Search the archive

MICROSOFT STRIPS ADS FROM SKYPE IN A MOVE TOWARD “USER-CENTRIC DESIGN”

Microsoft has removed all ads from Skype, despite having a somewhat aggressive ad strategy across other Microsoft experiences.

THE POWER AND PROMISE OF PRODUCT-LED GROWTH: INSIGHTS AND STRATEGIES

Product-led growth focuses on creating a product so valuable and user-friendly that it sells itself. Unlike traditional sales-led models, PLG prioritizes delivering an exceptional product experience to drive user acquisition, engagement, and retention. By deeply understanding and addressing user needs, companies can foster organic growth and achieve sustainable, scalable success.

WHEN TO JOIN A STARTUP

Building a successful startup involves systematically eliminating five key types of risk: technology, market, scaling, business model, and defensibility. Assessing and understanding these risks can guide potential employees to join at optimal times, enhancing their career growth and economic outcomes.

WILL OPENAI'S SEARCHGPT FINALLY DISRUPT THE SEARCH MARKET?

OpenAI has pushed Google to innovate and adapt, benefiting consumers. Despite the competition, Google still holds significant advantages in infrastructure, user base, and existing partnerships.

WHY MORE AND MORE COMPANIES ARE KILLING THEIR CLASSICAL HOMEPAGE

SaaS businesses are phasing out traditional homepages and shifting to ungated experiences like freemiums and interactive demos that don't ask for any information. While homepages can act as business cards, they often hinder immediate value delivery as people care more about your offerings than your company.

HOW TO FIGURE OUT METRICS OWNERSHIP

Understand your metric ownership by mapping current metrics and defining an ideal state. Transition to this ideal state by owning, sharing, or transferring the metric ownership to another team. Use the gap between current and ideal states to explain and win over stakeholders.

LEADING BY FOLLOWING

Leadership means knowing when to follow. Sometimes, the best thing for a product manager is to step aside and support the team after a decision is made. Followers can voice concerns before decisions but should drive for unity and progress once the direction is set.

WHAT SETS GENIUS TEAMS APART

Genius teams show that imperfection and tension drive breakthroughs but need careful management to avoid destructive conflicts. They prioritize psychological mastery, treat team interactions seriously, and maintain ethical standards as they succeed.

BUILDING AI PRODUCTS

There are four methods for personalizing AI responses: prompt engineering, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), fine-tuning, and pre-training.

WAIT HERE: ON LINES AND WAITING ROOMS

Designing the waiting experience, whether through unstructured waiting rooms or orderly lines, significantly impacts anticipation, fairness, and overall emotional response. Thoughtful consideration of these elements can enhance the overall experience.

THE LITTLE TECH AGENDA

Little Tech faces significant threats from hostile government policies that favor big incumbents, stifling innovation and competition. Defending Little Tech politically and promoting supportive policies is crucial for sustaining American technological, economic, and military leadership.

LOSING A DAY A WEEK TO INEFFICIENCIES?

Developers lose at least one full day per week to inefficiencies. This issue persists largely unaddressed due to the intangible nature of knowledge work, high costs of fixes, and ingrained workplace habits, highlighting the need for a cultural shift towards addressing these inefficiencies.

BURDEN OF PROOF: GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT

In tech companies, every new project must rigorously justify its worth to avoid distracting from core priorities, as resource dilution and the allure of new initiatives can undermine focus and profitability.

WHY MORE COMPANIES SHOULD EMBRACE INTERIM LEADERS

Interim leaders provide immediate expertise and flexibility to businesses, offering a low-risk, short-term solution to critical roles, which can be beneficial for both companies and individuals by enabling a "try before you buy" approach.

THE PRODUCT MODEL AND ORG DESIGN

Transforming to a product model generally doesn't require reorganization, as the most appropriate organizational design is determined by the business strategy and product vision, with both the GM and Functional models capable of delivering excellent products if led by skilled and motivated teams.

HOW GOOGLE HANDLES JAVASCRIPT THROUGHOUT THE INDEXING PROCESS

There are common myths about how Google handles JavaScript during the indexing process. Through a study involving over 100,000 Googlebot fetches, researchers found that Google can render and index JavaScript content, including complex SPAs, dynamically loaded content, and streamed content. The study also debunked the myth of a significant rendering queue, showing that most pages are rendered within minutes, not days or weeks. As a result, people should feel free to use JS frameworks in their websites while still making sure that pages load fast.

