As I plan for the next year, I’ve been contemplating my contributions at work and found two significant deficiencies: insufficient technical expertise and lacking business/product context. Even though I can rely on engineers and product partners in these areas, I want to understand my team’s work in more detail. After the holidays, I will reach out to my colleagues and create a plan to build more expertise there. In the meantime, I started taking an entry-level SQL class.

Software Engineering ⚙️

Star Schema vs. Snowflake Schema

Based on my rudimentary understanding of MySQL, I believed that all data should be normalized. But this article taught me that normalization makes queries more expensive by requiring more joins and that some denormalization may be preferred depending on the use cases.

Why Vitest

Jest has been the defacto standard to test Javascript for many years since it has everything you need with sensible defaults. But it’s built with the assumption that Javascript is bundled, which is no longer true thanks to Snowpack and Vite, which uses native ESM in browsers. Vitest takes advantage of this new module paradigm.

Introducing fuite: a tool for finding memory leaks in web apps

I found this tool intriguing but not too valuable. All web apps I worked on mainly suffered from slow APIs or sluggish rendering. In addition, they were short-lived, so some memory leaks didn’t hurt them. It may be helpful if you are working on work tools like Figma, Slack, or Google Sheets.

Building a Service Mesh with Envoy

My team recently migrated to Envoy, so I wanted to learn more about how it fits the rest of the tooling.

People ❤️

Time management for makers

When meetings keep getting thrown at you, it isn’t easy to progress on significant projects. The article proposes that we allocate our time based on priorities in advance. For example, my allocation could look like this:

30-40% Team management (preparing for and conducting 1:1s, planning growth conversations, hiring, etc.)
20% Planning and delivery (setting the goals, shaping upcoming projects, managing the scrum process, etc.)
20% Context gathering (meeting stakeholders, reading documents, etc.)
20% Buffer time (emergency meetings, extracurriculars, etc.)

Onboarding a product manager – do’s and don’ts in the first few weeks

As I thought about how best to learn business and product context, I started reading how product managers get onboarded. I realized that I hadn’t spent much time with my team’s product yet.

Cool things 😎

Guidelines for Submitting Unicode® Emoji Proposals: Evidence of Frequency

It was surprising to read that a screenshot of a Google Trends page could show the need for a proposed emoji.

You need to supply screenshots of each result for each of the methods listed below: Google Search, Bing Search, Google Video Search, Google Trends (Web Search), and Google Trends (Image Search). Trends screenshots must include “elephant” as a comparative search term.