2022.09.12 - How Technical People Make Products

Title: 2022.09.12 – How Technologists Can Build Products

Building Products & A 40‑Year‑Old Programmer & Less In More & Education for a New Era & Dayu

This Week’s Hot Topics

Yu Bo’s Product Thoughts: How Technologists Can Build Products https://www.yuque.com/yuque/blog/kyet95
What else can a technologist do besides coding? Many have wondered about this. One answer is “build products,” because every technologist harbors a product dream. Today I want to discuss that topic: how technologists can build products, and share some of the insights I’ve gathered along the way.

The Forty‑Year Programmer https://codefol.io/posts/the-forty-year-programmer/
I’m not going to tell you which language or framework to learn. If you’ve mastered the fundamentals, you can pick up anything you want. Until then, you can be bad at whichever one you choose—that’s how I started, anyway. Instead, I’ll talk about the things that didn’t make sense to me at the beginning and that now serve as guiding stars. It’s not about specific technologies; they come and go, as do languages. They can’t be your sky. Let’s begin with this: software is young. Related: 30 thoughts on turning 30.

Less Is More Agile https://beny23.github.io/posts/my_take_on_engineering_room_9/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706548
Software engineers often forget the simplicity at the heart of Agile. Too often we chase solutions in process and technology, when the first thought should echo the manifesto’s “people over process.” That means talking to people—whether they’re users, stakeholders, teammates, or colleagues from other teams. The simplest solutions are often the most efficient, and that includes resisting the urge to “write a software tool for that” when a few Post‑It notes would suffice.

Research: Quantifying GitHub Copilot’s Impact on Developer Productivity and Happiness https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-copilots-impact-on-developer-productivity-and-happiness/
When the GitHub Copilot Technical Preview launched a little over a year ago, we wanted to answer one question: Is this tool actually helping developers? The GitHub Next team conducted research using surveys and experiments, yielding both expected and surprising results.

Rewriting Tests from Cypress to Playwright Using GPT‑3 https://contra.com/p/PWBcPYZc-rewriting-tests-from-cypress-to-playwright-using-gpt-3
Cypress and @playwright/test are competing integration‑testing frameworks. We’d used Cypress for a long time but recently decided to migrate all 400 of our Cypress tests to Playwright. The speed and reliability gains (more on that in a future post) make it absolutely worth it… but it seemed like a massive amount of manual work! Or so I thought…

Article Series: Continuous Architecture https://www.infoq.com/articles/continous-architecture-article-series/
In this series we reframe software architecture as the set of decisions teams make about how their system will satisfy quality‑attribute requirements (QARs) such as scalability, security, performance, throughput, sustainability, and so on—requirements that go beyond functional needs. While code can show how a system meets functional requirements, how it meets its QARs is far more subtle, often hidden. Viewing architecture through the lens of decisions completes the picture by clarifying what choices were made and why. Related: Foundations for Successful Fintech Infrastructure.

Deep Reads

Preact: Introducing Signals https://preactjs.com/blog/introducing-signals/
Signals provide a way to express state that keeps apps fast no matter how complex they become. Built on reactive principles, they offer excellent developer ergonomics with a unique implementation optimized for the Virtual DOM.

The 100 % Markdown Expedition https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/09/the-100-percent-markdown-expedition/
In June 2021 we decided to start converting MDN Web Docs source code from HTML to a format that would be easier for us to work with. The goal: migrate 100 % of our manually written documentation to Markdown—a massive mountain of source to climb. This post explains why we chose Markdown and outlines the steps that can help us on this mission.

Critical CSS? Not So Fast! https://csswizardry.com/2022/09/critical-css-not-so-fast/
I’ve long held strong opinions about the Critical CSS pattern. In theory—under perfect conditions—it’s demonstrably a Good Idea™. In practice, however, it often proves fragile and costly, rarely delivering the benefits many developers expect.

My Blog Is Hilariously Over‑Engineered to the Point People Think It’s a Static Site https://xeiaso.net/talks/how-my-website-works
Speed. Safety. Development experience. Fearless concurrency. These are all qualities you associate with Rust programs. Want more buzzwords? How about “elegant”? I’m Xe Iaso, and I’ll share the gritty details of how my blog works—and why people often mistake it for a static site. Buckle up; we’re about to explore the internet.

Three Developer Mistakes: Schema Design https://www.singlestore.com/blog/three-developer-mistakes-schema-design/
Modern tech stacks require developers to juggle many parts of an application: frontend UI, orchestration, APIs, and the database.

Vulnerability Management for Go https://go.dev/blog/vuln
We’re excited to announce Go’s new support for vulnerability management, our first step toward helping Go developers learn about known vulnerabilities that may affect them. This post provides an overview of what’s available today and the next steps for the project.

Viewing the World as a Computer: Global Capacity Management https://engineering.fb.com/2022/09/06/data-center-engineering/viewing-the-world-as-a-computer-global-capacity-management/
Meta currently operates 14 data centers worldwide. This rapidly expanding global footprint creates new challenges for service owners and our infrastructure‑management systems. Systems like Twine (used to scale cluster management) and RAS (which handles perpetual region‑wide resource allocation) give service owners the abstractions and automation needed to be machine‑agnostic within a region. As we add more data‑center regions, we need new approaches to global service and capacity management. That’s why we built new systems—Global Reservations Service and Regional Fluidity—that determine the best placement for a service based on intent, needs, and current congestion.

A Bug That Was 23 Years Old—or Not [https://dan

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Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.