DISSECTING PARTIAL PRE RENDERING

Partial Pre-Rendering (PPR) in Next.js combines the best of static site generation, server-side rendering, and client-side rendering. By pre-rendering static portions of a page at build time and streaming dynamic content at request time, PPR is able to have fast initial page loads, personalized content, and interactivity in a single HTTP request. This article goes into how PPR works.

BUILDING A MULTI-PLATFORM ON-CALL MOBILE APP

Incident.io chose React Native for its on-call mobile app because it could provide a native feel, a single codebase for iOS and Android, and code familiarity for its team. The team initially used Expo Go for rapid development and iteration during a hackathon, then transitioned to the "managed workflow" setup for production, using Expo's build services and implementing native features through Expo's "modules" system.

AFTER A DECADE OF REACT, IS FRONTEND A POST-REACT WORLD NOW?

React introduced the concept of a "virtual DOM" to optimize web app rendering. Its popularity led to widespread adoption, but also to criticisms regarding its learning curve, state management, and performance. While React's defenders highlight its improvements in recent versions, alternative frameworks like Svelte and Astro offer simpler approaches without relying on the virtual DOM.

DON'T ASK PERMISSION TO DO YOUR JOB CORRECTLY: AVOIDING THE TECHNICAL DEBT TRAP

Technical debt, often confused with cruft, is intentionally simplified code with a plan to address it and business alignment. Cruft is unintentional and lacks a plan. To avoid the technical debt trap, developers should prioritize clean code practices and communicate effectively with management to make sure technical debt is understood and addressed eventually.

WRITE BUG REPORTS DEVELOPERS LOVE

A checklist to write bug reports that developers love. It discusses what to put in the bug report and how to write it. Some important points include: titles should be short and specific, steps to reproduce the bug should be easy to follow, and screenshots should be added if possible.

GITOPPER

Gitopper enables a GitOps workflow for non-Kubernetes environments by automatically pulling changes from a Git repository and restarting services based on those changes, using sparse checkouts and bind mounts for efficient resource utilization.

NOTSHAZAM

An implementation of Shazam's song matching algorithm in Golang.

THREAT ACTOR ABUSES CLOUDFLARE TUNNELS TO DELIVER RATS

Proofpoint observed an increase in malware delivery through the abuse of Cloudflare Tunnels, particularly with the TryCloudflare feature. The campaign delivers remote access trojans (RATs) and has been evolving to bypass detection. It involves sending malicious emails with URLs or attachments, leading to the download and installation of malware like Xworm, AsyncRAT, VenomRAT, GuLoader, and Remcos.

THE TROUBLE WITH __ALL__

Python's `__all__` attribute is meant to define a module's public API, but it doesn't enforce it, allowing access to private elements. This can lead to tightly coupled modules and broken domain boundaries, especially in large projects. A custom `ModuleWrapper` class can enforce `__all__` but has downsides like runtime impact and limited scope.

OSCAR, AN OPEN-SOURCE CONTRIBUTOR AGENT ARCHITECTURE

Oscar is an open-source project that aims to improve software development by automating repetitive tasks for maintainers using large language models and deterministic code.

WORDGRINDER

A word processor that runs in the console.

GOOGLE CLOUD NOW HAS A DEDICATED CLUSTER OF NVIDIA GPUS FOR Y COMBINATOR STARTUPS

Google Cloud is partnering with Y Combinator to provide early-stage AI startups with subsidized access to GPUs and TPUs.

NEAT CSS

Neat is a minimalist CSS framework that's only 3KB.

* 80% test coverage in weeks—not years

* Unlimited parallel test runs

* 24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation that keeps you bug-free * Easy test exporting with no vendor lock-in

Schedule a demo to learn more

A FIRST LOOK AT APPLE INTELLIGENCE AND ITS (SLIGHTLY) SMARTER SIRI

Siri received a big update in iOS 18's latest developer preview. The update comes with meaningful improvements to language understanding. Future updates will add features like awareness of what's happening on users' screens and the ability to take actions on users' behalf. This article takes a look at the updated Siri and the other AI features introduced in the developer preview.

