I had a disappointing week because our user acceptance testing session after a month of hard work revealed two blocking issues. I don’t expect huge changes, so the release will be delayed only about a week. Normally, I would expect some amount of rework and often appreciate this feedback since it means we can release a better product. But this delay sapped my morale.
Thinking over the weekend, I see two reasons why I am so disappointed. First, I have led the engineering effort for this project and communicated with the stakeholders about the release plan. While I accept the inevitable uncertainty, I still feel that I am responsible for the delay, and it doesn’t feel great.
Second, this is the last project before I move to a different domain, and this delay leaves me in a limbo state longer. I need a clean closure and want to focus on the new domain, which already has many projects that require my attention. But this project is getting in the way.
Hopefully, by the next issue, I will have completed the project!
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
Software Engineering 🌐
Deno 1.0 – Ryan Dahl, Bert Belder, and Bartek Iwańczuk
The biggest news in Javascript last week was the announcement of Deno 1.0. Deno is out to simplify and secure the ecosystem, as outlined two years ago. Deno promises to provide stable and standard browser APIs. While its ecosystem is split from the Node ecosystem and still very nascent, it already offers many standardized solutions to common problems, such as formatting and running on AWS Lambda.
Native Javascript APIs are now powerful enough for most tasks, thanks to quickly evolving ECMAScript standards. If we have some key libraries for data access and web server framework production-ready, Deno will be useable as a webserver.
Apollo Server File Upload Best Practices – Khalil Stemmler
JSON isn’t the only form of data that needs to be sent between clients and servers. I read this article in preparation for the internal GraphQL discussions. As the article suggests, it makes sense to isolate binary data handling from GraphQL servers.
The JavaScript coders guide to getting more from GitHub and NPM – Edward Thomson
This video is a sneak peek at the upcoming npm 7. A picture is worth a thousand words and a video worth a thousand pictures. You can find improved npm audit at 7:36, yarn support at 13:56, and workspace support at 16:32.
People ❤
Autonomy vs. Leverage – Marty Cagan
I appreciate this list of factors to consider when you tradeoff between autonomy and leverage. Two factors new to me were Level of Accountability and Importance of Integration. If you want the work by many teams to integrate with relative ease, you will want to align on common interfaces, which is what my org is going through.
Business 💸
#LoveWhereverYouWork – Twitter
Twitter announced last week that it would support a permanently remote workforce. Even though there have been some notable remote-first or remote-only companies, we never had it at a Twitter scale. As more companies support remote work, it will have a massive implication on the local economy (commercial and residential real estate, to begin with). People in Silicon Valley are already talking about moving out.
Reddit About to Beat Facebook, Telegram, and Most ICOs With Actually Useful Token – Camila Russo
Reddit launched the Community Point system for its subreddits on the public Ethereum network, which means the awarded Points belong to the users forever. As a crypto skeptic, I don’t see that this ownership aspect differentiates the system much from other loyalty programs. Doesn’t Reddit still own the rest of the ecosystem that could change the value of the Points? Nonetheless, I am deeply curious about how this experiment will pan out.
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