As I gain more years of experience, I keep wondering about a couple of things. First, where do I go from here? Second, where will I be when I retire? Per the first question, these two articles (here, and here) provide a good roadmap. Per the second, I am not so sure. But I was glad to find out about Python creator’s retirement last week. I hear a lot about up-and-coming young engineers, but not about older engineers. Some part of me was relieved that at least some engineers successfully retire.
Photo by insung yoon on Unsplash
People ❤️
Managing your manager
We all share the responsibilities with our managers to get the resources and deliver. It is about trust and transparency. Help your managers and, by doing so, help yourself.
Do we have to love our work?
Work-life balance is for all of us to think about. We, as individuals, need to find the right balance for ourselves. I like my line-of-work, and I want to do it well. I happen to like my employer, as well. But I won’t sacrifice my evenings or weekends for it.
Software Engineering 🌐
Building Great User Experiences with Concurrent Mode and Suspense [in React]
I had a hard time understanding this article since I haven’t had to think about performance deeply. This article is essentially about creating resource hints for data and code, a step forward from HTML’s resource hints. I hope the instrumentation be rather straightforward; otherwise, I fear I won’t care enough.
Minimum Viable Product vs. Minimum Delightful Product
The idea isn’t new. If our product is not delightful and, thus, not viable in the market, we should strive to be delightful enough. However, I do think it is useful to have a different vocabulary to emphasize the point.
Business 💸
AlphaStar: Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning
AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol less than four years ago. When DeepMind announced that they would go after Starcraft II, I wondered how long it would take to create an AI capable of beating top human players under the similar interface constraints. DeepMind achieved that a little over three and a half years. This is a fantastic feat, considering the enormous problem space, and imperfect information.
NPM: Add fund subcommand and GitHub Sponsors is now out of beta in 30 countries
Open source funding is still an ongoing issue for which key infrastructure players are trying to come up with solutions. I hope they work at scale, but I am also pessimistic about human nature.
youngk.im 