Published
Weekend Reading — 📥 Integration Test Email #1
This week we check our spam folder, witness a passing integration test, swoop and poop, and a trip to Waffle House.
Ok people you're funny
🪑 Design Objective
Choosing Your North Star Metric A look at the North Star Metric from over 40 of today’s most successful growth-stage.
🧰 Tools of the Trade
Next.js 11 Next 11 ships a bunch of improvements for image rendering, script loading, font optimization, etc. And two interesting announcements that I can't wait to try out.
Next.js Live lets you chat, draw, and edit code in the browser:
Next.js Live puts the entire development process inside the web browser, which opens up some great possibilities, like collaborating and sharing instantaneously with a URL (without a build step).
Conformance for Frameworks brings different types of checks — linting, TypeScript, runtime, etc — into the browser:
The fewer technologies in your stack, the better. Postgres and Redis can do a LOT of things “well enough”… adding more tech into that means your team is master of none. That makes it hard to scale, because you can’t scale what you don’t understand deeply.
ToolJet If you’re building an admin dashboard for your app, Retool is the low-code way to do it. Or ToolJet, an open source clone of Retool.
Ask HN: What is the most bloated website you use JIRA wins hands down.
GitLive Real time collaboration for VS Code + Git.
Gently Down the Stream Introduce your kids to Apache Kafka.
📓 Lines of Code
Ryan Grove HBO Max has an oops moment, sending a test email to all their subscribers:
There are two types of developers: those who have accidentally sent a test email to production users and those who will someday accidentally send a test email to production users.
Brian Gracely: "Y’all are just jealous that an integration test worked on the first try.”
Patrick McKenzie 👇 When things break in unexpected ways and at the worst possible time:
In honor of someone’s bad bug today, I will retell a story of my worst bug:
Once upon a time I was the CEO and entire engineering team of a company which sent appointment reminders.
Each reminder was sent by a cron job draining a queue. That queue was filled by another cron job
hardmaru “Game of Life running a Game of Life. Since the Game of Life is Turing Complete, it is capable of simulating itself.”
🧑🤝🧑 Teamwork
An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding
- How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it
- How to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution, in a reasonable period of time
- How to mentor an early-career teammate, a mid-career engineer, a new manager who needs technical advice
Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders Somehow this hack is both transparent and effective:
They also offered a great tip for dealing with advice that didn’t seem relevant to the project’s success: Create an extended product roadmap and put those items at least a year off into the future “and as long as they don’t seem relevant, you can just keep pushing them into the future.”
Perversely this plan made everyone happy – everyone’s feedback is on the roadmap, and now it’s all just a question of priorities.
Tyler Swartz: “@productboard came up with some new stakeholder acronyms to go along with the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (hippo). Really digging the ZEbRA 😆”
Tyler Swartz: “but hey @productboard...missed the opportunity to have Seagull be the “swoop and poop manager”
📈 Business Side
The great resignation “Surveys show anywhere from 25% to upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.” If this happens, I predict it will accelerate growth and innovation, the way the pandemic accelerated WFH. When employees move around, they bring with them new skills, expertise, and culture.
Li Jin 👇 Related, a growth in independent workforce, and fractional employees, is another accelerator of growth and innovation:
#1 Independents don't freelance primarily for the money; they're doing it for autonomy and freedom.
86% of all independents surveyed work less than 40 hours/week, and 40% work less than 30 hours/week.
Five new bills aim to break up Big Tech platforms, force them to play nice Not clear how many (or if any) of these bills will pass, but clearly there's strong interest in overhauling antitrust law and reigning on big tech.
Cristian Pereyra Facts:
Things that you would like to rush, take > 3x what you think.
Things that you would like to delay, take > 3x less of what you think.
Applies to money as well.
⭐ None of the Above
Typewriter 21327 Build your own old-fashioned typewriter in LEGO® style.
McKay Coppins 👇 The replies to the replies on this thread are 👩🍳💋
My two oldest kids (8 and 6) ask me to tell them an “interesting fact” every night at bedtime. Having now exhausted my own supply of memorized trivia as well as several random lists on the internet, I’m taking suggestions below…
Trung Phan “This Twitter exchange is gold”
Lee Sanderlin 👇 Funniest thread from this week:
I am coming to you live from a Brandon, Mississippi Waffle House. I, a total loser, came in last place in my fantasy football league. As punishment, I spend 24 hours in a Waffle House. Every waffle I eat shaves an hour off the clock. It’s 4:07 Central.
Been rounding up Reddit posts that reveal "industry secrets". Here are some great ones 🧵
1/ Live Events
"At any concert you attend, the best sound will be directly in front of the engineer at the main soundboard."
Have you ever had the urge to create, but you didn't because you got "stuck"? This is called "creative paralysis" and I'm finally shaking it off after struggling with it on and off for the past 1.5 years.
Here's a thread on how I overcame it 👇🏽
The ultimate hotel room coffee-making guide Traveling doesn’t mean you have to compromise on the quality of your morning coffee.
No general method to detect fraud Magic, statistics, and money scams:
The idea is that when people look at an illusion, they really consider only the reasonable ways by which the trick could have been achieved, mentally ruling out all the unreasonable ways. For a trick to work it needs to confound Occam's razor: there must be a complicated explanation.
bliss “a photo i can’t believe i took”
