...
• APIFutures: API Sprawl to Be a Pressing Concern in 2024 | Nordic APIs | - 2024-01-14 - As API reliance soars, documentation, governance, and security are still lagging. API sprawl is set to be a pressing challenge in 2024.
• Getting things done (in small increments) - 2024-01-14
• The future of React.use and React.useMemo - a powerful alternative to context selectors - 2024-01-13 - use-context-selector is my preferred way to prevent re-renders when using React contexts. But some future React updates provide a better alternative using only React.use and React.useMemo. Follow along as I learn a powerful lesson in my unsuccessfully attempt to prove Dan Abramov wrong.
• Google is a giant squid wearing Mickey Mouse gloves - 2024-01-12 - Friday roundup of Tech Things, good and evil
• A Guide To Soft Navigations And Core Web Vitals Reporting | DebugBear - 2024-01-11 - Core Web Vitals currently don't report soft navigations used in single page applications, but this is about to change. Here are the details and an explanation of how soft navigations work.
• Experimenting with measuring soft navigations  |  Web Platform  |  Chrome for Developers - 2024-01-11 - The Chrome team is working on better measuring so-called soft navigations used by Single Page Applications and a new API is now available behind a flag to allow sites to experiment with this too.
• Are any of your features the steak on the menu? | nicole@web - 2024-01-11 -
• Quantifying your documentation's success — Rami James - 2024-01-11 - - The primary challenge faced by technical writers often boils down to how to evaluate the effectiveness of what you write. You build some documentation and you think it is great. How do you know if you are right? How do you prove it to upper management? How do you really, really know?
• Are nitpicks really worth it? - Nick Scialli | Senior Software Engineer - 2024-01-11 - - I have started questioning whether PR nitpicks are necessary.
• Daniel Rosenwasser on TypeScript and What’s Ahead in 2024 - The New Stack - 2024-01-11 - The senior product manager over TypeScript at Microsoft shares TypeScript’s most significant developments in 2023 and previews what developers can expect in 2024.
• Roadmap 2024 | Biome - 2024-01-11 - Roadmap 2024 and new logo
• Roadmap 2024 | Biome - 2024-01-11 - Roadmap 2024 and new logo
• Peer Dependencies | Node.js - 2024-01-11 - Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.
• A Complete Guide to Regular, Dev, and Peer Dependencies in npm - 2024-01-11 - Understanding the differences between the three types of npm dependencies
• LLMs in My Engineering Workflow - 2024-01-10 - - Exploring the impact of LLMs in my daily engineering tasks. From refining code to understanding feedback, I explain how these AI tools have enhanced efficiency and productivity in my workflow over the past 6 months.
• Microservices without reason - 2024-01-09 - - Too many companies default to microservices, and with it comes increasing development and operational costs, a decrease in software quality, and a decrease in team motivation.
• Dark Mode is not just about aesthetic - 2024-01-09 -
• Re-founding, reInventing and the Future of AWS – tecosystems - 2024-01-09 - Four weeks ago at the company’s Universe event, in a move that proved controversial in some corners, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced that the company was now “re-founded on Copilot.” This was a bold statement that some apparently viewed as a potential abandonment of Git and its founding principles, which alarmed those with little to
• LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024 - <antirez> - 2024-01-09
• Elon Musk is not understood – Casey Handmer's blog - 2024-01-09 - - Elon Musk is a divisive character. My intent here, as always, is to add some nuance and signal to a noisy, complex and/or obscure subject. Whatever your views on Elon, I feel that it is a worthy go…
• The True Purpose of Testing | Epic Web Dev by Kent C. Dodds - 2024-01-09 - Discover the true essence of automated testing and the difference between an implementation and intention.
• Trying ArchUnit with Typescript - 2024-01-08 - I recently learned about something called ArchUnit. It seems that it can test dependencies. I want to try it out right away, so I'll leave this as a memo.
• 10 Principles of Organization Design: Aligning Structure with Business Strategy - Frederik Today - 2024-01-08 - - Entrepreneurs looking to match their company's setup with their business goals should really focus on these ten organization design principles. Following these rules can help your business perform better, adjust more easily to changes, and keep growing, setting you up for lasting success.
• Maximizing LLM performance - 2024-01-08 - - Short excerpt on how LLMs can be pushed from prototype to performance in a scalable way
• Efforts and Goals and Joy - by Simon Sarris - 2024-01-08 - There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn.
• You should be using rtx • Andrei Calazans - 2024-01-08 - - rtx - A version manager for multiple languages like ASDF, has great developer experience and is not yet an industry standard.
• Choose optimism — Steph Ango - 2024-01-08 - - Only optimists can create a great future. One day, I decided to become an optimist and life became much more fun.
• How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT - 2024-01-08
• Why we got rid of Sentry - rossmcmillan.co.uk - 2024-01-07 - - “Could probably scan every one of us and find five different doodads that look like cancer”
• // Proper Tail Calls: The unimplemented web standard from ES6 - 2024-01-07 - - Code Comments by Erik Langille: Chrome and Firefox are not compliant with the ES6 web standard from 2015. How could this be, over eight years later? Is it some nuanced optimization or a crucial feature? Well - it's both.
• Here be dragons | TBM's Blog - 2024-01-07 - - Subscribe via email or RSS feed This was inspired by something I saw on Shalim Khan's blog. Take a second to read it (it's short). I'd guess pretty much eve...
• Is This Really It? | Shalim's Blog - 2024-01-07 - Wake up. Go to work. Come home. (Exhausted...) Scrape together some food. Force yourself to enjoy some TV show that your friends are talking about. Slump int...
• Weird things engineers believe about Web development - Brian Birtles’ Blog - 2024-01-07 - - I wrote most of this post sometime in 2022 but I think it holds up alright in 2024 so I decided to publish it for posterity. I don’t really like doing posts like this—I’d much rather share some innocuous learnings or tips but it turns out I have opinions too 😓 Sorry! Since I quit Mozilla and went back to full-time Web development, I’ve discovered a few surprises. It turns out Web development is actually pretty hard, Web developers are actually very smart, and some of these frameworks and techniques we mocked as browser engineers aren’t so bad. Oops. At the same time, it turns out some Web developers have ideas about browsers and the Web that, as a former browser engineer and standards editor, I’m a bit dubious of. Here are a few of the things that surprised me.
• We’re reducing emissions by optimizing signal timing in partnership with Google - SDOT Blog - 2024-01-06 - We’re working to reduce vehicle emissions and use industry-leading technology through Project Green Light, in partnership with Google.
• NPS, the good parts - apenwarr - 2024-01-05 - - The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a statistically questionable way to turn a set of 10-point ratings into a single number you can compare with...
• Interesting - apenwarr - 2024-01-05 - - A few conversations last week made me realize I use the word “interesting” in an unusual way. I rely heavily on mental models. Of course, e...
• Just Write, You Dolt | anderegg.ca - 2024-01-04 - - When it comes to writing posts on this site, the phrase “I don’t like writing, I like having written” resonates strongly. I enjoy getting more posts on the site, but I find it strangely difficult. I want to post more in 2024, so I’d like to get past this.
• Return to Office Is Bullshit And Everyone Knows It - Dhole Moments - 2024-01-04 - I quit my job towards the end of last month. When I started this blog, I told myself, “Don’t talk about work.” Since my employment is in the rear view mirror, I’m going to b…
• The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn't Exist | jakelazaroff.com - 2024-01-04 - - A one-dimensional spectrum can't sufficiently capture the tradeoffs involved in web development.
• Inspiration for the year ahead - by Lenny Rachitsky - 2024-01-03 - Powerful life mottos shared by my podcast guests
• Elon Musk is not understood – Casey Handmer's blog - 2024-01-02 - Elon Musk is a divisive character. My intent here, as always, is to add some nuance and signal to a noisy, complex and/or obscure subject. Whatever your views on Elon, I feel that it is a worthy go…
• Reflections on a Sabbatical - 2024-01-01 - - But in the seventh year the land is to have a year of sabbath rest.
• Effort to repeal Washington’s capital gains tax, other initiatives move forward | The Daily Chronicle - 2024-01-01 - A conservative group's effort to eliminate Washington's capital gains tax, among other initiatives, took a step forward last week when it turned in a petition with nearly 420,000 signatures to the &hellip;
• Puget Sound Leaders Debate a Pivot Away from Highway Expansion - The Urbanist - 2024-01-01 - A small change around regional grant funding criteria could prove a bellwether for transportation policy in Puget Sound. Everywhere from Lynnwood to Puyallup, from Auburn to Silverdale, the long-range transportation plan for central Puget Sound calls for a significant expansion of the region's roadways over the coming decades, even as evidence mounts that expanding roads
• 2024 is Poised to be Puget Sound’s Biggest Transit Year in Decades - The Urbanist - 2024-01-01 - A new Swift line, a RapidRide line, and 12 new light rail stations are all on deck for the coming year. Public transit enthusiasts and elected officials looking to pose at a ribbon-cutting will have busy calendars in 2024 as brand new transit lines across three different agencies are all set to open next year,

December 2023

• Why do remote companies do meetups? - Artur Piszek - 2023-12-31 - People need relationships and trust to work effectively. This face-to-face time pays dividends for the entire year. Plus, it's a ton of fun.
• Prompt hacking is Oxygen - Artur Piszek - 2023-12-31 - If Communication is Oxygen, and Prompt hacking is essentially communication, then… 1: Communication is Oxygen At Automattic, we like to say that communication is the oxygen of a distributed company. Why is that exactly? For remote work to work, you have to provide sufficient context so your coworkers are on the same page. They cannotContinue reading "Prompt hacking is Oxygen"
• LLMs are Interpretable - Tim Kellogg - 2023-12-31 -
• This is not a Drill, this is just Tuesday | Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp - 2023-12-31 -
• Alternate Futures for “Web Components” · The Ethically-Trained Programmer - 2023-12-31 - Stop trying to make customElement happen. Do this instead.
• Quitting while you're ahead - Tilting at Windmills - 2023-12-31 -
• Amazon's Silent Sacking - Justin Garrison - 2023-12-31 - - Companies are fighting back for quiet quitting and it's having a big impact.
• Be kind to attendees eyes - Kevin Chant - 2023-12-31 - - In this post I want to cover how you can be kind to attendees eyes when presenting. Because I think it is an important thing to be aware of.
• Semantic Versioning is a terrible mistake | The Reinvigorated Programmer - 2023-12-31 - - When I first heard about Semantic Versioning, or SemVer, I thought it was one of those ideas that’s so obviously right that we were all going to benefit from someone having just codified it a…
• S3 as an Eternal Service - Last Week in AWS Blog - 2023-12-27 - AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr obviously needs no introduction to anyone even tangentially aware of what AWS is–but did you know that he's also a
• My experience with the Kindle Scribe - 2023-12-27 - Because I wanted an E-ink tablet
• Ask yourself dumb questions – and answer them! | What's new - 2023-12-27 - - Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical sp…
• Career Independence comes from being very good at a valuable skill - 2023-12-27 - Blog and book recommendation
• Evaluating Product Managers – We help you create successful product culture and process - 2023-12-27 -
• 7 simple habits of the top 1% of engineers - 2023-12-27 - How elite software engineers maintain outperformance
• Happy Holidays! And Spending Your Life Wisely - 2023-12-27 - A brief interlude during the holidays.
• - Don't Put All Your Apples In One Basket - 2023-12-27 -
• Why DDATs? - Starting Point - 2023-12-25 - - Developer Driven Automated Tests are beneficial, but not cheap. They are good value for the effort!
• The Source of Readability - 2023-12-24 - - Readability is more objective than you'd think.
• Pull requests make CI harder - Tyler Cipriani - 2023-12-24
• Work/Life Balance - 2023-12-24 - - A topic comes up somewhat regularly that irritates me. It's suggested, particularly in the tech community, that people should focus more on their life and less on work. It's suggested there's a regular atmosphere of over-work in this industry. I'm not one known to just be quiet about opinions, so I've come to vent.
• Laurence Tratt: Minor Advances in Knowledge Are Still a Worthwhile Goal - 2023-12-24
• TheeSeeShip – The Opposite of a Rewrite – Sherman On Software - 2023-12-24 -
• Two Paths For Paying Down Tech Debt – Sherman On Software - 2023-12-24
• How many passengers can Washington ferries transport this holiday season? - MyNorthwest.com - 2023-12-23 - Staffing has also been a big issue. Retirements and other work separations have led to the loss of more than 140 employees.
• Embrace the Tarpit – flenker.blog – thoughts on stuff, views on things - 2023-12-23 - - Whenever a new tool in the productivity space is released - say a new To Do list or a new PK app, you’ll invariably read the following advice in every discussion around it: Beware the productivity tarpit, it’s easy to get sucked down while setting up the latest fancy app, feeling productive when all you did was moving around stuff without actually generating value.
• Two Paths For Paying Down Tech Debt – Sherman On Software - 2023-12-22
• "In 20 years only your children will remember that you worked late." - 2023-12-21 - This quote SHOULD make you think. Over my career, I've been a part of many close teams. Teams that worked hard together, ate lunch together every day, and attended social events together. I've also worked long hours for every company I have served. Evening and weekends.
