Search the archive

THE GOOGLE MAPS PIN SCAM: A NEW GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE THREAT

Scammers can change the map location of Google Business Profiles using the ‘Suggest an edit' feature, potentially tanking the rankings for that business.

YOUTUBE MUSIC IS TESTING AN AI-GENERATED RADIO FEATURE AND ADDING A SONG RECOGNITION TOOL

YouTube Music has introduced an AI-powered radio for custom playlists and a Shazam-like tool for identifying songs by singing, humming, or playing them.

Attend live [4] or sign up for the on-demand version

STARTING AN ANALYTICS ORG FROM SCRATCH — LESSONS FROM A DECADE AT DOORDASH

This piece outlines the essentials for establishing and evolving an analytics function in a startup, covering the importance of focusing on organizational needs, structuring data consumption, hiring the right talent with a mix of hard and soft skills, and adapting the team as the company grows and concluding with an analytics readiness checklist.

MVP IS OVER. YOU NEED TO THINK ABOUT MVE

Startups should focus on creating a Minimum Valuable Experience, rather than just a Minimum Viable Product. The A.C.T. (audience, communication, and touchpoints) framework can help to identify and deliver valuable experiences that resonate with the target audience.

EMBRACING PRODUCT-LED GROWTH: PRINCIPLES, STRATEGIES, AND METRICS

Grammarly's journey, scaling from 1M to 30M users in five years with a lean team of ~300 employees, exemplifies a successful product-led growth strategy. The strategy focuses on leveraging the product itself to drive user acquisition, retention, and expansion. Key PLG goals include organic growth, conversion to premium plans, and building communities.

UNDERPERFORMER

Labeling someone's performance as not meeting expectations differs significantly from labeling the person as an underperformer, as the former recognizes the influence of context and environment on performance, while the latter unfairly attributes the issue solely to the individual, ignoring the complexities of skills, experience, attitudes, and workplace culture.

MORE ENGINEERS IS NOT THE SOLUTION

PMs often say they need more engineers when CEOs ask how to 10x users or revenue, but the true issues typically lie in strategy, culture, or market problems. Adding engineers can temporarily worsen productivity, lead to unrealistic output expectations, and ultimately shift the problem from lacking engineers to hiring and performance issues. Simply increasing headcount won't address the underlying challenges.

HOW TO DEAL WITH B2B SALES-DRIVEN FEATURE REQUESTS

Product managers in B2B can face challenges not present in the consumer space, such as dealing with complex sales requests and achieving scalability. A key strategy to tackling this is prioritizing product capabilities and creating a scalable culture, while staying open to sales-driven needs.

BUILD THOUGHTFULLY

Building great products requires two distinct pursuits: creating what customers want, which demands practicality, customer empathy, and speed, and betting on an unproven future, which necessitates visionary, zealous individuals who can drive ambitious, creative thinking despite fear, bureaucracy, and skepticism.

GREAT EXECUTION AS A LEADER

Great execution goes beyond visible activity and meeting deadlines - it encompasses outstanding results, creativity, and strategic thinking. Misunderstanding the blend of strategy and execution, as seen in responses undervaluing Steve Jobs' execution, highlights a lack of comprehension of what truly drives success.

KEY SECTIONS FOR A HIGH-CONVERTING LANDING PAGE

Here are 9 key sections to include in a high-converting landing page, drawn from years of landing page design experience.

CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS ARE A MIXED BAG AND MAY MISLEAD PMS DOWN THE WRONG PATH

Customer interviews can be misleading, as demonstrated by Netflix's failed hypothesis on improving retention through higher-rated movies.

FOG OF WAR

Remix's "Fog of War" feature dynamically loads route information based on user interactions. This optimizes React Router SSR applications by decoupling rendering from fetching, resulting in a "fetch then render" approach that eliminates network waterfalls. It uses a Route Manifest to prefetch route data and components so that navigation is smooth.

HOW WE TAMED NODE.JS EVENT LOOP LAG: A DEEPDIVE

Trigger encountered reliability and performance issues in its Node.js application due to event loop lag, which led to high CPU usage and crashes. To fix this, it fixed inefficient code, added pagination, and monitored event loop lag with OpenTelemetry. Moving forward, it will keep an eye on larger payloads, as a learning from this experience.

