I spent last week looking back at 2020 and summarized my thoughts here. I definitely have things to improve (taking better care of my body and questioning more critically at work), but I am happy that I survived the year without a big personal crisis. I hope you take some time to reflect on how you fared this troublesome year.

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Software Engineering ⚙️

React Server Components – Addy Osmani

The React team came out with a new experimental concept called React Server Components, which enables continuous server-side rendering (vs. one-time server-side rendering). Among the many that came out, I found Addy Osmani’s explanation the easiest to understand.

How to sell SLOs to Engineering Directors – Thomas Césaré-Herriau

At a large organization, the ability to write a compelling proposal is among the most important to have. An engineer at Brex shares his proposal that successfully persuaded his org to adopt service-level objectives (or SLO). The key is to speak in the language that the audience understands.

People ❤️

Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian – Logic Mag

Quite a revealing piece of interview. The interview covers anything from AWS’s meteoric rise to the impact of COVID to the social justice movement at Amazon. The most memorable quote to me was, “People at Amazon are mercenaries. …People work there because it pays a little bit better than the competition and it looks good on a resume.”

Moving Upstream – Aviv Ben-Yosef

This article resonated well with my 2021 goal to understand and critique more at work. If I don’t have access to the necessary context or meetings to do my job well, I need to ask for it.

Business 💸

The Loop: A community health indicator – Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow’s community management team shares how they monitor the health of their communities via metrics. I am always fascinated by how different teams use metrics to understand complex systems. If you are curious about choosing the right metrics, this article by Julie Zhuo is golden.