• Seattle Forfeits $7.3 Million Grant for Stalled Out First Avenue Streetcar Project - The Urbanist - 2023-12-21 - The City of Seattle is officially on track to return $7.3 million in grant funding that had originally been awarded to the Cultural Connector Streetcar, formerly called the Center City Connector, after a local match to advance project plans was not included in the City's 2024 budget. The impending return of funds was previously reported
• 🚀 Skyrocket your productivity - by Fran Soto - 2023-12-21 - 10 tools and processes I use every day for a huge productivity boost
• JavaScript essentials: why you should know how the engine works - 2023-12-21 - by Rainer Hahnekamp JavaScript essentials: why you should know how the engine works Photo by Moto “Club4AG” Miwa [https://www.flickr.com/photos/moto_club4ag/] on Flickr [https://www.flickr.com/photos/moto_club4ag/4342364192/in/datetaken/]This article is also available in Spanish [https://www.campusmvp.es/recursos/post/fundamentos-de-javascript-por-que-deberias-saber-como-funciona-el-motor.aspx] . In this article, I want to explain what a software developer, who uses JavaScript to write applic
• How JavaScript works: Optimizing the V8 compiler for efficiency - LogRocket Blog - 2023-12-21 - - A guide to compiler-friendly Javascript optimization methods to help front-end devs write more efficient Javascript and reduce slowdowns.
• Death by a thousand microservices - 2023-12-21 - The software industry is learning once again that complexity kills
• Jeff Bezos lessons on building business value - 2023-12-21 -
• Chinchilla Paper explained | Nikhil. R - 2023-12-21 - - Whenever I see a discussion online about the current generation of LLMs, there is an inherent assumption and extrapolation that these technologies will keep improving with time. Why do we think that? The approximate answer is because of scaling laws which suggest indefinite improvement for the current style of transformers with additional pre-training data and parameters. This blog post delves into the intricacies of these scaling laws and examines how they guide the development of more powerful and efficient LLMs. I will be as comprehensive as I can (with the math knowledge I have) including parts about the scaling law origins, recent finding and their implications.
• SpaceX no longer taking losses to produce Starlink satellite antennas - 2023-12-21 - Elon Musk's SpaceX is no longer absorbing the cost of the Starlink antennas it sells with its satellite internet service.
• The Tyranny of the Marginal User - by Ivan Vendrov - 2023-12-20 - why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time
• You Don't Have to be a Manager to be a Leader Because Leadership != Management - 2023-12-20 - Leadership is a way of relating to others. Management is an organizational construct. Many leaders are not managers, and (unfortunately) some managers are not leaders.
• Igor Cananea | Software engineer titles - let's get rid of them (??) - 2023-12-20 - - One of the worst ideas that I’ve seen in tech companies is to strip away titles from software engineers and just call them that. Levels are obviously preserved1, because you still need to be able to compensate according to them but they are internal and not supposed to be divulged. The justifications I’ve seen for this have been along the lines of Some people feel intimidated by a person’s title, particularly if the gap is big (say, junior and staff); It puts everyone in the same bucket, erasing differences and giving everyone a “we are all just software engineers, let’s work together” vibe; It allows everyone to be able to step up and own any engineering problem because, again, “we are all just software engineers here”; I’ve also heard of something-something solves under-slotting of minorities (seriously, can’t remember the reason exactly because it was just too wrong).
• The Three Types of Documentation - 2023-12-20 - - How to think about documentation and how to structure it in a way that it addresses the right audience.
• Why Should You (Or Anyone) Become An Engineering Manager? – charity.wtf - 2023-12-20 - - The first piece I ever wrote about engineering management, The Engineer/Manager Pendulum, was written as a love letter to a friend of mine who was unhappy at work. He was an engineering director at…
• The await event horizon in JavaScript - 2023-12-20 - Why async functions in JavaScript are insufficient as a Structured Concurrency primitive
• What are the odds? – Probably Overthinking It - 2023-12-20 - - Whenever something unlikely happens, it is tempting to ask, “What are the odds?” In some very limited cases, we can answer that question. For example, if someone deals you five cards fr…
• Build your own RAG and run it locally: Langchain + Ollama + Streamlit - 2023-12-20 - - Let's simplify RAG and LLM application development. This post guides you on how to build your own RAG-enabled LLM application and run it locally with a super easy tech stack.
• I found myself envying a peer and making myself unhappy... - 2023-12-19 - Someone I know well has had a very accomplished life. We came from similar circumstances and got the same education. I worked hard, got lucky, and succeeded. He worked at least as hard, also had some luck, and achieved even more. What made the difference? He took bigger risks and they paid off. He started his own business, weathered the scary early days, and succeeded.
• Seattle public transportation usage remains far below pre-pandemic levels - Axios Seattle - 2023-12-19 - Ridership in the metro area in September was less than 60% of 2019 levels.
• How Google takes the pain out of code reviews, with 97% dev satisfaction - 2023-12-18 - A study of Google's code review tooling (Critique), AI-powered improvements, and recent statistics
• v3 is out! - 2023-12-18 -
• Sound Transit Approves $3 Flat Fare for Link - The Urbanist - 2023-12-18 - The change hiking fares on short-distance riders and lowering them for long-distance trips will go into effect when Lynnwood Link opens in the fall. Three-dollar light rail fares will be the rule of the land after the Sound Transit Board of Directors approved the change in an unanimous vote on Friday. For short trips, riders
• Fahhem's Blog – Dev onboarding, then and now - 2023-12-18 - Posts and writings by Fahrzin Hemmati
• I'm still fed up and a browser is coming along fine - 2023-12-18 -
• Leaving Microsoft - Austin Z. Henley - 2023-12-18 - - I left my dream job at Microsoft.
• Natural language is the lazy user interface - Austin Z. Henley - 2023-12-18 - - A chatbot is the lazy user interface. It puts all the burden on the user to articulate good questions.
• Eternal Robustness - 2023-12-16 - - "Look, you can trust us. We can be depended upon. We are serious about our products and we take great care to provide you with excellence year after year. Your involvement with us will be predictable and stable."
• GitHub - phoenixframework/flame - 2023-12-16 - Contribute to phoenixframework/flame development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Please, don’t stretch your text across the entire screen - 2023-12-16 -
• Code caching for JavaScript developers · V8 - 2023-12-16 - - (Byte)code caching reduces the start-up time of commonly visited websites by caching the result of JavaScript parsing + compilation.
• Why Aren't We SIEVE-ing? - Marc's Blog - 2023-12-16 -
• Risk Management is not Project Management | Rucker's Musings - 2023-12-16 - A common situation I find myself in looks like this: I am working with a client to plan a project at a strategic level. These are large, cumbersome, multi-ph...
• Kitemaker blog - More product, fewer PMs - 2023-12-16 - There has been a lot of discussion about how many Product Managers (PMs) are required in a product team. This conversation gained momentum after Airbnb restructured their product management organization, followed by articles about how startups are thriving without any PMs.
• SDOT: Weekday biking up 144% after Duwamish Trail connection, freight travel times increased less than 1 second – Seattle Bike Blog - 2023-12-16 - From the West Marginal Way SW Safety Project Evaluation Report (PDF). The Freight Advisory Board fought hard against SDOT’s plan to connect the Duwamish Trail to the Alki Trail and Spokane St…
• Breaking Up with SVG-in-JS in 2023 | Jacob Groß | kurtextrem.de - 2023-12-15 - - Technical deep-dive on why you shouldn't have SVGs in your JS bundle and better techniques for JSX usage.
• Web Performance Calendar » Fastest Way of Passing State to JavaScript, Re-visited - 2023-12-15 - Revisiting a study of the fastest way to parse large chunks of JSON such as those often used in SPA-type applications to set up state.
• Examples of Great URL Design - Jim Nielsen’s Blog - 2023-12-13 - - Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
• re:Invent 2023 recap - Chris Farris - 2023-12-13 - My breakdown of the key announcements security folks should know about from AWS re:Invent 2023.
• "Other" on the org chart - by Ethan Evans and Jason Yoong - 2023-12-13 - I once had a peer whose group on the org chart was called "other." His group was composed of all the things that did not fit cleanly into the product teams. I have run "other" a few times. Of course, we never publicly called the groups "other" as that would be demotivating, but you can recognize if you are in an "other" group when the group name is a long phrase.
• How and why I paid for Kagi? – RadOncNotes - 2023-12-13 - - Kagi is one of the most innovative search engines. I came to know about it through Hacker News forums when the service was announced. I have had my account since December 2021 (after I spoke to the…
• How I make OKRs more playful for my team with Hill-Charts - 2023-12-13 - - OKRs for Managers and C-Level? Great! But have you ever asked your teams? In this post I am sharing how I make OKRs less dry and more enjoyable for the teams I manage.
• The TypeScript 5.3 Feature They Didn't Tell You About | Total TypeScript - 2023-12-12 - TypeScript 5.3 introduces relaxed rules around readonly arrays and improvements in const type parameters.
• Amazon solidifies push into custom chips that replace Intel and AMD processors, unveils Graviton4 and Trainium2 cloud servers | Tom's Hardware - 2023-12-11 - Amazon's new Graviton4 and Trainium2 mark a new era in custom silicon development.
• Three Things That LLMs Have Made Us Rethink – Rodney Brooks - 2023-12-10
• LLMs in the middle: Content aware client-side filtering - 2023-12-10 - - LLMs in the middle: Content aware client-side filtering using browser extensions and local large language models to filter content across multiple websites.
• 10 Hard Truths About Tech Leadership - 2023-12-10 - Collaboration with Amir Shevat
• Caring for Your Team in Crisis - 2023-12-09 - When a leader makes a mistake, you take your whole team. In this post, I wrote about surviving a crisis where I personally disappointed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. I described my actions in managing the crisis with the executives above me. Now I want to write about caring for the team.
• Former Amazon HR Worker: Performance-Improvement Process Gave Me PTSD - 2023-12-09 - A former Amazon HR worker says they were frustrated with the company's performance-improvement process. When they were placed on a PIP, they quit.
• Communicate nuance clearly (a worked example) — Earfinders - 2023-12-09 - Sometimes you need to convey a complex point in few words. Here’s how I reworked an over-simplistic message to clearly carry nuance.
• in tech, be a generalist - 2023-12-09 -
• Writing that’s too short wastes everyone’s time — Earfinders - 2023-12-09 - - The droning advice to keep writing simple sometimes hides reality. Over-simplifying messages makes work more complicated. It helps to read more.
• The UX of UUIDs | Unkey - 2023-12-09 - - Unique identifiers play a crucial role in all applications, from user authentication to resource management. While using a standard UUID will satisfy all your security concerns, there’s a lot we can improve for our users.
• The Plug-in System Hiding in Your App - 2023-12-09 - - Leveraging your application architecture to bootstrap an Extism plug-in system
• Quality software deserves your hard‑earned cash — Steph Ango - 2023-12-09 - Quality software is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the ...
• Can you speak to your greatest weakness? - 2023-12-09 - Free event: Tough economy? Layoffs? Get practical advice on motivating your team and thriving in bad times. On December 8 (Fri), I will moderate a panel with 3 experts on “Leading in Tough Times.” We will discuss how to lead in difficult times, how to motivate and retain your team, how to optimize limited resources, and how to keep forward momentum via a compelling vision.
• Amazon planned to take away RTO’d employees’ free coffee. Then 10,000 spoke up | The Seattle Times - 2023-12-06 - Amazon planned to end a program that gave employees free coffee at the office. But, after workers spoke out against the change, it will keep the free espresso flowing.
• Success Over Being Right | Pluto - 2023-12-06 - - “__I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success. I don’t mind being wrong, and I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter ...
• The Cost of Index Everything - 2023-12-06 - - Many AI products today are focused on indexing as much as possible. Every meeting, every document, every moment of your day. Every modality — images, audio, and text. Devices that are meant to capture your every moment. Then, they run every data point through a complex pipeline of vector searches, heuristics, draft models, large models, and more to make sense of it. Models trained to take in ever-increasing context-lengths that fit in as many documents and pieces of information as possible. Bu
• "What Would Finishing This Today Look Like?" | Jake Worth - 2023-12-06 - - When I’m feeling sluggish at work, I have a great hack: asking “What would finishing this today look like?” It’s a version of one of Tim Ferriss’ favorite…
• An Announcement, a 2.5 Year Newsletter Update, and My Highest Ever ROI Action at Amazon - 2023-12-05 - My move to Substack, a bit about how the newsletter has grown, and a great story about how I helped drive down errors across dozens of systems, without my team lifting a finger.
• Re:Invent 2023 underscores a new simplicity mandate for AWS - SiliconANGLE - 2023-12-05 - Re:Invent 2023 underscores a new simplicity mandate for AWS - SiliconANGLE
• re:Invent 2023 - DEV Community - 2023-12-05 - Regarding re:Invent 2023, it was my second year in the raw and was terrific. I am part of a...