HOW BOOKING.COM SCALED THEIR CUSTOMER REVIEW SYSTEM

Booking.com scaled its customer review system by sharding reviews across multiple servers using the internal ID of accommodations as the partition key. When it needed to add more machines to the cluster due to increased traffic, it used the Jump Hash Sharding algorithm to minimize the amount of data that needed to be rearranged. This algorithm guaranteed monotonicity, meaning that data was only transferred from old shards to new shards during resharding, avoiding unnecessary data movement.

USE A WORK JOURNAL TO RECOVER FOCUS FASTER AND CLARIFY YOUR THOUGHTS

It can be hard to maintain focus, especially when switching between tasks. Keeping a work journal to record your thoughts and actions can help you think more clearly and regain context faster. Writing down what you're doing and reading the last few sentences when resuming work can be a helpful tool for improving focus.

THE GHOST JOBS HAUNTING YOUR CAREER SEARCH

Ghost jobs are job postings that companies don't intend to fill. Companies post ghost jobs for various reasons like wanting to hire eventually, maintaining a talent pool, or creating a false impression of company growth. To avoid ghost jobs, job seekers should be wary of vague job descriptions, old listings, and companies with little online presence.

styling. Start with the free, full-featured demo

SCALE LANG

SCALE is a GPGPU programming toolkit that allows CUDA applications to be natively compiled for AMD GPUs. It does not require the CUDA program or its build system to be modified.

CLAUDE DEV

Claude Dev is a VSCode extension that can handle complex software development tasks step-by-step. It can read & write files, create entire projects from scratch, and execute terminal commands (after you grant permission). Claude Dev can assist you in ways that go beyond simple code completion or tech support.

PR PILOT

PR Pilot is an AI agent for your development workflow that can search and manipulate the code base, browse the internet, and interact with GitHub issues and pull requests.

WHY FACEBOOK DOESN'T USE GIT

Facebook chose Mercurial over Git because Mercurial is written in a more modular way that makes it easier to extend. Additionally, back when Facebook adopted Mercurial, its developer community was more helpful in addressing Facebook's specific scaling problems. However, it is true that Git is a familiar tool for many engineers, and Mercurial was not necessarily the faster choice out of the box.

SAFEGUARDING APP HEALTH AND CONSUMER EXPERIENCE WITH METRIC-AWARE ROLLOUTS

DoorDash uses metric-aware rollouts to automatically detect and address app quality degradation during experiment rollouts. This new feature allows for faster response to issues and a much better customer experience by automatically pausing rollouts and alerting experiment owners when app quality degradation is detected.

IT'S ABOUT TIME I TRIED TO EXPLAIN WHAT PROGRESSIVE ENHANCEMENT ACTUALLY IS

Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where a website is built in layers, starting with a solid baseline experience for all users and progressively adding enhancements based on browser capabilities. This approach prioritizes functionality and accessibility for all users, regardless of their device or browser, and uses JavaScript as an enhancement rather than a requirement. This is the opposite of graceful degradation, where a "perfect" experience is designed and then broken down for less capable browsers, potentially resulting in a broken user interface.

MAKO

Mako is a new open-source front-end build tool based on Rust.

IS TYPESCRIPT JUST A LINTER?

TypeScript is not just a linter but a typed language built on JavaScript, with the ability to infer types and act as a linter due to the presence of the 'any' type.

I'M NOT A FAN OF STRLCPY(3)

The strlcpy function in C is inefficient - use memccpy, memcpy, or strdup instead.

THE GRAYING OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY NEEDS FRESH BLOOD

The open source community needs to attract younger developers to maintain and improve existing projects as many experienced programmers are aging and burning out.

Put your team on the path to continuous improvement with Swarmia

GOOGLE REPORTEDLY IN ADVANCED TALKS TO ACQUIRE CYBER STARTUP WIZ FOR $23 BILLION, ITS LARGEST-EVER DEAL

Google may be acquiring cybersecurity firm Wiz for $23 billion. Wiz, founded in 2020, had been eyeing an IPO as recently as May, when it achieved a valuation of $12 billion. Its security offering gives companies insight into their full cloud presence. If completed, the deal will be Google's largest acquisition yet.

