I hate to admit but I have been experiencing some mannerisms after a while at Netflix. I still find the work challenging and rewarding but learned to give up some fights after a while—problems such as how to run sprints, or how to organize our codes. When I first joined, I tried to question them and hopefully improve them. But I wasn’t enough and eventually got desensitized to those recurring issues. I always had other more pressing work to do.
But after new team members joined, they renewed the team’s energy to revisit those old challenges. They have been speaking up during the code reviews and sprint planning meetings when they don’t understand why. In less than a month, we reorganized our codebase, scheduled a new weekly design-eng sync, and started spending time more consciously during the meetings. I am grateful for this opportunity to grow as a team and looking forward to the coming months.
People ❤
How I Write & How to Write Usefully
I have been trying to write more because I can clarify my thinking and retain my learnings better by writing. At the same time, I also have had a hard time coming up with ideas and writing coherent long articles. I appreciated that both prolific authors shared their processes and the work they put into each writing.
Software Engineering 🌐
Fix the slow render before you fix the re-render
The math is simple. Your app will need to render at least once. So if that render is slow (say >50 ms), it doesn’t matter whether your app renders only once. I also learned to differentiate “render,” “reconciliation,” and “commit” in React land.
renamer: Rename files in bulk
My current codebase is a hodgepodge of camelCase, PascalCase, and kebob-case. I look forward to cleaning those up with this tool. But I would love to have a tool that will update dependency paths in files.
What’s behind the hype about Blazor?
Blazor is a client-side UI framework based on .NET and C#. I asked JS engineers at the company about their thoughts and was surprised to see that many who I respected loved writing C#. So maybe there is something to the framework.
Business 💸
The Gross Margin Problem: Lessons for Tech-Enabled Startups & The New Business of AI (and How It’s Different From Traditional Software)
Two articles, although they analyze two different verticals (physical world products and AI), share the same insight. Gross margin used to be great for software companies, where the cost of serving customers after the first one was effectively zero. But efficiency starts to matter.
Cool things of the week 😎
YouTuber uses neural networks to upscale 1896 short film to 4K 60 fps
I got so used to HD that I find movies before 2010 hard to watch. Maybe, we can get remaster releases of classics such as Starcraft or Warcraft Remasters using this technique like this.
youka: Generate karaoke for any song in any language
Another cool AI technique splitting the voice and the instruments from audio to generate karaoke video.
youngk.im 