When media or politicians discussed regulating the software industry, I feared that the regulation would close the door to newcomers. Opening the doors to more startups and people should make “disruptions” less painful and more beneficial to our society. This belief made me against most regulatory approaches.
But I heard an analogy of the architecture design of a building vs. the actual building that changed my mind. An architect student is free to come up with a plan and learn from it, but the construction of the design that could affect people’s lives should be regulated. We can apply the same thinking to code vs. running service. This analogy will be my frame of thinking going forward.
Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash
People ❤️
Informal Communication
If your team works remotely, you need to put more effort into building the relationship. Gitlab uses video chats to organize social events to connect its people.
CodeOwnership
Do you let people outside your team commit to your codebase? I have heard and seen that different approaches at different companies: from collective code ownership of Facebook to strong code ownership at my previous employers. Most likely, the procedures are more organic than chosen consciously. Food for thought.
Software Engineering 🌐
Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor
If anything, I like the sound of “quantum supremacy.” It is something out of a sci-fi. Seriously, though, quantum supremacy is an idea that there is a set of problems cheap for quantum computers, but prohibitively expensive for classical computers. Cracking modern cryptography could be one such problem. The linked blog post about Google’s achievement is human-readable, so check it out!
When to useMemo and useCallback
One useful reminder that premature optimization could be more expensive than a naive approach.
Apollo GraphQL: Local state management
This article is rather long and not too approachable. But it helped me understand the Apollo Client’s behavior more deeply. I recommend it to the experienced GraphQL users.
Business 💸
“…and we’d like to allow users to message each other”
Since there are so many chat apps, your product manager wants to add the feature to your app as well. You may think it’s just another WebSocket feature and say yes. And you will spend days and nights solving group chat moderation and abuse monitoring. I know. I have been there. Think through the feature and understand possible implications beforehand.
An insider look at the serious business of esports training
The profile of a Southeast Asian progamer, which I found fascinating.
youngk.im 