Search the archive

FACEBOOK CONTINUES TO ADD USERS AFTER 20 YEARS OF EXISTENCE

Despite its age and evolving landscape, Facebook continues to grow, reaching over 3 billion monthly active users.

NEARLY 8 IN 10 CONSUMERS WOULD RATHER RECEIVE MORE ADS THAN PAY FOR DIGITAL CONTENT AND SERVICES

IAB released a consumer privacy study that contains users' opinions over the open ad-supported Internet. Findings include the overwhelming preference for ads over paid content and services and the lack of trust in data and privacy practices.

WHY YOUR TOP OF FUNNEL METRICS ARE MISLEADING

Meta’s Threads is the perfect case study on how top-of-funnel numbers don’t always reflect trends in sustained revenue.

YOUR REFERRAL LINK - https://tldr.tech/marketing?ref=2613930

HOW TECH OUTSTAYED ITS WELCOME

This article dives into the history of tech and the current state of consumer disillusionment using Apple's release of the Vision Pro as a case study to highlight the gap between the industry's lofty assurances and the actual user experience. Tech giants have lost touch with consumers due to growth-focused business strategies and a lack of meaningful innovation.

B2B PRODUCT MANAGERS: WHAT VALUE ARE YOU ADDING?

It is crucial for PMs in B2B to understand market and customer needs independently, beyond just feature delivery. A strong market knowledge foundation is essential to making informed decisions, impacting the product lifecycle, and guiding sales teams effectively.

THE BIGGEST UNTAPPED OPPORTUNITY

The key source of waste in companies is the untapped potential of skilled pragmatists - employees who possess valuable skills but work within the system without seeking recognition or challenging the status quo. Companies often overlook this pool of talent, focusing on more visible issues or rewarding those more deft at maximizing optics.

HOW PMS CAN BENEFIT FROM JOB HOPPING

Job hopping can significantly enhance a PM’s market value and skill set by exposing them to diverse industries and practices. This article emphasizes growth over comfort while explaining the benefits of gaining broader expertise and becoming more marketable through changing jobs, despite the risk of being perceived negatively by some employers.

OUTSOURCING UX DESIGN: THE BEST PRODUCT DECISION YOU’LL EVER MAKE

This article highlights the strategic advantages of outsourcing UX design, emphasizing cost savings, operational efficiency, and access to specialized expertise. It covers the benefits of partnering with external UX agencies, including domain knowledge, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and the flexibility of team augmentation, making it an insightful read for product leaders seeking to optimize resources and enhance product development.

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT WILL BE TAKEN OVER BY AI IN 5 YEARS

There may be a potential shift in product management in the next few years. AI advancements may be able to automate up to 80% of current tasks and potentially redefine the PM role within five years. Strategic, creative, and human-centric aspects of product management will gain prominence, while AI takes over data analysis and predictive tasks.

THE VALUE ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK

This framework helps define, deliver, and ensure the perception of value in products, emphasizing the variation in customer needs based on their profile and product maturity. It details how to create a value table for different customer profiles, assessing value definition, delivery, and perception, and highlights the importance of honest assessment in addressing gaps.

HOW TO BUILD AN ICONIC BRAND

How to think about a brand pre-launch, covering hypotheses, minimum viable brands, and how to spend just enough to scale post-launch.

12-MONTH MBA FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS

This post shares a DIY MBA program for PMs, providing a structured curriculum with recommended readings, online resources, and downloadable product management diagrams. It also highlights new PM resources to consider.

WHY USING A NOW/NEXT/LATER ROADMAP MIGHT BE RIGHT FOR YOU

A now/next/later roadmap emphasizes the limitations of deadline-driven development and advocates for short-term, prioritized commitments, planned upcoming work, and potential future priorities. It allows for flexibility and adaptation based on evolving data.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO PRODUCT FEATURES ANALYSIS

This guide details how to identify popular features, measure their value and ROI, and decide which to optimize, monetize, or remove. There is a need for detailed data tracking, mature analytics, and adapting to product uniqueness.

HOW TO TEST NEW PRICING & PACKAGING

Pricing adjustments, such as modifying plan prices, usage limits, or introducing new tiers, can yield high ROI with minimal engineering effort. These changes, often less time-consuming than major feature developments, can significantly boost conversion rates and average revenue and reduce churn.