• Do The Hard Part First – Sherman On Software - 2023-12-05 -
• On leverage - 2023-12-05 - - Joose Toiviainen
• Why we use AWS instead of Vercel to host our Next.js app - 2023-12-05 - At Graphite, we moved from a simple SPA deployment to a robust containerized environment using AWS ECS, enhancing our ability to manage, deploy, and scale our Next.js application.
• LIGHT RAIL: Sound Transit talks about stations with West Seattle Transportation Commission, asks for your feedback | West Seattle Blog... - 2023-12-05
• AWS finally gets serious about genAI | InfoWorld - 2023-12-04 - At AWS re:Invent, the company announced significant AI advancements that may make AWS a leader in generative AI.
• The Bond villain compliance strategy - 2023-12-03 - Jurisdictional gamesmanship is a common strategy for crypto businesses. Here is how it worked out for Binance and its CEO. Spoiler: poorly.
• Code is run more than read - 2023-12-03 - Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
• Amazon Strikes Landmark Deal for Kuiper in Japan - Via Satellite - 2023-12-02 - Some of the biggest names in Japanese communications will team up with Amazon to use its Project Kuiper Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity
• Spokane’s Permanent Middle Housing Rules Should Set a Statewide Standard - The Urbanist - 2023-12-02 - Last week, Spokane finalized its year-long effort to legalize more housing choices across the city. Their new code sets a statewide standard, and it should be emulated in cities large and small -- from Seattle and Bothell to Yakima and Vancouver. Recall that under the zoning package passed last year, Spokane gave itself a year
• SQLSync - Stop building databases - 2023-12-01 - - Join me as we take a look at common application data patterns, and how they relate to the inner-workings of databases. In this post, we discuss data caching, indexing, optimistic mutations, and recursive cache invalidation. We will see how life might be easier if we could just use a frontend optimized database like SQLSync instead.
• Coeffects and useSyncExternalStore | Patrick's Blog - 2023-12-01 -
• You Must Fuck Around and Find Out - 2023-12-01 - - You should take much more risk, and try new things much more often. Much of your comfort with risk is hard-coded genetically, a variable carefully tuned by millions of years of evolution, balancing the upside and downside of risk. But this is one of these cases where the modern world
• You don't want to work with embeddings - Blog by Grzegorz Kossakowski - 2023-12-01 - - Embeddings are the assembly of the AI world. We should spare people touching them, and climb the abstraction ladder as fast as possible. As we did in software.
• Say it again: values not expressions | Ned Batchelder - 2023-12-01 - Sometimes you can explain a simple thing for the thousandth time, and come away with a deeper understanding yourself. It happened to me the other day with Python mutable argument default values.
• Web developers: remarkably untalented and careless? – Baldur Bjarnason - 2023-12-01 - - This passage here from John Gruber’s review of some new macs struck me in particular: Web browser rendering is surprisingly resource-intensive — partially because modern HTML, CSS, and Javascript are remarkably complex, and partially because most web developers are remarkably untalented and careless programmers
• Mastering Skills: The 1% Formula - 2023-12-01 - - This article gives you a formula you can follow to become an expert in something. It's a new mental model for building expertise in a way that's practical, approachable and fun.
• Seattle Is Building a Citywide Bike Network That Cannot Handle Its Own Popularity - The Urbanist - 2023-12-01 - Seattle's climate plan calls for doubling bicycling, but SDOT is not building its bike facilities to handle the load. To bike to Climate Pledge Arena, home of two of Seattle's professional sports teams as well as dozens of concerts per year, from Downtown Seattle, people using the city's flagship protected bike lane on 2nd Avenue
• Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on culturally aware LLMs, developer productivity and FemTech | TechCrunch - 2023-12-01 - By tradition, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels caps off the AWS re:Invent conference with his last-day keynote. A more recent tradition is that he also uses that
• Inside the AI chip race: Amazon's strategy vs. Microsoft and Google - 2023-12-01 - The foundation of Amazon's AI strategy is its custom chips, part of a silicon lineage that goes back to a fateful happy hour a decade ago.

November 2023

• Hide console logging for passing tests and show it for failures with node:test - 2023-11-30
• Yusuf Aytas - Leading from Where You Are - 2023-11-30 - - Yusuf Aytas - Leadership - Leading from Where You Are
• Yusuf Aytas - Becoming a Rockstar Engineer - 2023-11-30 - Yusuf Aytas - Software - Becoming a Rockstar Engineer
• GrilloPress - Get more out of design reviews - 2023-11-29 -
• Why the local development experience matters (a lot) - blog.moritzhaarmann.de - 2023-11-29 - - Unless you're completely invested in a cloud-based development environment, chances are you'll actually clone a repository and run its code locally. For me, how well that works is a crucial indicator of overall project health. But let's start at the beginning.
• Chopping the monolith in a smarter way - 2023-11-29 - - In my previous post Chopping the Monolith, I explained that some parts of a monolith are pretty stable and only the fast-changing parts are worth being 'chopped.' I turned the post into a talk and presented it at several conferences. I think it’s pretty well received; I believe it’s because most developers understand, or have direct experience, that microservices are not a good fit for traditional organizations, as per Conway’s Law. In the talk, I use an e-commerce webapp as a
• Should this be an A/B Test? | Alexey needs a web presence - 2023-11-29 - - Before you A/B test, explore / its aptness with these questions four
• Trying simple tree-search techniques for LLM token sampling - ⌨️🤷🏻‍♂️📷 - 2023-11-29 -
• On the cusp of senior management - will she make it? - 2023-11-28 - Career growth is a tricky thing. We have ups and downs, two steps forward and one step back. How will she fare?
• cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends: Friends don't let friends make certain types of data visualization - What are they and why are they bad. - 2023-11-26
• OpenAI’s Misalignment and Microsoft’s Gain – Stratechery by Ben Thompson - 2023-11-26 - The end of a dramatic weekend in tech is that OpenAI has split and Microsoft is partnered with one and has hired the other; this is the ultimate failure case of what should have been a for-profit c…
• git branches: intuition & reality - 2023-11-26 - git branches: intuition & reality
• Hixie's Natural Log: Reflecting on 18 years at Google - 2023-11-26
• Europe is coming to Seattle in what founders are hoping will be a new Christmas tradition – KIRO 7 News Seattle - 2023-11-25 - Founder, Malte Klutz has been working on transporting Seattleites to Germany with the immersive Christmas village for the last thirty years,
• Consider Evaluating LLMs as Search Engines – Win Vector LLC - 2023-11-25 - - A lot is going on with current large language models (LLMs). Some of it is quite impactful, and some of it is the usual venture capital game (“we don’t stretch the truth, but we benefit…
• Score by Surprise - 2023-11-25
• Mods Are Asleep. Quick, Everyone Release AI Products | WIRED - 2023-11-24 - In the five days between Sam Altman’s mysterious firing and rehiring as OpenAI’s CEO, multiple companies dropped new artificial intelligence tools.
• Op-Ed: Seattle Poised to Repeat Chicago’s School Closure Mistake - The Urbanist - 2023-11-24 - Last week Seattle Public Schools (SPS) unveiled plans to embrace sweeping austerity, making major cuts to school programs and closing an unspecified number of schools in the 2025-26 school year. In response to a new wave of community organizing against austerity plans, the district abandoned plans to close schools in the 2024-25 school year. Unfortunately,
• Property Based Testing With Typescript - DEV Community - 2023-11-24 - In my current project my colleague Michael Seifert introduced property based testing in our Python...
• Product \ Anthropic - 2023-11-24 - - Our latest model, Claude 2.1, is now available over API in our Console and is powering our claude.ai chat experience.
• Worldwide availability of EC2 instance types | cloudonaut - 2023-11-23 - The promise sounds tempting; with AWS, you can roll out your infrastructure in 28 regions worldwide. Indeed, it is an eye-ope...
• Moving back to React - 2023-11-23 - Discover the story behind daily.dev's transition from Preact to React for frontend development. This post explores the challenges, solutions, and benefits of migrating to React, enhancing our web app's performance and development experience.
• Join us for a week of AWS Amplify launches | Front-End Web & Mobile - 2023-11-23 - This week, as AWS Amplify celebrates its 6th birthday (and Amplify Hosting’s 5th), we’re releasing five new launches based directly on feedback from you, our community. Over the past six years, you’ve helped us grow so much by providing incredibly valuable suggestions via our Discord community, GitHub, and social media. We’ll be releasing features that […]
• A Detailed Account of a Failed Principal Promotion - 2023-11-20 - Not everything we do will be successful. We learn a ton from failure. Unfortunately for managers, our failures sometimes impact our teams as well.
• Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat? - 2023-11-20 - The biggest announcement from last week’s OpenAI DevDay (and there were a LOT of announcements) was GPTs. Users of ChatGPT Plus can now create their own, custom GPT chat bots …
• The dangers of reproducing while old - 2023-11-20 -
• Don't hijack our browser shortcuts | Jose M. - 2023-11-20 - - I’m angry today. As web apps become increasingly complex, developers need more shortcuts to map various actions. Now we have countless shortcuts for any site. Take GitHub’s shortcuts as an example; they have a few. But there’s a limit, and I’m here to draw that line. Your website shouldn’t hijack the default browser shortcuts. Don’t assume your feature is more important than years of muscle memory. I want to get things done, but I feel lost when I use a shortcut, and your website does something else instead or tries to replace the default behavior of the browser.
• Literally the Void - Keeping a Practice Log - 2023-11-20 -
• A faster web in 2024 - rviscomi.dev - 2023-11-20 - The web is getting faster. In fact, according to HTTP Archive, more websites than ever before are passing the Core Web Vitals assessment, which looks at three metrics that represent different aspects of page performance: loading speed, interaction responsiveness, and layout stability. Earlier this week, the Chrome team published a retrospective on the Web Vitals […]
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired: Read the full memo to employees - 2023-11-20 - Lightcap wrote in the memo everyone was taken by surprise and that he's had many conversations with the board to try to understand their decision.
• Good Software - 2023-11-20 - - I am so sick and tired of bad software.
• Fumbling with AWS - by Mike Rapin - Attempting to Code - 2023-11-20 - This is not a new take on an old problem, just my specific take on it
• Hugging Face and AWS partner to make AI more accessible - 2023-11-20 - - We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
• Amazon Bedrock: How good (bad) is Titan Embeddings? - 2023-11-20 - In this blog post I took a closer look at Amazon Bedrock Titan embeddings model and how good (bad) the perform.
• Amelia Wattenberger - 2023-11-20 - - Amelia Wattenberger's personal website
• All of the writing I did in a week as a software engineer · Caffeinspiration - 2023-11-19 -
• Coding is actually hard - 2023-11-19 - - Welcome to my little corner of the Internet - Kapil Dutta
• Every software is messy and has skeletons - 2023-11-19 - - You need to accept one truth - every shop is messy and every app has its skeletons. Period. Welcome to the backstage of the software world, where the
• Amazon cuts hundreds of jobs in its Alexa unit as it doubles down on layoffs that already total more than 27,000 over the past year | Fortune - 2023-11-19 - Seattle-based Amazon is in fierce competition with other tech companies rushing to capitalize on the generative AI craze.
• Post by Aaron Greenspan - 2023-11-19
• OpenAI President Greg Brockman quits as shocked employees hold all-hands meeting – Ars Technica - 2023-11-19
• Seattle has 9th-highest cost of living in U.S., study finds - Axios Seattle - 2023-11-17 - Groceries in Seattle are more expensive than in Manhattan, according to a new cost-of-living index.
• How the Pacific Northwest became the nation’s cyclocross capital | The Seattle Times - 2023-11-17 - November is shoulder season in Washington's outdoor sports scene. Don't tell that to cyclocross racers, hundreds of whom will pedal in Sunday's Woodland Park GP.
• Your Never-Ending To-Do List - Chris Bailey - 2023-11-17 - - Your to-do list will never end. That’s a good (and normal) thing!
• Migrating to OpenTelemetry | Airplane - 2023-11-17 - - At Airplane, we collect observability data from our own systems as well as remote “agents” that are running in our customers’ infrastructure. The associated outputs, which include the standard “three pillars of observability” (logs, metrics, and traces) are essential for us to monitor our infrastructure and also help customers debug problems in theirs. Over the last year, we’ve made a concerted effort to migrate most of our observability data generation and collection to the OpenTelemetry (OTe
• Yusuf Aytas - Coding in Leadership - 2023-11-17 - - Yusuf Aytas - Leadership - Coding in Leadership
• The Limit Does Not Exist: Hidden Visibility of AWS Service Limits | by Jason Kao | Nov, 2023 | Medium - 2023-11-14 - 2,991. That’s the number of unsupported service limits in AWS such as the Service Limit above for S3 Buckets in an AWS Account. These…
• What to do when someone tells you to "take initiative" - 2023-11-13 - - I have always hated the phrase “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions!”. It feels lazy. It incentivizes people to sweep things under the rug if they can’t figure out what to do. It doesn’t give any useful direction to the person bringing you problems, because if they had solutions, they probably would have brought them already! At its best, it’s unhelpful, at its worst, it’s actively harmful. I have similar, but less strong issues with the idea of telling someone to “take more initiative”.