TIKTOK IS THROWING $20 MILLION A MONTH AT OPENAI VIA MICROSOFT

TikTok has been spending $20 million a month to purchase OpenAI models through Microsoft. The purchases make up about 25% of Microsoft's AI revenue. TikTok's parent ByteDance is reportedly building its own AI models - if successful, TikTok would no longer need OpenAI or Microsoft. Other companies reportedly purchasing OpenAI models through Microsoft include AT&T, Coca-Cola, Fidelity, Volvo, and Walmart.

AUSTRALIA STARTS WORLD-FIRST PEANUT ALLERGY TREATMENT FOR BABIES

Eligible babies with peanut allergies in Australia will be offered treatment to build immunity under a world-first program. The babies will be given gradually larger doses of peanut powder each day for at least two years to reduce sensitivity. The program will be extended to more hospitals and potentially other food allergies if it is found to be effective and safe. Families are advised not to try oral immunotherapy at home unsupervised.

THE SILICON VALLEY STARTUP USING AI TO SCOUR THE EARTH FOR COPPER AND LITHIUM

KoBold is using artificial intelligence to scour the earth for copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt. The company says that machine learning allows it to collect and analyze more sophisticated data about deposits than conventional exploration methods. It attained a valuation of more than $1 billion in 2023 and is currently looking to raise funds at a valuation of at least $2 billion. The company has more than 60 exploration projects in North America, Africa, and Australia.

📥 Get Surfshark for 80% off with 3 months EXTRA

NGTOP

ngtop is a command-line program for querying request counts from nginx's access.log files. It can count requests from various time periods, count requests to URLs matching a pattern, show top visited URLs matching a pattern, and more.

DICEDB

DiceDB is a drop-in replacement of Redis with SQL-based real-time reactivity. It is multithreaded and follows a shared-nothing architecture. DiceDB enables clients to listen to SQL queries and get notified in real-time whenever something changes. It currently only supports a subset of Redis commands and is not yet ready for production.

REDDIT CEO SAYS MICROSOFT NEEDS TO PAY TO SEARCH THE SITE

Reddit's CEO is calling on Microsoft and other companies to pay if they want to continue scraping the site's data. The site is now blocking companies that haven't signed agreements about how its data will be used or not used. Companies like Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity have refused to negotiate. OpenAI's SearchGPT will be able to show Reddit results as the two companies reached a deal earlier this year.

80% OF DEVELOPERS ARE UNHAPPY. THE PROBLEM IS NOT AI, NOR IS CODING

Stack Overflow's most recent annual Developer Survey showed that a majority of developers hate their jobs. Reasons for the dissatisfaction include failed expectations, technical debt, hustle culture, bureaucracy, and uncertainty and fear when it comes to career prospects. While most developers are in favor of using AI tools, many don't consider the tools reliable. 70% of professional programmers don't see AI as a threat to their work - many are instead worried about the spread of misinformation and misguided tasks.

HOW I COMPUTER IN 2024

A look at how the VP of Engineering at Canonical uses his computer - it covers which applications he uses, how he sets up his desktop environments, and more.

WHY SOFT DELETES ARE EVIL AND WHAT TO DO INSTEAD

Soft deletes create far more problems than they solve - use audit logs instead.

AMD IS BECOMING AN AI CHIP COMPANY, JUST LIKE NVIDIA

Nearly half of AMD's sales are now data center products.

T-MOBILE HAS A NEW SIDE GIG: FIBER INTERNET

T-Mobile has pieced together at least five partnerships with fiber-optic internet providers, putting the company on the cusp of becoming a major home internet provider in its own right.

XBOX CONSOLE SALES CONTINUE TO CRATER WITH MASSIVE 42% REVENUE DROP

While hardware sales are down, Microsoft's gaming content and services revenue are up a healthy-sounding 61 percent year-over-year.

10 CHARTS THAT CAPTURE HOW THE WORLD IS CHANGING

This article looks at emerging trends, such as the rise of ketamine, the decline of churches, and AI, and how they are set to change the world.

WHITE HOUSE SAYS NO NEED TO REGULATE OPEN SOURCE

The White House says there is no need to regulate open source systems for AI in their current form and to allow the community to continue developing the technology.