EVERYTHING I HATE ABOUT PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

A rant about product management spotted on Reddit.

YOU CAN JUST DO THINGS

What it means to be high agency.

YOUR REFERRAL LINK - https://tldr.tech/product?ref=2613930

Discount ends 2/13, so save your spot now.

HOW WE INCREASED SEARCH TRAFFIC BY 20X IN 4 MONTHS WITH THE NEXT.JS APP ROUTER

Properly optimizing a Next.js web application can lead to much faster load times, and thus, much better search traffic from Google. Some of the techniques that can be used to speed up a Next.js web app include using server-side rendering as much as possible, fetching server-side and hydrating client-side, bootstrapping the most important data, creating ghost components, removing excess providers, and optimizing font loading. This post goes deep into the technical aspects of each of these techniques, providing detailed images, explanations, and code examples.

REDUCING BIGQUERY COSTS BY 260X

Implementing clustering in large tables can help reduce BigQuery costs significantly. This article provides an example of a MERGE query and compares the costs and performance between clustered and unclustered tables. The results show that clustering can lead to a 260x reduction in data processed, 20x lower slot time, and 268x lower costs.

WHY DOES GOOGLE RECOMMEND MODULAR MONOLITHS INSTEAD OF MICROSERVICES?

A recent Google paper found that most of its developers split binaries for one of the following reasons: performance improvements, fault tolerance, abstraction boundaries, and/or flexible rollouts. The paper recommends developers use modular monoliths to write applications and leverage a runtime to dynamically and automatically assign components to physical processes. This approach has worked for Google: it reduces application latency by up to 15x and costs by up to 9x.

HOW NOT TO BOMB YOUR OFFER NEGOTIATION

This is one of the most original guides on offer negotiation for software engineers. It covers both the big picture and the nitty-gritty of offer negotiation, including a step-by-step process of a successful negotiation. Some of the advice offered includes trying to negotiate over the phone if possible, having alternatives, and asking for more by being motivated by more than just money. This article provides several real-life example scenarios of negotiation.

2024 GUIDE TO MENTORING FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

Mentoring others is often an essential part of being a senior engineer or manager. This article covers everything you need to know about finding someone to mentor and setting them up for success from start to finish. Topics range from how to find a mentee to managing your relationship to help them grow, how to provide actionable feedback in an empathetic way, and tools for crafting a growth plan with them.

BROWSERS ARE WEIRD RIGHT NOW

Arc Browser has intuitive tab management and a good picture-in-picture mode. Firefox has cross-platform support and personal customization options. Chrome is what everybody practically uses. Safari is battery-friendly on macOS.

coverage [12] in just 4 months. And they guarantee zero flakes.

They build and maintain your test suite in Playwright + include unlimited parallel test runs on their infrastructure.

PANDA CSS

Panda CSS is a styling engine that generates CSS-in-JS styles in a type-safe and readable way. It is compatible with various frameworks, including Next.js, Vue, Svelte, and Astro.

WEB2PDF

Web2PDF is a CLI to convert web pages into well-formatted PDFs.

NATURALSQL

NaturalSQL is a series of LLM models that can produce accurate SQL from natural language.

VESUVIUS CHALLENGE 2023 GRAND PRIZE AWARDED: WE CAN READ THE FIRST SCROLL!

The Vesuvius Challenge asked people to use AI to read an ancient library of papyrus scrolls that are now stored in Naples, Italy. The scrolls are rolled up and practically lumps of carbonized ash, so they cannot be opened without being severely damaged. A team of three won the prize of $700k for being able to read 5% of the scroll. There are now multiple new challenges and 6-figure dollar amounts available in prizes to continue reading the rest of the scroll. So far, the scroll talks philosophically about pleasure and how to enjoy life.

MAKING A PDF THAT’S LARGER THAN GERMANY

A couple of years back, a tweet claimed that the maximum size of a PDF is half of Germany. This post dives into this claim and proves how big PDFs can actually be. It also explains the inner structure of PDFs and how you can change page sizes. Most PDF sizes are limited only by the PDF reader and not the PDF itself. Turns out, the biggest size of a PDF is 15 million inches, or roughly the distance of Earth to the moon.