• Thank you reviewer 3 | Philip Heltweg - 2023-11-13 - - Be friendly. Be like reviewer 3.
• DSHR's Blog: Robotaxi Economics - 2023-11-13 - Source The New York Times team of Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz and Yiwen Lu have been covering San Francisco's experiment with robotaxis from W...
• GrilloPress - Design for real data - 2023-11-10
• GrilloPress - Do the design digging - 2023-11-10 -
• The T-shaped Developer | Petar Ivanov's Website - 2023-11-10 - - The way how software companies work has changed. A new need has emerged — the need for T-shaped Developers.
• The LEGO Arbitrage - 2023-11-10 - - Generate miniscule amounts of LEGO Insiders points at zero cost, except lots of time and effort.
• Amazon Stock Upgrade: AWS Is A Force To Be Reckoned With (NASDAQ:AMZN) | Seeking Alpha - 2023-11-09 - Amazon's AWS is well-positioned to capitalize on the AI revolution and is ahead of Microsoft Azure in a key area. Find out why AMZN stock is a Buy.
• How to Navigate the Door Zone as a City Cyclist | Momentum Mag - 2023-11-09 - Streets present challenges for cyclists and there are few things that weigh more heavily on a commuter's mind than navigating a door zone.
• Don't Let Your Soft Skills Block Your Career - Overcoming Mental Blocks - 2023-11-08 - Everyone recognizes that hard skills can be a blocker for their career, and that means everyone focuses on strengthening their hard skills. Soft skills are similar. They can hold you back, and they can be improved. And I'm going to talk about how.
• Reasoning behind automated tests - 2023-11-08 - - Online, people often share their opinions as if they were absolute truths. Here's mine.
• The domino effect of good habits | Jose M. - 2023-11-08 - - Opening your eyes, you glance at the clock on the night table—time to get up. The house is completely silent as you make your way to the kitchen. Each sound feels amplified at this early time in the morning. Entering the kitchen, you remember the fantastic croissant your partner bought you yesterday. It looks delicious and crispy on the outside. It must taste so good. You can’t help but wonder if you should have it.
• Strategy Doesn't Matter If You Blunder Every Move — Ludicity - 2023-11-08 -
• Securing generative AI: An introduction to the Generative AI Security Scoping Matrix | AWS Security Blog - 2023-11-07 - Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) has captured the imagination of organizations and is transforming the customer experience in industries of every size across the globe. This leap in AI capability, fueled by multi-billion-parameter large language models (LLMs) and transformer neural networks, has opened the door to new productivity improvements, creative capabilities, and more. As organizations […]
• The Evolution of a Software Engineer | by Sean Hickey | Medium - 2023-11-07 - - On Coming Full Circle
• My simplicity toolkit · Jens Rantil - 2023-11-07 - “Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away” Antoine de Saint-Exupery When it comes to software engineers, I’m a sucker for simplicity and going back to basics. I have been coding for ~25+ years (~15 years professionally) and have truly gone through The Evolution of a Software Engineer. Throughout my career I have grown increasingly worried about the growing cargo culted complexity in our industry.
• Smart home automation shouldn't be stupid | Jeff Geerling - 2023-11-07 -
• Autoscaling is not a panacea · Jens Rantil - 2023-11-07 - - There is a belief that autoscaling will solve problems it will not.
• Cutting User Drop-Off by 50%: A Lesson in User Acquisition - 2023-11-07 - Discover how a startup's pivot to anonymous authentication sparked user engagement and growth. Join Josh Fonseca as he shares actionable insights from his journey in user acquisition.
• Was Rust Worth It?. From JavaScript to Rust, three years… | by Jarrod Overson | Oct, 2023 | Medium - 2023-11-07 - - From JavaScript to Rust, three years in.
• Announcing WinterJS - 2023-11-07 - The most performant JavaScript Service Workers server thanks to Rust and SpiderMonkey
• Cloudflare, Google and AWS Disclose HTTP/2 Zero-Day Vulnerability - 2023-11-06 - On October 10th, Cloudflare, Google, and AWS disclosed a novel zero-day vulnerability attack known as the "HTTP/2 Rapid Reset." This attack exploits a weakness in the HTTP/2 protocol to generate enormous Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, up to almost 400 million requests per second (rps).
• Habits of great software engineers - 2023-11-05 - - The role of a software developer often gets distilled down to a singular activity: coding. While coding is undeniably the heartbeat of the profession,
• Analysing Go code with Souffle - 2023-11-05 - - A painfully basic static code analysis example
• Why I Ran Away from Philosophy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried - 2023-11-05 - Or how flawed thinking can make $10 billion disappear
• Striking the balance: Cloudflare's innovation and the quest for reliability - 2023-11-05 - - Cloudflare excels in innovation with a vast network and pioneering features. Yet, recent outages highlight the need for a stronger focus on stability alongside expansion.
• Unbundling Cash & Equity - 2023-11-04 - my working theories
• I am not your Cloud person - 2023-11-04 - - There are only so many hours in a day to do it all
• Getting hugged to death - Johnathan Nader - 2023-11-04 - - Getting hugged to death by Johnathan Nader
• Op-Ed: Sound Transit Should Run Link All Night or Provide Shadow Night Bus Service - The Urbanist - 2023-11-02 - Standing on the platform of SeaTac Airport Station after midnight, straining to see whether the next light rail train is coming, I can’t help but wonder whether I would have been better off taking a $60 taxi home. The $3 train would be coming, my transit app assured me, but it wouldn’t be taking me
• Don't Build a Mine Before You Struck Gold - 2023-11-02 - - The best analogy I’ve heard for startups is that they’re like looking for gold. Not because of the adventure, or the camaraderie, or the riches awaiting you on the other end. But because a gold-seeking expedition has two very different phases: first, you look for gold; then, you
• Labelled exceptions for smoother error handling - Peter's DevLog - 2023-11-02
• GitHub is really good, but there's a small problem with that - Blog - 2023-11-02 -
• The Five-Year Cliff - 2023-11-02 - - Nobody tells you that you hit a career cliff every five years - here’s how to overcome it.
• Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region - 2023-11-01

October 2023

• A short note on AWS KEY ID. As I was playing with AWS… | by Tal Be'ery | Oct, 2023 | Medium - 2023-10-30 - As I was playing with AWS authentication and authorization system, I had realized that most of its inner working and data structures are…
• Buy Yourself a Good Pen and a Scanner - 2023-10-30 - - You can derive a lot of pleasure from physical things.
• How to enjoy life like a billionaire - Monevator - 2023-10-30 - - Being a billionaire comes with perks, but there are plenty of things that get no better with half-a-dozen extra zeroes.
• The View Transitions API, the Navigation API and the SPA vs MPA debate - 2023-10-26 - - Memory leaks, accessibility, core web vitals, paint holding, native browser loading spinners, Server Side Rendering, and more.
• How to Not Build a React App (Part VII) | Patrick's Blog - 2023-10-26 -
• GitHub - nolanlawson/fuite: A tool for finding memory leaks in web apps - 2023-10-26 - A tool for finding memory leaks in web apps. Contribute to nolanlawson/fuite development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Why Bus Factor should be a key metric for any software team? - 2023-10-26 - - If you are the only developer who knows how the project works, then you might have good job security. But that's it. You are just writing code to solve problems and ticking off your assigned to-dos.
• Practice and Experience — bayindirh - 2023-10-26 -
• Vector search for dummies - 2023-10-26 - - Recently I built a system that uses vector search to logically truncate long documents and retain the most significant parts according to some search term. I'm a dummy, with no background in machine learning or mathematics, so there were new concepts for me to understand and implementation details to figure out. This post summarises what I learned.
• How to Be Surprisingly Likeable - 2023-10-24 - - Aka, how to not accidentally become a jerk.
• The Beauty of Smol Things - 2023-10-23 -
• Preloading modules - Chrome for Developers - 2023-10-23 - Module preload offers a way of declaratively loading JavaScript modules ahead of time.
• Relative Cost / Benefit of an Investment - Byte Tank - 2023-10-23 - - Simple heuristic to breakdown the lifetime cost / benefit on an investment
• The boy who cried risk – Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io - 2023-10-23 - - Accurately gauging and mitigating risk is tough work.
• Keep Your Dependencies Updated - 2023-10-23 - - Updating your dependencies removes technical debt and uncertainty and is something that you should practice.
• People Can't Care About Everything - 2023-10-23 - - I originally posted an even more snarky response to this, but later deleted it when I realized they were just a teenager. Kids do not have decades of experience with buggy drivers, infuriating edge-cases, and broken promises necessary to understand and contribute to the underlying debate here (nor do they have the social context to know that Xe and I were just joking with each other). Of course, they also don't know that it's generally considered poor taste to interject like this, as it tends to annoy everyone and almost always fails to take into consideration the greater context in which someone might be using Windows, or Mac, or TikTok, or Twitter, or whatever corporate hellscape they are trapped in.
• Seattle-area commutes have gotten shorter - Axios Seattle - 2023-10-22 - A larger share of us are getting to work in less than 30 minutes.
• Metro Seeing Early Signs of Labor Rebound and Ridership Momentum - The Urbanist - 2023-10-19 - Buoyed by a bump in compensation in new contract, Metro is ramping up bus driver recruitment and hopes to grow service by fall 2024. King County Metro is close to hitting its 99.7% service delivery target and has seen an uptick in recruiting mechanics and bus operators, according to Metro General Manager Michele Allison's recent
• Brief lessons from using LLM APIs in production | Akash Tandon - 2023-10-15 - - Lessons that can help you when using large language models (LLMs) in a software production environment
• Good Docs Take Great Effort | er4hn - 2023-10-15 - Then Life Continued
• Tacit Knowledge is Dangerous | er4hn - 2023-10-15 - - Then Life Continued
• Metrics and Mistakes ⸺ Dave on Design - 2023-10-15 - - Measuring things—and some poetry. Let me tell you two stories about metrics. Stick with me: the results are more interesting than they sound. We’ll cover choosing what you measure, and what happens when you start acting on the results from your choice of metrics.
• AWS Advances Relational Technologies with Open Source and Vector Database Support - The New Stack - 2023-10-15 - Support includes contributions to MariaDB Server and pgvector, which enables PostgreSQL to store embeddings for vector search and Gen AI.
• speedscope - 2023-10-15 -
• Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - draft-js emoji plugin - 2023-10-15 - - A regex was constructed from scratch 7138 times from a 42kB heavy string. Caching that computation greatly speeds up the initialization phase of the draft-js emoji plugin.
• Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - Polyfills gone rogue - 2023-10-15 - - Many popular npm packages depend on 6-8x more packages than they need to. Most of these are unnecessary polyfills and it's one of the key reasons node_modules folders are so large. The eslint ecosystem seems to be most affected by this.
• Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - The barrel file debacle - 2023-10-15 - Many projects are littered with files that just re-export other files. These so called "barrel files" are one of the key reasons why JavaScript tooling is slow in bigger projects.
• Maghammer: My personal data warehouse @ osmarks' website - 2023-10-15 - - Powerful search tools as externalized cognition, and how mine work.
• Developer productivity hacks #2 - How to keep your React project clean | Adam Nemeth - Software Engineer - 2023-10-15 - - Ideas to help Software Engineers of any level grow and learn new things.
• Sharing early work is not a distraction - 2023-10-14 - - A quick reflection on the role of sharing work-in-progress.
• Sound Transit Prepares to Hire Three Megaproject Czars and Implement Other Expert Advice - The Urbanist - 2023-10-14 - Sound Transit is moving ahead with a search for new executive talent and in coming months will hire three people with megaproject experience in transportation projects to guide the Sound Transit 2 and 3 capital programs. The agency is also advancing a slate of other operational improvements prescribed by the Technical Advisory Group (TAG), a
• Seattle Lays Out 2030 Mode Shift Goals in Climate Framework - The Urbanist - 2023-10-14 - Questions remain about how the City will get there and how committed it is to overcoming obstacles. Transit would jump from 11% of trips to 24% of trips by 2030 if Seattle is able to meet the goal set in its recently released "Climate Change Response Framework." Walking, rolling, and biking, meanwhile, would collectively jump
• When a 33% Success Rate Outperforms 99.999% – Sherman On Software - 2023-10-14 -
• Sharing State with Islands Architecture | Frontend at Scale - 2023-10-14 - Strategies for communicating between interactive components using Islands Architecture, with examples using Astro and React.
• On Organizing Bookmarks - 2023-10-14
• CSS relative color syntax - Chrome for Developers - 2023-10-13 - Create new colors based on another color's channels and values.
• Amazon's Bold Move: Demolishing Towers For AI Dominance - 2023-10-13 - The online retailer will ultimately use the space to build new, state-of-the-art data centers.
• The Consistently Inconsistence response to Access Key Leaks - Chris Farris - 2023-10-12 - I leaked eight access keys to a public GitHub Repo. Here is how AWS Responded
• West Seattle swing bridge reopens four days early | The Seattle Times - 2023-10-12 - Seattle Department of Transportation crews installed a reconditioned hydraulic cylinder that turns one of the swing bridge's pivoting road spans.
