I started having my farewell conversations with my colleagues. During those conversations, I’ve shared what I especially enjoyed working with them and asked for feedback. In general, I appreciated their vote of confidence that I will do well in my new role at Square.

In one conversation, I received the most positive feedback so far in my engineering career: I epitomized what it means to be a senior engineer as I went outside my teams and tackled the challenges faced by the larger organizations. I am very grateful for that kind word, but I also recognize that the environments had to be right to stretch myself like that. I needed access to the right opportunity and freedom to pursue my vision. When I join Square, I plan to create the same environment for my team and others to go beyond their immediate responsibilities and stretch themselves.

Software Engineering ⚙️

Focusing on What Matters: Using SLOs to Pursue User Happiness

I tend to blindly trust existing processes and policies at their face value, especially when new to the domain. So I appreciated this list of assumptions to double-check when a service failed its service-level objectives:

• Was the error budget consumed by real failures?
• Did we notice a number of false positives?
• Maybe we need to reevaluate the metrics we’re collecting,
• or perhaps we’re okay with setting a lower target goal because there are other targets that will be more important to our customers.

How Replicache Works

Our users increasingly expect our tools to allow real-time collaboration thanks to tools like Google Docs and Figma. How to implement real-time collaboration correctly is not straightforward. This library explains one possible implementation strategy.

People ❤️

Why don’t hiring managers give 3 of THEIR references to job candidates?

A reference check is one of those rarely done but important signals. Candidates are already at a significant disadvantage in terms of the information they can get about their hiring managers. The hiring managers should level the playground by sharing their references.

Business 💸

Apple makes App Store concessions to settle developer suit

A class-action lawsuit against Apple forced Apple to concede on multiple fronts: allowing direct communication between developers and customers, lower commissions for smaller developers, and so on. Whether the court will accept this proposal and how this settlement could affect the Apple-Epic lawsuit are to be seen.

Netflix and Video Games

An interesting analysis of what video games mean for Netflix. The point that the younger generations are playing more video games, which poses a significant threat to Netflix, was spot on.