I mentioned a few weeks ago that I wrote a vision document for a cross-functional effort. I had a chance to get feedback on the vision from my org’s VP last week. I sought tactical advice on how to socialize, but he instead gave a thought-provoking perspective; he asked why we UI engineers still need to be responsible for setting up the correct data access. Why can’t our backend engineers who own the domain do it?

Trying to answer why, I could find several practical reasons why we couldn’t make that big jump in the next one or two quarters. But I never envisioned what the ideal state should be, and I appreciated the nudge. This conversation reminded me of the article Director to VP Engineering: what is expected and how to prepare? which emphasized the longer time horizon executives operate at.

Software Engineering ⚙️

Thinking in Relay

A key difference between Relay and Apollo, two most popular GraphQL clients, is that Relay uses Fragments to describe the data requirements. Apollo, on the other hand, is far more lenient on how you fetch and use your data. I’ve been learning Relay to prepare for the query level nullability proposal.

Sucrase: An alternative to Babel that allows super-fast development builds

I tried moving my app to Vite.js recently and couldn’t finish migration due to a bug in Vite’s monorepo handling. I am hopeful that Sucrase could provide an easier migration path by working with my existing webpack config.

Solving a Mystery Behavior of parseInt() in JavaScript

This article wasn’t useful but still fun to read. When parseInt gets a non-string input, it first converts the input into a string and then parses it into an integer. That explains why parseInt(0.0000005); returns 5.

People ❤️

Being Experienced Doesn’t Automatically Make You a Great Mentor

I’ve been asked to mentor a colleague on his technical skills. This article reminded me that I shouldn’t pretend to be the expert on everything (when I do that, my frustration over my lack of knowledge comes out).

Business 💸

96% of US users opt out of app tracking in iOS 14.5, analytics find

When users opt out of app tracking, many platforms will have a hard time retargeting and measuring performances. The previous opt-out number was around 30% and now it’s 96%. How will Google and Facebook ads perform after more users upgrade to iOS 14.5?

What Roku and Google are fighting about: Video codecs, voice search and millions of eyeballs

Roku and Google have been feuding publicly over the availability of Youtube TV on Roku devices. The article explains the likely motivations for both companies.

What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter?

The answer: Create/tell stories, Build love for those stories, Monetize that love. And you need to meet your fans where they are: comics, TVs, theaters, phones, or even metaverses.