• Sound Transit Still Seeking Mitigation for Overcrowding Coming with Link Expansions - The Urbanist - 2023-10-11 - Near-term Link expansions will further strain limited resources for service capacity, forcing more crowding and lower frequencies that could last years. Can that be mitigated? Rider demand outstripping service levels could well be a fact of life on Link once Lynnwood Link opens and for a long time after, as Sound Transit faces a period
• Amazon Just Found a Smart Way to Add Billions of Dollars in High-Margin Revenue -- but Prime Members Won't Like It One Bit | Nasdaq - 2023-10-10 - The past few years have been challenging for Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). A decline in consumer spending caused by near-record-high inflation and exacerbated by tough pandemic-era comparisons caused e-commerce growth to slow to a crawl.
• Why are Cloud Development Environments Spiking in Popularity, Now? - The Pragmatic Engineer - 2023-10-10 - Tech companies are building their cloud development environments (CDEs) and dozens of vendors are launching their offerings. But why now?
• The Lambda monitoring blind spot | cloudonaut - 2023-10-09 - After a customer complained that a feature of marbot, our monitoring solution for AWS was not working as expected, I started ...
• HPACK: the silent killer (feature) of HTTP/2 - 2023-10-08 - If you have experienced HTTP/2 for yourself, you are probably aware of the visible performance gains possible with HTTP/2 due to features like stream multiplexing, explicit stream dependencies, and Server Push.
• A Simple, Yet Effective Cost Optimization Framework - The Duckbill Group - 2023-10-06 - When Corey and I started The Duckbill Group in 2019, I sat down with Corey and asked him to braindump everything he looks at when assessing a client's AWS
• TypeScript 5.3 adds support for import attributes | InfoWorld - 2023-10-06 - ECMAScript import attributes will support additional types of modules in a common way across JavaScript environments, starting with JSON modules.
• What helps people get comfortable on the command line? - 2023-10-01 - What helps people get comfortable on the command line?
• How architecture diagrams enable better conversations - Unravelled Development - 2023-10-01 - Earlier this year myself and a couple others at DrDoctor did some training in C4 Architecture modelling1. The trainer was really good and over a few sessions with him we got the hang of the method. We went onto use what we had learnt, meeting everything Thursday over the course of 3 months. We focused mainly on modelling our existing architecture into Level 1 (Context) and Level 2 (Container) diagrams. This process was enlightening and we all learnt a lot from it - that alone could easily be a couple of posts.
• How to avoid KPI psychosis in your organization? | by Ágoston Török | Aug, 2023 | Promaton - 2023-10-01 - - A practical guide to a good measurement culture where numbers don’t replace common sense
• How to sabotage your salary negotiation efforts before you even start - 2023-10-01 - We've helped hundreds of people negotiate an average of $50k more. These are the two mistakes we can't undo.
• No one actually wants simplicity - lukeplant.me.uk - 2023-10-01 - We think we do, but in fact every web developer will happily sacrifice simplicity to the first shiny thing promising them relief from the mildest of ailments.
• Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding - 2023-10-01 - Code Llama, which is built on top of Llama 2, is free for research and commercial use.
• DevOps is terrible 2023 - 2023-10-01 - - DevOps is terrible
• JavaScript is getting array grouping methods - 2023-10-01 - Grouping items in an array is one of those things you've probably done a load of times. Each time you would have written a grouping function by hand or...
• Change - Tim Hårek - 2023-10-01 - - Technologist from Norway that cares about creating solutions that respects people in terms of privacy, security and user experience.
• Importance of Goal Clarity for Delegation - Byte Tank - 2023-10-01 - - Clarity as one of the keys to unlock the delegation formula
• Agile & Coding: Software and Projects - 2023-10-01 - How can we simplify things, to add value as early as possible?

September 2023

• Metro Branding Reveal Draws Ire from Advocates Seeking More Bus Service - The Urbanist - 2023-09-29 - The County's cringeworthy move suggests more attention is needed on boosting service and electric trolleys. King County Metro will roll out new light yellow paint jobs to differentiate its new battery-electric buses from the rest of its fleet of older hybrid diesel buses and electric trolleys. The yellow branding wraps will begin appearing on new
• Finding the Legacy of the Move Seattle Transportation Levy - The Urbanist - 2023-09-29 - What comes next when a "transformational" levy didn't transform Seattle streets? On a Monday morning in late August, Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) Director Greg Spotts started his workweek with a walking tour in West Seattle. That's a usual day for Spotts, who has made a point of regularly meeting with staff in the field
• Challenging Established Norms: Making Component Fetching the Exception :: jjenzz - 2023-09-29 - Initially, integrating data concerns within our components appeared intuitive to me and simplified the developer experience. However, I eventually found reasons to treat it as a last resort.
• The cost of college has barely changed in the past 30 years – Kevin Drum - 2023-09-28 - - I have had my mind blown. Over at National Affairs, Dan Currell says that college tuition hasn't actually gone up over the past few decades: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, colleges discovered that the appearance of high tuition was good for marketing. Positioning one's school as
• Temporal API is Awesome · Taro - 2023-09-28
• You are the Problem - Rasul Kireev - 2023-09-27 - - We always blame the other person for being hard to deal with, but it is likely that you are the problem.
• RAG is more than just embedding search - Instructor (openai_function_call) - 2023-09-26 - - Enhancing OpenAI function calling with Pydantic
• An El Niño winter is coming: What could that mean for the US? | CNN - 2023-09-25 - Fall has only just begun, but it’s not too soon to look ahead to winter, especially since this one may look drastically different than recent years because of El Niño.
• Marc Gallant - 2023-09-24 - - Like, you know, whatever
• Luciano Remes | Don't be Outcome Oriented - 2023-09-24 - - Life is a multiplayer imperfect game, there are other players in this game, each focused on optimizing their own set of objectives. A…
• LLMs are mid (but that’s ok) – Ian Vanagas - 2023-09-24 - - LLMs, in their current form, are mid. They are better then bad, but not as great as perceived. If you use LLMs in your area of expertise, you likely ran into examples of their “midness.” You must e…
• Little metal boxes - 2023-09-24 -
• New issue may impact opening of Sound Transit's Eastside light rail line - MyNorthwest.com - 2023-09-23 - Crews discovered loose and broken tiles on the South Bellevue station passenger platform, according to a spokesperson.
• Distributed is still the future – Dave Martin - 2023-09-23 - - Many tech CEOs are calling quits on remote work, requiring employees back in the office. While understandable given the challenges of distributed teams, this reactive move risks abandoning the futu…
• Amazon: The Crown Jewel Isn't AWS (NASDAQ:AMZN) | Seeking Alpha - 2023-09-22 - Amazon's management believes weakness in AWS has reached a bottom. Check out why I reiterate my strong buy rating on AMZN stock.
• pragdave - Abilities: a New Way to Inject Behavior and State - 2023-09-22 - Unison’s Abilities may represent the future of designing programs, letting you inject behavior and state into your pure functional code.
• pragdave - PragProg 2.0 - 2023-09-22 - - I’m back at the Pragmatic Bookshelf, and I need some help to freshen things up.
• Using the WordStar diamond in 2023 - 2023-09-21 - Describes the WordStar diamond, a wonderful set of key bindings from the 1970s, and how you can use it in 2023 on Linux or Windows.
• Lambda layer: not a package manager, but a deployment optimization | theburningmonk.com - 2023-09-21 - Learn to build production-ready serverless applications on AWS
• Proactive vs. Reactive: Understanding the Mechanisms Behind Effective Leadership - 2023-09-20 - Reacting to situations means that the situation leads you. Act like a leader and use mechanisms to drive change.
• Amazon EC2 now supports Block Public Access for Amazon Machine Images - 2023-09-19
• Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell | All Things Distributed - 2023-09-19 - - It is time to celebrate EC2-Classic, which defined early cloud computing, and which is finally retiring.
• But It's Not Fair! How to Deal With Irritating Situations. - 2023-09-19 - Numerous things in life aren't fair. However, complaining about it won't fix things. Let's focus on fixing things.
• Failed and Successful Stories of Work-Life Balance - 2023-09-19 - Work-life balance isn't simply giving away free food, or lots of vacation days. It's often about what skills an employee can develop and use to set boundaries.
• Seattle’s Waterfront Bike Path Comes Into Focus, Narrower Than Past Promises Suggest - The Urbanist - 2023-09-19 - Late changes to add curving nine-foot-wide bottlenecks and remove bollards will hinder the new bike path. On Seattle's waterfront, visitors are now able to get a fairly good idea of the final form the long-planned redevelopment will take even though a final ribbon-cutting is still close to two years away. The Overlook Walk and the
• How to be a -10x Engineer - 2023-09-18 -
• The Amazon Working Backward Process for Engineering - 2023-09-17 - The working backwards process is the key mechanism Amazon uses to ensure that the right projects are funded. This same process should be used by engineering teams for their work.
• Why parquet files are my preferred API for bulk open data - 2023-09-17 - - Open data should be served as CORS-enabled parquet files rather than using a custom API
• 🌲When Themed Logs are More Useful than Daily Notes - 2023-09-17 - I group information by purpose, not chronology. This method allows for more focus, easier retrieval, and less context switching.
• Seattle Council Pushes Forward on Transportation Impact Fees - The Urbanist - 2023-09-16 - The issue of whether Seattle should impose a sizable fee on all types of new development to fund transportation network improvements is back in front of the city council, as several councilmembers who have long supported the idea try to move it forward before they leave office. Transportation impact fees, a tool authorized by the
• Sound Transit Braces for Overcrowding As It Launches Lynnwood Link in 2024 - The Urbanist - 2023-09-14 - The full opening of East Link will bring a reprieve, but overcrowding issues could resume with Federal Way Link. With approximately one year until Sound Transit plans to begin service on its extension of light rail north to Snohomish County, a clearer picture of some of the growing pains that are likely to come with
• Are Big Projects Ditching TypeScript? | Total TypeScript - 2023-09-13 - - Big projects like Svelte and Drizzle are not abandoning TypeScript, despite some recent claims.
• Creating Process is a Dangerous and Expensive Option. Anecdotes and Guidance for Leaders. - 2023-09-10 - Building processes is a mechanism for resolving issues. However, processes are also bottlenecks which slow your organization down. How do you choose when to add process?
• Avoiding fallback in distributed systems - 2023-09-10 - Building services that behave predictably during failures by avoiding fallback logic.
• A security community success story of mitigating a misconfiguration | Wiz Blog - 2023-09-10 - Learn about the process of preventing security issues by changing things outside of your environment by looking at how a misconfiguration was occurring when Github Actions were integrated with AWS IAM roles and the improvements made that have now made this misconfiguration much less likely. 
• 7 Tips to Build a Mission-Driven Organization—Even at Big Tech - 2023-09-10 - We tend to throw up our hands and assume that big companies mean big politics. It doesn't have to be that way.
• Why It's Better to Say No - 2023-09-10 - Often, saying no is better than saying yes. In the long run, there's serious value in doing fewer things.
• A Guide to the Deep Dive Leadership Principle - 2023-09-10 - Dive deep is a frequently misunderstood leadership principle. This is a complete walkthrough of the exact words used to describe this principle.
• Overworked Drone Gives Up. "I Quit." How Senior Employees Can Regain Their Sanity. - 2023-09-10 - Senior employees are in high demand to help out their teams. But that can lead to overwork. How can they balance everything?
• The half-life of code & the ship of Theseus · Erik Bernhardsson - 2023-09-09 - - As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project.
• We are still early with the cloud: why software development is overdue for a change · Erik Bernhardsson - 2023-09-09 - - Software development still has a long way to go until it fully embraces the cloud
• A Day in the Life of a Tech Director Promotion to General Manager - 2023-09-09 - Growing isn't as simple as learning new skills. It frequently means moving into areas of discomfort. This is a set of anecdotes from my move to GM.
• [Michał Sapka's website] Charybdis - 2023-09-06 - - My new keyboard
• Mats Eikeland Mollestad | DX can be more than just 'It Feels Good' - 2023-09-06 -
• Things To Look For In Work · Some ninja - 2023-09-03 - - Linux enthusiast. Audiophile. Huge anime fan. "Retired" amateur competitive swimmer. Tinkeror. Former typography nerd.
• Pricing | Fig - 2023-09-01 - - The next-generation command line.
• Short session expiration does not help security - 2023-09-01 - When logged into a web application, the session does not remain valid forever. Typically, the session expires after a fixed time after login, or after the user has been idle for some time. How long should these times be?
• Are You Getting the Performance Ratings You Deserve? - 2023-09-01 - Our performance ratings influence our ability to get raises, promotions, and our long term career success. They're not a simple meritocracy, but are a coarse-grained way of estimating our value to our company. Here's a bit on making certain you get a rating you deserve.
• What's New in DevTools (Chrome 117) - Chrome Developers - 2023-09-01 - - Override XHR/fetch requests and hide extension requests from the Network panel, see changes in fetch priority in the Performance panel, experience multiple UI improvements, check out new colors and experimental features, and more.