SPACEX ROCKET ACCIDENT LEAVES THE COMPANY'S STARLINK SATELLITES IN THE WRONG ORBIT

A SpaceX rocket has failed for the first time in nearly a decade. The upper stage engine of the Falcon 9 rocket malfunctioned several minutes into flight. It left 20 Starlink satellites in an orbit less than half of what was intended. The company is attempting to boost some of the satellites to a higher orbit using onboard ion thrusters, but it is unlikely to be successful. The satellites will likely return to the atmosphere and burn up. The Federal Aviation Administration says the problem must be fixed before SpaceX can fly its Falcon rockets again.

EX-META SCIENTISTS DEBUT GIGANTIC AI PROTEIN DESIGN MODEL

EvolutionaryScale, a company launched by ex-Meta scientists, applies cutting-edge machine learning models trained on language and images to biological data. It has developed a model that speaks the language of proteins called ESM3. ESM3 can be used to create proteins to specifications provided by users. It has been used to create new fluorescent molecules. A small version of the model that was trained without data from specific viruses, pathogens, and toxins has been open sourced.

THIS IS THE FASTEST OBJECT EVER MADE BY HUMANS, AND IT'S NOT SLOWING DOWN

NASA's Parker Solar Probe was recorded traveling at 635,266 kilometers per hour on June 29. It is expected to reach a top speed of around 692,000 kph when it makes its closest approach to the Sun in 2025. The probe uses Venus' gravity to create a sort of gravity-powered slingshot to reach its incredible speeds. It will eventually get within 6.12 million kilometers of the layer of ionized gas considered to be the Sun's surface.

Join the hack session on July 25 🤖 🛠️

PROPERTY: NEXT-GEN CSS VARIABLES NOW WITH UNIVERSAL BROWSER SUPPORT

@property extends the CSS language by providing meaning and context to CSV variables. It can be used to define a type for custom properties, preventing unexpected results and supporting new possibilities like animating gradients. The enhanced type safety opens up new opportunities for testing and validation directly within CSS.

CAN CHATGPT DO DATA SCIENCE?

The challenges of using ChatGPT are worse for data science tasks. Data scientists often work with very large data sets that have quality issues on tasks that may require domain expertise. Using ChatGPT will mean that data scientists also have to understand the context, data, code, and assumptions in ChatGPT's responses. Data scientists are still undecided whether tasks in the field are suitable for ChatGPT or not.

OPENAI REVENUE

Sam Altman projected $3.4 billion in annual recurring revenue for OpenAI in June. This report takes a look at publicly available data to calculate whether this projection is accurate. Most of OpenAI's revenue comes from ChatGPT Plus subscribers, with around 21% coming from ChatGPT Enterprise and 15% from the API. The full report is available in the article.

HERE'S HOW MUCH VALVE PAYS ITS STAFF — AND HOW FEW PEOPLE IT EMPLOYS

Valve employed just 336 staff in 2021. Its small number of staff across the board seems to explain why the company's product list is so limited despite its immense business. Its profitability per employee is higher than that of Google, Amazon, or Microsoft. A table containing employee pay data from Valve sorted by year and category is available in the article.

or on-prem systems. Start here

AT&T SAYS HACKER STOLE CELL, TEXT DATA ON NEARLY ALL ITS WIRELESS CUSTOMERS

The records included details about how different phone numbers interacted with each other but no contents of the calls or messages.

THE SIX DUMBEST IDEAS IN COMPUTER SECURITY

These ideas are usually misguided attempts to do the impossible by well-meaning people or companies who just don't fully understand the situation.

ELON MUSK'S X TO SUBLEASE S.F. HEADQUARTERS, TECH COMPANY'S FUTURE IN CITY UNCLEAR

The Mid-Market area has been struggling with rising vacancies, quality-of-life issues, and dropping real estate values since the pandemic.

DEAR AWS, PLEASE LET ME BE A CLOUD ENGINEER AGAIN

AWS' obsession with Generative AI is causing it to neglect everything that made it the leading cloud provider in almost every metric.

USE A WORK JOURNAL TO RECOVER FOCUS FASTER AND CLARIFY YOUR THOUGHTS

Using a work journal can help maintain focus while switching contexts all day long.