The Daily Index — Monday, June 19, 2023

ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

TLDR Web Dev

LINKING MODULAR ARCHITECTURE TO DEVELOPMENT TEAMS

This article recounts the journey of a software company that managed to achieve a 60% reduction in average cycle time, an 18-fold improvement in development costs, and an 80% reduction in team startup costs by shifting their team topologies to match a modular architecture while investing in the developer experience. It dives deep into the architectural principles that enabled these results.

martinfowler.com · 18 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW TO IMPROVE API PERFORMANCE

This system design refresher by ByteByteGo breaks down various methods to improve API performance, such as pagination, caching, and payload compression. It also goes over other useful topics, such as how Discord stores over a trillion messages, Netflix’s overall architecture, and more.

open.substack.com · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

FINDING STAFF-LEVEL SCOPE

One of the hardest parts of getting promoted from senior to staff engineer is finding projects that have staff-level scope. Engineering work meets the Staff bar based on a few high-level characteristics, including high complexity, significant impact, and a large workstream size. Finding staff-level scope can be difficult, but this article gives multiple tips on how to do it.

developing.dev · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

SMART GUY PRODUCTIVITY PITFALLS

The author notes that working around high-productivity professionals like John Carmack made him realize that if you want to excel, then you have to work hard and focus the whole time. One technique he uses is to play a CD while working, and if he was not being productive, he'd pause the CD player. He'd then measure his output for the day by how far he got down in his CD stack. You can replicate this method today using a long soundtrack or playlist on YouTube, Spotify, or other music applications.

waivek.github.io · 9 min

TLDR Web Dev

9 PIECES OF EXPERT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ADVICE

Software engineering is more than just coding - the job involves many other aspects that one must be proficient at to be successful. This post lists 9 pieces of advice to keep in mind for your career to progress fast and do well.

linkedin.com · 2 min

TLDR Web Dev

NO, GPT4 CAN’T ACE MIT

A paper seemingly demonstrating that GPT-4 could ace the MIT EECS + Math curriculum recently went viral on Twitter, getting over 500 retweets in a single day. However, three MIT EECS seniors took a closer look at the paper and found enough problems with it to debunk it. For example, even though the authors of the paper said they manually reviewed the published dataset for quality, the three MIT seniors found clear signs that a significant portion of the evaluation dataset was contaminated in such a way that let the model cheat like a student who was fed the answers to a test right before taking it.

flower-nutria-41d.notion.site · 15 min

TLDR Web Dev

THE NEW LANGUAGE MODEL STACK

More companies than ever before are bringing the power of natural language interaction to their products. The adoption of language model APIs is creating a new stack in its wake. Sequoia Capital asked 33 of their companies about LLM adoption and found that nearly every company in the Sequoia network is building language models into their products. The new stack for these applications centers on language model APIs, retrieval, and orchestration, but open source usage is also growing. Sequoia’s survey also delivered insights such as the fact that companies want to customize language models to their unique context and that it’s still early for AI.

sequoiacap.com · 7 min

TLDR Web Dev

WHAT DRIVES ADOPTION OF INTERNAL DEVELOPER TOOLS?

A study on the factors that affect the adoption of internal developer tools showed that developers do not want to change their usual style of work and might prefer tools that are easy to integrate with their usual style of work. Developers select or design tools that fit well with the usual work style of team members and that can be easily customized to their needs. The findings imply that developers are more likely to adopt tools that are used by their peers or by their community. The paper suggests utilizing developer-led blog posts or demonstrations of build automation tools at company events and public events to increase adoption.

newsletter.abinoda.com · 3 min

TLDR Web Dev

I'M ZOOM'S NEW CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER. HERE'S HOW I GOT TO THE C-SUITE AND MY BEST TIPS FOR WORKING MOMS WHO ASPIRE TO AN EXECUTIVE ROLE.

6 pieces of career advice from Zoom's new CPO, Smita Hashim. She is a first generation immigrant and a working mother, and she gives advice on how to balance work and family life and what to focus on during your career.

businessinsider.com · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

APPLE VISION PRO: HARDWARE ISSUES

This article covers the hardware and related human physical and visual issues with the Apple Vision Pro.

kguttag.com · 18 min

TLDR Web Dev

GUIDANCE FOR SCALING: REVERSIBLE VS IRREVERSIBLE DECISIONS

Tips for scaling engineering teams and codebases. For example, leaving optionality open while building on a codebase is immeasurable but a huge win for engineering as the codebase grows. This means that costly coding decisions are ideally reduced, especially if they need to be reversed.

craigkerstiens.com · 3 min

TLDR Web Dev

GENERATING INCOME FROM OPEN SOURCE

Generating income from open-source is next to impossible. However, there are a few things that have been found to work to generate open-source income, such as offering commercial licenses for companies, charging for more features, and offering a hosted version if it’s an open-source SaaS project.

vadimdemedes.com · 9 min