August 2023

• Introducing Sequence Analytics. Have you noticed that some business… | by Motif Analytics | Aug, 2023 | Medium - 2023-08-30 - - Have you noticed that some business questions are easy to express in words, but not in code? For example, you might want to find “abandoned…
• JS private class fields considered harmful • Lea Verou - 2023-08-30
• Array Types in TypeScript | TkDodo's blog - 2023-08-30 - is string[] really better than Array<string>? Of course not!
• The ideal viewport doesn’t exist - 2023-08-30 - Before you settle on basing design decisions on a handful of strict breakpoints, make sure you consider the vast fragmentation of screen sizes and browser viewports.
• Amazon issues a hard-nosed warning to workers - TheStreet - 2023-08-30 - Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy made a decision many employees won't like.
• Saving time with fzf - Ryan Bigg - 2023-08-29 - - Saving time with fzf
• Elijah Potter - 2023-08-29 - - I talk about the importance of shockingly fast iteration cycles and lean manufacturing.
• Build norms, not features - 2023-08-29 - - If you’re building a multi-user product, you’re not just selling social features. You’re selling social norms. In this post, I analyze LessWrong as a great example of product design, carefully designed to build strong social norms.
• AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge: Announcing new dedicated infrastructure options | AWS Security Blog - 2023-08-29 - At AWS, we’re committed to helping our customers meet digital sovereignty requirements. Last year, I announced the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge, our commitment to offering all AWS customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud. Our approach is to continue to make AWS sovereign-by-design—as it has been from day […]
• Can you trust 'open source' companies? • The Register - 2023-08-29 - Sometimes nothing fails like success
• Amazon Elastic Block Store at 15 Years – Perspectives - 2023-08-29
• Amazon Elastic Block Store at 15 Years – Perspectives - 2023-08-29
• cloudandthings/terraform-aws-clickops-notifier: Get notified when actions are taken in the AWS Console. - 2023-08-27 - Get notified when actions are taken in the AWS Console. - cloudandthings/terraform-aws-clickops-notifier: Get notified when actions are taken in the AWS Console.
• martinevald.net - Arguments Against IDEs - 2023-08-27 - - I don't use IDEs when I code, which I find is a position I keep having to explain. In this article, I aim to present some of my reasons.
• Selling The Blades | blarg - 2023-08-26 -
• Selling The Blades | blarg - 2023-08-26 -
• Use web components for what they’re good at | Read the Tea Leaves - 2023-08-24 - - Dave Rupert recently made a bit of a stir with his post “If Web Components are so great, why am I not using them?”. I’ve been working with web components for a few years now, so I…
• Define the Game - 2023-08-24 - - my working theories
• Amazon’s Radical Plan For Healthcare: À La Carte Pricing - 2023-08-23 - With Amazon Clinic, patients can see wait times and prices upfront, but there are limits to what it can do to cut down on the $4.3 trillion the U.S. spends on healthcare.
• Building a Two-Way Data Binding Hook for Form Inputs in React | Alex MacArthur - 2023-08-23 - Two-way form input binding is a popular feature offered by JavaScript frameworks like Vue and Svelte. I took a minute to explore what the React version of it might look like. I don't hate the result.
• A new way to measure developer productivity – from the creators of DORA and SPACE - 2023-08-23 - An exclusive interview with the four researchers behind a new developer productivity framework: The three dimensions of DevEx
• Zen and the Art of Logging - 2023-08-23 -
• Disaster Driven Development - IvyMike.dev - 2023-08-23 - - Back when I worked at Ixia, one of my managers had a software process I called "Disaster Driven Development". He would overcommit our schedule by saying yes to everything, and then we would work...
• Saying the quiet part out loud - 2023-08-23 -
• Americans Are Ready to Move On from Highway Expansion Even If Politicians Persist - The Urbanist - 2023-08-22 - A new poll found 82% of voters don’t believe highway expansions are the best solution for reducing congestion. America runs on highway sprawl and car commercials, but ample reason exists to think most Americans are seeking a different way to tackle transportation and growth issues. A new national poll conducted by Hattaway Communications found overwhelming
• The East Link Light Rail Starter Line Is Officially A Go - The Urbanist - 2023-08-22 - Light rail connecting Bellevue and Redmond is slated to open in spring 2024 following Sound Transit's starter line decision. Sound Transit was officially given the go-ahead to move forward with a plan to begin light rail service between eight isolated stations on the Eastside in spring of next year, after a vote by the agency's
• Even Year Elections Likely to Send Seattle Voter Turnout Skyrocketing - The Urbanist - 2023-08-22 - As the 1960s drew to a close Seattle was forced by the Washington State Legislature to switch the timing of its officer elections. In the first few decades that followed Washington’s admission to the United States as the 42nd state in the Union, it was standard practice to hold elections primarily in even-numbered years –
• Op-Ed: How To Plan for Seattle’s Transportation Future - The Urbanist - 2023-08-22 - Think ahead to 2043: What do you want it to look and feel like to get around Seattle? The City of Seattle is releasing a draft plan this summer answering this question. The “Seattle Transportation Plan” will integrate existing plans for separate “modes” – like walking, biking, transit, and freight – into one vision for
• Stub Yesler Way Bike Lane Illustrates Lack of Planning for Waterfront Bike Access - The Urbanist - 2023-08-22 - Early last week, crews with Seattle's Office of the Waterfront installed a very short stretch of two-way bike lane, at the foot of Yesler Way approaching Alaskan Way and Washington State Ferries Colman Dock. The new bike lane was timed to go in at the same time that new traffic patterns around the state ferry
• The East Link Light Rail Starter Line Is Officially A Go - The Urbanist - 2023-08-22 - Light rail connecting Bellevue and Redmond is slated to open in spring 2024 following Sound Transit's starter line decision. Sound Transit was officially given the go-ahead to move forward with a plan to begin light rail service between eight isolated stations on the Eastside in spring of next year, after a vote by the agency's
• Seattle Plans an Expansion of Block-the-Box and Transit Lane Cameras This Fall - The Urbanist - 2023-08-22 - The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has announced plans to install automatic traffic enforcement cameras at three locations to enforce dedicated transit lanes and intersection blocking, taking further advantage of a pilot program authorized by the state legislature in 2020. The new cameras all target locations with long-standing complaints of low compliance with traffic laws
• Take a Car Lane, Save a Transit Project - The Urbanist - 2023-08-22 - Transit: Why Don't We Do It in the Road? Transit has been getting some tough breaks lately in the Puget Sound region and across much of the United States. Projects are behind schedule and overbudget, and agencies are struggling with labor shortages and with attracting riders back following the shock of the pandemic. Many have
• "Context is that which is scarce" - Marginal REVOLUTION - 2023-08-22 - - A number of you have been asking me about this maxim, so here is some background on what it means: 1. Ever try to persuade another person?  Let’s say it is even of an uncontested idea such as supply and demand.  You might “final exam them into admitting that the demand curve slopes downward.”  But […]
• Only Finding the Non-Obvious Matters – Garrick van Buren - 2023-08-22 - - “The better you understand context, the more likely you will see how easily you can be missing out on it.” Tyler Cowen, “Context is that which is scarce” Magnus Neilsson&#82…
• Getting Started with CloudWatch agent and collectd | AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog - 2023-08-22 - Observability helps you understand the health, usage, performance, and customer experience for your workloads. Observability can support many use cases, from detecting incidents and supporting incident resolution, to understanding the impact of new features on your users and workflow. Establishing the right solution depends on being able to gather the right data for your situation. […]
• Reduce Lambda cold start times: migrate to AWS SDK for JavaScript v3 | AWS Developer Tools Blog - 2023-08-22 - The AWS SDK for JavaScript (JS SDK) v3 is a rewrite of v2 with a modular architecture and frequently requested features, such as a first-class TypeScript support and a new middleware stack. As our customers migrate their applications from JS SDK v2 to v3, they have been requesting reliable benchmarks to assess the SDKs performance […]
• Five Actionable Tips to Improve Your Leadership—The Fourth One is Just as Great as the Others! - 2023-08-22 - Five things you can do to dodge common leadership pitfalls. Plus a few fun stories along the way.
• How to use Context in AWS CDK | bobbyhadz - 2023-08-22 - Context is a combination of key-value pairs we can set in our CDK application.
• Tag your infrastructure-as-code resources with a link to their definitions – alexwlchan - 2023-08-22 - - Applying a default tag that points to the IaC definition makes it easy to go from the console to the code.
• Twenty years of Marginal Revolution – Erik Gahner Larsen - 2023-08-22 - - The blog Marginal Revolution turns 20 today. Not many blogs that were active 20 years ago are still active today, if they are even available online (one other exception is Crooked Timber, a blog th…
• Splitting the Web - 2023-08-22 - Splitting the Web écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
• How I turned Local Storage into a Web Socket - 2023-08-22 - - Your first question after reading the title must be WHY!? Well, let me explain the why before we jump into the how! For those of you who do not know me, I am the creator of Remix Development Tools, and for the past few weeks, I have been working on a...
• RIP AWS Go Lambda Runtime | Mark Wolfe's Blog - 2023-08-21 - Amazon Web Services (AWS) is deprecating the go1.x runtime on Lambda, this is currently scheduled for December 31, 2023. Customers need to migrate their Go based lambda functions to the a12.provided runtime, which uses Amazon Linux 2 as the execution environment. I think this is a bad thing for a couple of reasons: There is no automated migration path from existing Go Lambda functions to the new custom runtime. Customers will need to manually refactor and migrate each function to this new runtime, which this is time-consuming and error-prone.
• Squeeze the hell out of the system you have – Dan Slimmon - 2023-08-21 - When complexity leaps are on the table, there’s usually also an opportunity to squeeze some extra juice out of the system you have. By tweaking the workload, tuning performance, or supplement…
• Two quick hacks for laptop in-flight Delta Wi-Fi with T-Mobile - 2023-08-20 -
• How to Communicate When Trust Is Low (Without Digging Yourself Into A Deeper Hole) – charity.wtf - 2023-08-18 - - This is based on an internal quip doc I wrote up about careful communication in the context of rebuilding trust. I got a couple requests to turn it into a blog post for sharing purposes; here you g…
• AWS Security Monitoring in 2023: Untangle the chaos | cloudonaut - 2023-08-18 - Discover Effective AWS Security Monitoring Strategies. Combining the right AWS services is key when setting up AWS Security Monitoring.
• AWS Security Profile: Get to know the AWS Identity Solutions team | AWS Security Blog - 2023-08-17 - Remek Hetman, Principal Solutions Architect on the Identity Solutions team In this profile, I met with Ilya Epshteyn, Senior Manager of the AWS Identity Solutions team, to chat about his team and what they’re working on. Let’s start with the basics. What does the Identity Solutions team do? We are a team of specialist solutions […]
• The Four Ingredients to Create a Positive Team Culture - 2023-08-17 - Team culture impacts productivity, retention, and happiness. This can be a positive or negative influence, depending on how you create your team's culture.
• Blogged Answers: My Experience Modernizing Packages to ESM · Mark's Dev Blog - 2023-08-16 - Details on the painful experiences and hard-earned lessons I've learned migrating the Redux packages to ESM
• AWS CodeArtifact should be the place to store AWS code artifacts | by Ben Kehoe | Medium - 2023-08-15 - Users deserve purpose-built service for managing artifacts destined for AWS services
• Stopping at 90% - Austin Z. Henley - 2023-08-14 - - A common pattern is to stop short of the real finish line for your project. A little evangelism, documentation, and polish can go a long way.
• User Feedback - Jim Nielsen’s Blog - 2023-08-14 - Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
• Design and disappointment | Thomasorus - 2023-08-12 - - It seems impossible for me to find a company who cares about design
• Troy Hunt: Divorce - 2023-08-12 - - I wish I'd read this blog post years ago. I don't have any expertise whatsoever to be guiding others through this process so please don't look at this as a "how to". But what I do have is an audience, and I've found that each time I've opened up about
• The Code Review Pyramid - Gunnar Morling - 2023-08-08 - When it comes to code reviews, it’s a common phenomenon that there is much focus and long-winded discussions around mundane aspects like code formatting and style, whereas important aspects (does the code change do what it is supposed to do, is it performant, is it backwards-compatible for existing clients, and many others) tend to get less attention. To raise awareness for the issue and providing some guidance on aspects to focus on, I shared a small visual on Twitter the other day, which I called the "
• The Concretude of the Cloud | Notes - 2023-08-08 - - It’s ironic that the “cloud” of the tech titans behaves in the opposite way to that of nature: instead of bringing water, it consumes it.
• Layoffs and its impact | Aravind Putrevu - 2023-08-08 - At a company I worked in, A senior leader used to start the town hall or quarterly business review meetings with, "Think, if this is your…
• "Make something idiot-proof, the world will show you a better idiot" - 2023-08-08 - Ever felt the frustration of crafting an 'idiot-proof' masterpiece, only to watch the world conjure up a brand-new kind of 'genius'?