GOOGLE THROWS $1M AT RUST FOUNDATION TO BUILD C++ BRIDGES

Google has donated $1 million to the Rust Foundation to enhance interoperability between the Rust programming language and C++. This move aims to improve memory safety, as memory safety errors are a significant source of vulnerabilities for Google and Microsoft.

ASK HN: WHAT HAVE YOU BUILT WITH LLMS? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Hacker News commenters have used LLMs to build sales call simulators, a better Apple experience using Apple Shortcuts, a real-life Pokedex, an interactive resume AI chatbot, and more.

HTTP GARDEN

The HTTP Garden is a collection of HTTP servers and proxies with scripts to interact with them that allow for finding vulnerabilities easier.

YOUR REFERRAL LINK - https://tldr.tech/webdev?ref=2613930

GOOGLE WILL NO LONGER BACK UP THE INTERNET: CACHED WEBPAGES ARE DEAD

Google is killing off its cached links feature. The company says that the feature was designed as an alternative way to load websites when people couldn't depend on a page loading, but technology has improved to the point Google feels it can retire it. While users can currently still create cache links manually, all of Google's support pages about cached sites have been taken down. Deleting cache data will free up an uncountable number of petabytes of data for Google, which is currently in an era of cost savings.

THE FIRST REDDIT REVIEWS OF THE VISION PRO ARE IN

OBESITY DRUGS HAVE ANOTHER SUPERPOWER: TAMING INFLAMMATION

The drugs classified as GLP-1 receptor agonists have been shown to reduce inflammation in the liver, kidneys, heart, and brain. These drugs include semaglutide and tirzepatide, which are marketed as treatments for diabetes and obesity. This effect is leading scientists to hope that they could be used to treat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, which both involve brain inflammation. More than 20 clinical trials are now exploring the drugs as therapies for the two conditions.

ANTI-AGING PILL FOR SENIOR DOGS IS NOW IN CLINICAL TRIALS

Biotech company Loyal has launched a study that will test a daily anti-aging pill in senior dogs. The pill is designed to help dogs live and stay healthy longer. Dogs must weigh at least 14 pounds, be at least 10 years old, and live near one of 55 participating vet clinics to enroll in the study. Loyal plans to enroll 1,000 senior dogs in the study, which has already begun. A link for dog owners to sign their pets up for the study is available in the article.

Download the cheatsheet from Datadog

INTRODUCING PKL, A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE FOR CONFIGURATION

Pkl is a programming language for producing configurations that are declarative and simple to read and write. It features capabilities borrowed from general-purpose languages like classes, functions, conditionals, and loops. Pkl can build abstraction layers to meet many different types of configuration needs. It can produce static configuration files in any format or be embedded as a library into another application runtime. Pkl code can be shared by creating packages and publishing them.

THE PAIN POINTS OF BUILDING A COPILOT

Companies everywhere are launching copilots, AI assistants that leverage large language models to assist with tasks. This article looks at the process of building these products, the pain points, and the opportunities for AI tools. The information was gathered from semi-structured interviews with developers from a variety of companies that are working on copilots. It is still very early in the field of product copilots and it will be interesting to see how software engineering will evolve over the next several years.

REMAKING THE APP STORE

The iPhone proposed a new kind of tradeoff for the software industry - it put security, privacy, and reliability over the freedom to change anything and do anything. While this tradeoff is right for almost everyone, Apple uses its control for selfish reasons that are not about security, privacy, or reliability at all. The DMA appears to be trying to stop gatekeepers from abusing their control over competitors while also requiring them to control all sorts of other policy objectives. Apple's response to the DMA suggests that nothing much will change.

WHEN SHOULD YOU GIVE UP ON A PROJECT THAT DOESN'T WORK?

If you have an idea, you should test your hypothesis as soon as possible. Being afraid that your hypothesis may be wrong can lead you to spend time working on something that won't pay off. Early testing can validate an idea - you will know straight away if something is worth building. Procrastination can sometimes be a sign that you subconsciously know a project isn't going to work out the way you thought it would.

3-day money-back guarantee* Join 1 million travelers