I had gotten feedback from six people last week, and I’d like to share them here and what I plan to do about them.

The positive feedbacks:

• I care about business goals and provide valuable feedback on our projects to meet the goals.
• I maintain strong relationships with partners. My partners trust me to deliver what I committed.
• I bring new technical ideas from my participation in working groups.
• I promote the voices of the newer and the less vocal colleagues.
• I reflect on my work often and make necessary adjustments.

The constructive feedbacks:

• Pursue more opportunities to share ideas and lead in our product domain. Two shared this feedback. I provide plenty of feedback on others’ ideas, but I don’t proactively develop new ideas.
• Better communicate what I am working on. As I spend more time on working groups, I’ve failed to communicate my lower bandwidth to my product partners.
• Pay more attention to the details and the user flow. I see this related to the above feedback. I’ve rushed features as I have less time, and it shows.

I haven’t talked to my manager about all this feedback, but here are my current takeaways:

• I’ve leaned heavily into engineering-focused projects, such as feature flags, so far. I should start focusing more on my product domains and suggesting new projects (say, implement a no-code tool for admin tools).
• My partners have been very supportive of my “extracurriculars.” So when I don’t have time for that, I need to say so. Once we hire a new engineer for my squad, this conversation will get easier.
• Keep being empathetic and introspective. Maintaining my emotional capacity will be key.

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Software Engineering ⚙️

Announcing the Deno Company

Deno, an alternative server-side Javascript runtime, has received funding and formed a company. The announcement snipes at the Node Foundation and then shares its vision for web-first abstraction layers, where web developers can reuse their skills in other domains.

GraphQL Mesh

GraphQL Mesh is a library that automatically generates a working GraphQL API based on other strongly typed APIs such as gRPC. It’s not just GraphQL Mesh; many tools try to solve the pain point. But I am a huge skeptic. The main benefit of GraphQL is in providing an excellent client developer experience, and these tools seem to optimize for the wrong audience, the graph producers.

The Complete Guide to useRef() and Refs in React

I wasn’t aware that updating a reference doesn’t trigger a component re-rendering. That one nugget was worth my time reading the article.

Business 💸

Implications for cookiepocalypse

The situation is complicated and fascinating.

Third-party cookies have been used to track users across websites, but they will be sunset next year on Chrome (other browsers already blocked them). This change, known as cookiepocalypse, has pushed the Adtech industry to start “fingerprinting” users with other signals and store the user identities on their ends, not on users’ devices. Users won’t have any control over their identity at this point. So Google is coming up with a new, less bad solution called FLoCing, which has its own privacy and business concerns.

More companies announce the office reopenings.

More than 25% of the US population are fully vaccinated, and more companies announce reopening plans. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will eventually require everyone to be back in the office.