• Engaging volunteer developers effectively | Software and puns - 2023-08-07 -
• Have as much deliberate fun as you want! | Yusuf Bouzekri - 2023-08-06 - - Believe it or not, up until early this year, I never owned a proper smartphone. throughout my whole teenage years, my parents only bought me those small Nokia phones with no internet.
• Amazon's online store sales dip below 40% of net sales for first time, and other earnings notes – GeekWire - 2023-08-05 - The chart below is what Amazon’s net sales look like in raw numbers over the past several years, broken down into the major business segments reported by the Seattle-based company.… Read More
• Unraveling the magic of Pattern Matching - 2023-08-05 - Delve into the intricate world of pattern matching and discover its profound impact on code efficiency and expressiveness.
• Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 | All Things Distributed - 2023-08-05 - Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
• What, Not Why — Ben Bernstein Psychotherapy - 2023-08-03 - - Using What and Not Why in Mental Health
• Dealing with Negative Internal Politics. - 2023-08-01 - Dealing with negative politics doesn't mean making your enemies wail in terror.
• Axess Lab | Toggles suck! - 2023-08-01 - - You’ve all seen them, tiny switches that let you toggle a setting. And maybe, just like me, you sometimes pause, thinking “...Is it on or…

July 2023

• Sampling at scale with OpenTelemetry - 2023-07-30 - - Thoughts on different sampling strategies at scale when using OpenTelemetry. With experience running tracing at scale at Grafana Labs.
• LN 035: The Messy Desktop - 2023-07-30 - - When I got to college, I learned a lot about computing fairly quickly, before I even stepped into my first computer science course.
• Don't Miss Your Next Role! The Surprising Advantage of Using Your Brain While Job Hunting. - 2023-07-29 - Job hunting isn't just about interviewing well. Getting that initial interview often takes luck, or some very specific skills.
• The State of the Tech Market in 2023 - The Pragmatic Engineer Guest Post - 2023-07-29 - A Guest Post on the State of the Tech Market in 2023 by Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer.
• The Law of Bad GUIs (and how LLMs give us a way out) - 2023-07-28 - GUIs get worse over time. LLMs will help software companies and their users escape this unfortunate dynamic by complimenting point and click navigation.
• Get It Done - 2023-07-26 - Too often people do the best they can with what they have when they should instead get it done
• Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software - 2023-07-26 - [Audio version (read by a tts bot)](https://youtu.be/9jODhmgkp3o) ![https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/De_Rebus_Bellicis%2C_XVth_
• Modulithic Architecture - Barry Coughlan - 2023-07-26 - - The past decade saw everyone from startups to tech titans jumping onto the microservices bandwagon, hoping to untangle themselves from their unmaintainable monoliths. The trend can be traced back to Jeff Bezos’ API memo at Amazon, followed by a wave of innovation by Netflix engineering. As tech companies grew, centralized governance became impractical. They transitioned from viewing their organization as a system to an ecosystem, allowing for greater autonomy and concentrated decision-making within teams, and it paid off.
• The Power of Being New: A Proven Recipe for High Impact | Hazel Weakly - 2023-07-26 - - When starting a new job as a software engineer, it’s natural to feel the pressure of delivering immediate value and meeting the expectations of your role....
• Measure And Optimize Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | DebugBear - 2023-07-25 - The Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric measures how quickly a website responds to user input.
• Is software getting worse? - 2023-07-25 - - A rant, with some examples.
• 5 Inconvenient Truths about TypeScript - 2023-07-25 - I’m writing books about TypeScript and I do workshops and trainings online and in-house. Every time I meet a new group of developers there are some TypeScript facts that they need to be confronted with:
• Why would you build a cloud DC in America's hottest city? • The Register - 2023-07-24 - 100 days over 100F and historic drought don't faze Microsoft or Google
• System Initiative: The Second Wave of DevOps · Nick Gerace Hacks Away - 2023-07-24 - - It’s finally time to talk about System Initiative. Since early December 2021, I’ve had the privilege and honor of working alongside one of the best software teams on the planet to handcraft foundational technology for ushering in the second wave of DevOps.
• Age-Period-Cohort graphs for suicide and drug overdoses | Andrew Wheeler - 2023-07-24 - - When I still taught advanced research methods for PhD students, I debated on having a section on age-period-cohort (APC) analysis. Part of the reason I did not bother with that though is there were…
• Queryability and the Sublime Mediocrity of SQL • Buttondown - 2023-07-24 - - I'm going to a small academic workshop on design next week. This got me thinking of the various meanings of "design", which got me thinking about the various...
• Empathetic tools | Software and puns - 2023-07-24 -
• Going Lean • Lea Verou - 2023-07-24 -
• Accidentally Load Bearing - 2023-07-21 - Sometimes people will talk about Chesterton's Fence, the idea that if you want to change something&#8212;removing an apparently useless fence&#8212;you should first determine why it was set up that way: The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason
• The past is not true | Derek Sivers - 2023-07-21
• Be proven wrong · Will Hackett - 2023-07-21 - - It's not easy to be proven wrong. But damn, is it nice to embrace it.
• Software engineers should read – Gio Lodi - 2023-07-20 - - When you think for a living, reading is an essential skill.
• "You're Entirely Wrong About Everything." How to Disagree Respectfully. - 2023-07-20 - Some people are nice co-workers. Other people firmly insist on getting to the right decision. The intersection of nice people who firmly insist on making the right decisions are highly valuable.
• Why you should always merge to main | Ergomake - 2023-07-19 - - Why you should always merge to main | Ergomake
• Trophy Jobs - 2023-07-19 - - my working theories
• Using XPath in 2023 - 2023-07-19 -
• Anyone could steal your bus money in Seattle | Evan Byrne - 2023-07-19 - - Hacking the government to prevent cash from being stolen from millions of passengers.
• GitHub - option-t/option-t: A toolkit of Nullable/Option/Result type implementation in ECMAScript. Their APIs are inspired by Rust's `Option<T>` and `Result<T, E>`. - 2023-07-19 - A toolkit of Nullable/Option/Result type implementation in ECMAScript. Their APIs are inspired by Rust&#39;s `Option&lt;T&gt;` and `Result&lt;T, E&gt;`. - GitHub - option-t/option-t: A toolkit of N...
• Has anyone thought that WFH is just sustainable? – JetUNsetter - 2023-07-18 - - I mean the obvious: commuting is polluting. This is too obvious. On top, we build our solis twice: different building to work, different to live. In fact we replicate all that tech and human modern…
• Stop Overengineering - 2023-07-18 - - A personal appeal. 1. Overengineering works against results. Shifting the focus away from results is never good — for personal projects, corporate codebases, or anything in between. 2. Overengineering over indexes on things you know. Overengineering invents new constraints instead of tackling real ones. The made-up constraints we tell ourselves are usually ones we already know how to solve (known-knowns vs unknown-unknowns). 3. Overengineering is not elegant. Overengineering yields compli
• Jeremy Mikkola - What makes developers productive? - 2023-07-17
• The Private Equity Model in Medicine is Flawed | Ben White - 2023-07-17 - It can be hard for trainees in the job market to make sense of the current state of affairs. Everyone knows private equity companies have been gobbling up practices around the country in an ever-consolidating market, but the implications of this trend are another matter entirely. Most people willing to talk openly about private equity
• From subprime crisis to the newly prime crisis | Boaz Sobrado's Website - 2023-07-16 - - Credit score algorithms faced an unprecedented challenge during the Covid-19 crisis. Will we soon see the consequences?
• How people who work in data see each other - 2023-07-16 - - How people who work in data see each other
• More Bang for Your Buck | 0x1 - 2023-07-16 - - Skipping having to spend time defining an API until you really, really need it.
• Words & Laws 📚 - 2023-07-15
• The secret life of .well-known - 2023-07-14 -
• My Favorite Bits of OSDI/ATC'23 - Marc's Blog - 2023-07-14
• Yet More Painful Mistakes Which Were Key to My Career Success - 2023-07-14 - I've made mistakes in various ways. It can be embarrassing, but mistakes are also the best way to learn.
• The effects of the HN 'personal blogs' thread on my RSS feed · Alex Gherghișan - 2023-07-14 - A recent trend in the HN community has been to share personal websites. In this article I look at the RSS traffic I got after posting this site.
• My Missed Career Opportunities, Or Why I'm Not an SVP - 2023-07-13 - We've all had missed opportunities. What have you learned from yours?
• The Great Pendulum - 2023-07-11 - - On the great pendulum that hides in the tech industry
• Cldfire's Blog - 2023-07-11 -
• Technological schadenfreude - 2023-07-11 - - Technological schadenfreude: taking pleasure in seeing that a technology you intended to learn but haven't has gone away.
• Blunt/Direct/Assertive communicators, online communication challenges and how to overcome them - Scramblings - 2023-07-11 - - This blog post explores the challenges faced by blunt or direct communicators, particularly in the context of online communication, and proposes some effective strategies that have proven helpful.
• Feature Flags: Theory vs Reality - bpapillon - 2023-07-11 - - A contemplation of how feature management tools might evolve to better support how feature flags are used in practice
• Hacking LangChain For Fun and Profit - I | Kevin Hu's Blog - 2023-07-11 - - 1 Overview Recently I’ve looked into the LangChain project and I was surprised by how it could be such a powerful and mature a project built in such short span of time. It covers many essential tools
• Repetition vs. Pushing Hard - 2023-07-11 - - When working, how much can we improve by constantly pushing our limits? At what point do we start start hurting ourselves, and what does the economic theory, 'The law of diminishing marginal returns' help us understand about ourselves.
• HPC on Cloud for Financial Risk — A Comparative Analysis | by Hamza | HMx Labs | Jun, 2023 | Medium - 2023-07-10 - - This article presents the results of running the COREx benchmark on over 600 different VM types across the three major cloud providers. It…
• HPC on Cloud — Cost Optimisation & Cloud Economics | by Hamza | HMx Labs | Jun, 2023 | Medium - 2023-07-10 - - This article looks at the economics of running a HPC system on a public cloud infrastructure. It looks at the impact of the performance…
• JavaScript Gom Jabbar / frantic.im - 2023-07-10 - What's inside that package.json? Pain.
• Taming the Wild Genius of Large Language Models - 2023-07-09 -
• Accurate Predictions – Dan Quach Blog - 2023-07-09 -
• Academics: You’re Doing Open Source Wrong | chanind.github.io - 2023-07-09 - - Cake with melted plastic lego pieces, delicious. Generated by Midjourney
• Getting Through Your Day · @jimmyislive - 2023-07-09 -
• Being a good mentor - a developers guide - 2023-07-09 - - Let’s talk about the process where the experienced welcome the inexperienced under their wing and illuminate the path ahead. I’ve worn many hats over the
• How to Succeed: Lessons from Sam Altman | Aarush Gupta - 2023-07-09 - - This is an escape from my usual stream of posts, for I wanted to attempt to expand the horizons of my routine writing.
• It's 2023. Your API should have a schema - 2023-07-09 - - Here's a story you might find relatable. We kicked off a new integration project that started 3 months later than everyone wanted. APIs just shipped after a bunch of delays. We were handed API docs and a test environment and started work building out the new feature. The documentation was
• Test Against Reality - 2023-07-09 - - Against mocking.
• How to use ESM on the web and in Node.js - 2023-07-07 - ESM (ECMAScript Modules) is a modern module format with many advantages over previous formats like CommonJS. How do you switch to it?
• CommonJS is not going away | Bun Blog - 2023-07-07 - CommonJS is here to stay, and that's okay. Better tooling will solve today's developer experience issues.
• On The “Enshittification” of Platforms: Technology is Only Human After All – Constant Tinkerer V2.0 - 2023-07-06 - In 2023, the world of online technology has truly changed. In around a decade, the landscape has really shifted from one of techno-optimism to one of profit-grabbing and “enshittification&#82…
• Announcing turmoil | Tokio - An asynchronous Rust runtime - 2023-07-05 - - Tokio is a runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. It provides async I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, and more.
• Going faster with continuous delivery - 2023-07-04 - How Amazon automates software delivery including automated testing and deployments.
• What would a map of your career look like? - 2023-07-04 - - Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create.
• Stuff - 2023-07-03 - Stuff and other stuff
• Why Benchmarks Miss The Mark for AWS Spend - The Duckbill Group - 2023-07-03 - How much should I be spending on an AWS service? External benchmarks for AWS spending and usage aren't as useful as you might think.
• Amazon Prime Video’s Microservices Move Doesn’t Lead to a Monolith after All - The New Stack - 2023-07-03 - The streaming service provider made waves when its engineers reported they had refactored their QoS monitor for a monolithic architecture. Microservices experts evaluating the details discovered they actually did just the opposite.
• Fast machines, slow machines - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev) - 2023-07-03 - Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that I&rsquo;ve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years and&hellip; nothing, almost-zero interest. Now that things have cooled down, it&rsquo;s time to stir the pot and elaborate on those thoughts a bit more rationally. To summarize, the Twitter thread shows two videos: one of an old computer running Windows NT 3.51 and one of a new computer running Windows 11. In each video, I opened and closed a command prompt, File Explorer, Notepad, and Paint. You can clearly see how apps on the old computer open up instantly whereas apps on the new computer show significant lag as they load. I questioned how computers are actually getting better when trivial things like this have regressed. And boom, the likes and reshares started coming in. Obviously some people had issues with my claims, but there seems to be an overwhelming majority of people that agree we have a problem. To open up, I&rsquo;ll stand my ground: latency in modern computer interfaces, with modern OSes and modern applications, is terrible and getting worse. This applies to smartphones as well. At the same time, while UIs were much more responsible on computers of the past, those computers were also awful in many ways: new systems have changed our lives substantially. So, what gives?
• Advanced macOS Commands - saurabhs.org - 2023-07-03 - Advanced macOS command-line tools.
• Jay Little - Software Obsessionist - Developer Brethren, its Time to Embrace Boring! - 2023-07-03 - - So this morning I was listening to one of the Linux related podcasts, Coder Radio and the hosts read feedback from a listener who claimed that he was &quot;bored&quot; with PHP and ready to try something else. Now to be fair, in this particular case, the writer outlined some circumstances that made me sympathize with him. Long story short is that parts of the PHP based stack he was relying on for some of his software had changed significantly. In order to update his software to a currently supported version of PHP, he basically now has to rewrite it from scratch. So yeah, that sucks.
• Cultural Hints - Mark Loves Tech - 2023-07-03 - - BACK TO TOP Too Long; Didn’t Read Try Three Things Dates and Goals Focus on your unique value first before helping others too much AAA – Anticipate, Analyze, Answer DDD – Dates, Dates, Dates Brilliant and Well Intentioned Unclear Commitments are the Root of a lot of Evil RCA – Root Cause Analysis There Are […]
• Why Commuters Prefer Origin to Destination Transfers | Pedestrian Observations - 2023-07-03 - - It’s an empirical observation that rail riders who are faced with a transfer are much more likely to make the trip if it’s near their home than near their destination. Reinhard Clever&#…
• Move Fast, Break Things Explained - 2023-07-02 - - You keep on using that word, it does not mean what you think it means
• A life-changing encounter with a man named Dan « The Story's Story - 2023-07-02 - This essay is by my brother, Sam. In 2009, I had a life-changing encounter with a man named Dan; he was the top salesman at our company and left an indelible mark on my career. Dan was an impressiv…
• Don't Make it Intelligent - Gus Hogg-Blake - 2023-07-02 -
• Waste in software development · Jens Rantil - 2023-07-02 - - Toyota Production System and waste Link to heading It was around ~2011 when I first read The Toyota Way book. This book introduced me to The Toyota Way principles and the Toyota Production System (TPS). It laid the foundation for me to understand the Continuous Delivery book which I later read. The Toyota Way also lay the groundwork for me to understand the inter-related Lean Manufacturing, particularly Lean services (which applies the Lean concept to the service industry).
• A few words on taking notes | All Things Distributed - 2023-07-02 - As we are about to start the planning meetings for 2024 at AWS, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I take notes.

June 2023

• How Companies Incentivize Layoffs—A Study of Corporate Career Incentives - 2023-06-30 - Managers at growing companies are incentivized to do one thing more than anything else. Grow their teams. Is it mysterious that most tech companies seem to have over hired?
• Code the Shortest Path First | varchar(255) - 2023-06-28 - - There is a strange thing that I noticed as I progressed from a junior engineer to mid-career to senior. When you’re a new engineer, still learning the basics, you are given a task or you have an idea, and you proceed to implement exactly that idea. Very simple, point A to point B, whatever gets the job done. You hate your code later but you got it to work. Then you learn some stuff– you learn about object-oriented design & algorithms & design patterns & frameworks & abstractions & higher-order functions & monoids & whatever else you found on Hacker News.
• Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1 | JonLuca’s Blog - 2023-06-28 - - Every time I leave New York and land back in Europe or in Asia, I can immediately tell which apps have a global presence and which apps only deploy to a single US region. Everything just immediately feels a little slower. The pull to refresh feels a bit sluggish, the preview images take a little longer to load, and even native apps just feel less responsive.
• How to do templates properly · Omrigan - 2023-06-28 - There are numerous templating engines out there. There is: Jinja2 - which is standard these days Python’s Django’s templates - which are much like jinja2, but not quite Go’s text/template which claims to be the template engine (hence, the name) Mustache, which is also popular And numerous others I’ve even recently stumbled upon Calibre’s (which is an open-source e-book management tool) own custom (!!!) templating engine. The fact that I have to learn another templating engine so that my e-books can be placed into folders is insane.
• FTC Request, Answered: How Cloud Providers Do Business - Last Week in AWS Blog - 2023-06-28 - - Chief Cloud Economist Corey Quinn answers the Federal Trade Commission's Request for Information about the business practices of cloud computing providers.
• O(0) - danangell.com/blog - 2023-06-27 - - A common tool for measuring the efficiency of an algorithm is Big O notation. It has a formal mathematical background and is taught today in university classrooms teaching math and computer science. But software engineers also use it as a pragmatic tool. How long will that web page take to load? Well, if the user is uploading 1 or more files and you want to show the files in a sorted order that’s going to be, at best
• Everything that uses configurations should report the values they are using (or: achieving persistence with a hidden SSH backdoor) | Joshua.Hu - 2023-06-27 - - Configuration parsing is an interesting topic I have been working on in the context of my hacking and creating simple backdoors which are hidden from your average sysadmin.
• How "Exit Traps" Can Make Your Bash Scripts Way More Robust And Reliable - 2023-06-27
• How I achieved all six specialty AWS Certifications on first attempt | AWS Training and Certification Blog - 2023-06-27 - I joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a Solutions Architect in September 2022 after skilling up in AWS Cloud, validating my expertise by earning six AWS Certifications. I decided to pursue the other six certifications, at the specialty level. In this blog post, I’ll share my journey to prepare for and earn the AWS Specialty Certifications, each on the first attempt.
• There's still no silver bullet |> Changelog - 2023-06-26 - - I’ve found myself referencing this a couple times recently. Both of those conversations were in the context of React, but the principle applies to every over-adopted technology.
• The anti-pattern game - 2023-06-26 -
• Leaders | ruiper.es - 2023-06-26 -
• Why I Fired Myself. Being a digital nomad, does not only… | by Sebastian Galonska | Medium - 2023-06-26 - - Being a digital nomad, does not only expose me to picturesque landscapes, but also enables me to look behind and reflect.
• You don’t need a vision — Austin Kleon - 2023-06-26 - - The trouble with visualization.
• Bake the Best Gluten Free Bread with Your Bread Machine - Fearless Dining - 2023-06-24 - If you have been looking for the perfect gluten free bread recipe, this easy bread machine recipe is absolutely amazing. Easy directions.
• A Guide to Being a Great On-call. - 2023-06-24 - Being a good operator builds a wealth of skills. But there are a few tricky aspects you'll want to think about.
• No, I don't want to chat with my documents | Engin Arslan - 2023-06-21 - - Engin Arslan - Software developer, teacher, entrepreneur
• GitHub - Textualize/frogmouth: A Markdown browser for your terminal - 2023-06-20 - A Markdown browser for your terminal. Contribute to Textualize/frogmouth development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Narrow Waists Can Be Interior or Exterior: PyObject vs. Unix Files - 2023-06-19 -
• Victims and abusers - 2023-06-19 - - It may not be helpful to cast all abusers as scheming psychopaths
• Two types of software engineers - by Thorsten Ball - 2023-06-18 - One assumes it's easy because it's a non-technical problem, the other assumes that's why it's hard
• IKEA-Oriented Development - 2023-06-18 - - To frugally furnish a codebase, imitate Ikea.
• Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems | the jsomers.net blog - 2023-06-17
• GitHub - algolia/autocomplete: 🔮 Fast and full-featured autocomplete library - 2023-06-17 - 🔮 Fast and full-featured autocomplete library. Contribute to algolia/autocomplete development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Cities of Software · all things considered... - 2023-06-16 - - Photo by Adrian Schwarz on Unsplash Cities are an interesting way to think about Software. Cities have foundations, like infrastructure for cars, electricity. Housing for people to live and work. Stores to sell and buy goods. Also, Cities are often referred to as an organism. Just like a large organization, a department, or a team are an organism. But these organisms are building software. I first came across this idea in Mikio Braun’s post on Everyone Is Still Terrible At Creating Software :
• What I've learned about data visualization - Tyler Cipriani - 2023-06-16 -
• Migrating Netflix to GraphQL Safely | by Netflix Technology Blog | Jun, 2023 | Netflix TechBlog - 2023-06-16 - - By Jennifer Shin, Tejas Shikhare, Will Emmanuel
• The downsides of batch APIs · Jens Rantil - 2023-06-15 - - Many small API calls are usually better than one large one.
• Confidence, Competence, & Gravity - Fritz Johnson - 2023-06-15 - - Sharing three thoughts I had this morning on the topics of blind confidence, stacking competence, and the seriousness of fundraising.
• React.useEffect Hook – Common Problems and How to Fix Them - 2023-06-15 - React hooks have been around for a while now. Most developers have gotten pretty comfortable with how they work and their common use cases. But there is one useEffect gotcha that a lot of us keep falling for. The use case Let's start with a simple scenario. We are
• How we Build Platforms - 2023-06-14 - - I’m fascinated by the Metaverse. Not because I want to use that steaming pile of legless avatars, but because it’s the latest prominent attempt to establish a new platform. As Mark Zuckerberg said in internal emails about it:
• A wave of sleep laws for teens? – Half-formed thoughts and musings - 2023-06-10 - - Ezra Klein recently interviewed psychologist Lisa Damour about teen depression where she honed in on the contributing factor of declining sleep levels. It’s an argument I hadn’t heard c…
• Price controls: Too early for a victory lap - by Noah Smith - 2023-06-10 - Narrative-driven triumphalism does not make for sound policy.
• Interactive versionable architecture diagrams - Jeroen Mols - 2023-06-10 - - Tired of building un-versionable, lifeless architecture diagrams? Wouldn’t it be great if you could add your diagram to Git, embed it in your documentation, and have clickable elements?
• Why do railway tracks have crushed stones alongside them? - Alpha Rail - 2023-06-10 - Track ballast is the name for the crushed stones next to railway tracks. They are used by Railway Track Designers for numerous reasons
• Why Niche Content Sites Are Toast - Fritz Johnson - 2023-06-10 - - Content websites are, as the kids say, "donezo". I write about how a monsoon of spam will continue decimating the digital publishing world.
• Paul's Law - 2023-06-09 - - Paul's law of build tool evolution
• The React Ecosystem in 2023 - 2023-06-08 - Let's take a look at the React ecosystem's tools and libraries that have become widely used over the last ten years.
• You need black pixels — Stephan Ango - 2023-06-08 - One of my first industrial design jobs was working on a headset that never shipped, for a now defunct startup. It used two micro-OLED displays similar to the...
• How I made my web pages load 10x faster - 2023-06-08 - The most typical advice you get when it comes to improving site performance these days is purely technical things like using CDNs or other serving optimization, using X hosting mechanism instead of Y, going serverless, cache optimization, etc. I'm not talking about those things, I'm talking about the old school …
• Improve Your Prompts for LLMs: Simple and Effective Techniques - 2023-06-08 - - Tools like ChatGPT and Bing have been skyrocketing in popularity. ChatGPT took five days since launch to . Governments all over the world are trying to what to do . Sweet are showing up everywhere; like this dog I generated using Bing:Though LLMs (Large Language Models) are still in their infancy,...
• A bicycle for the senses — Stephan Ango - 2023-06-08 - For the past seven decades, computers have been primarily designed to enhance what your brain can do — think and remember. New kinds of computers will enhanc...
• Why I'm signing the Stack Overflow strike letter - 2023-06-06 - - Abstract
• I’m a skills sceptic, and maybe you are too. - 2023-06-06 - Brits are less productive because it is too hard to build stuff.
• Administrivia: new web hosting arrangements - 2023-06-06
• Potential Space as another Mental Model - 2023-06-06 - - Potential Space as another Mental Model - Uncertainty in tech organizations.
• You Are Already There | Jose M. - 2023-06-04 - - I’ve been fighting all my life. I always wanted to move forward, to get somewhere. Once I pass that exam, everything will be ok. Once I get my degree, I’ll be fulfilled and happy. Once I get enough money, my life will be great. I was always looking forward to the next stage, always wanting something more. Like if all my problems would fade away as soon as I achieved something.
• EU is a counter-weight for tech regulation - Can's blog - 2023-06-04 - - Everybody is annoyed by the cookie pop-ups. But the regulation behind it, GDPR, and similar tech regulations by the European Union are actually a good thing. …
• A Neighborhood With Friends – Tynan.com - 2023-06-04 -
• Preparing for the future of knowledge work - 2023-06-04 - Large Language Models are here to stay, and they might change everything. How can we prepare for the future of knowledge work?
• Microfrontends should be your last resort - 2023-06-03 -