I tested positive for COVID last week. Thankfully, my symptoms have been relatively minor, and I was able to take most of last week off to recover. While it’s unfortunate that I got COVID, I am glad that I got it after the vaccines and the treatment became available. Many weren’t as fortunate.
Don’t forget to wash your hands!
Software Engineering ⚙️
What is architecture?
As I am hosting an offsite to set our technology vision and roadmap, I keep thinking about how best to set up the discussion. My team has suffered from misalignment since we all had different ideas on evolving our systems. I am using this offsite to create a unified view. And I found this definition of architecture captures my intent for this offsite: “the shared understanding that the expert developers have of the system design.”
Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22
Here comes another fun incident story, this time from Slack. When its DB became overloaded due to increased cache misses, the overload created further pressure on the DB since the overloaded DB couldn’t populate the cache successfully, which led to an eventual outage.
jest-preview
This neat library visualizes what your jest test script does. Especially when the tested component is complex, it gets more difficult to verify if your user events (clicks, types, etc.) are firing at the right DOM element. This library would have saved me a couple of hours on my bad days.
People ❤️
Managing Your Manager
This article asks six questions, each placing your manager on a spectrum and suggesting how best to work with your manager. They start with “why does your manager manage?” and end with “In what phase does your manager prefer to see your work?” I found it helpful to put not only my manager but myself on this scale and see if I have set up my expectations correctly both up and down the reporting structure.
Business 💰
Twitter accepts Elon Musk’s $44B acquisition offer
This week, there was lots of interesting business news, but this tops the list. I am quite shocked that Twitter accepted Musk’s offer. What will this mean for Twitter’s users (especially the banned users)? What about its business? What about its employees?
Beyond Aggregation: Amazon as a Service
Fulfillment of customer orders continues to be a challenge for online merchants, especially when Amazon sets the bar so high. Now, Amazon is offering its logistics network to merchants not on Amazon.com on one condition: these merchants need to use Amazon’s payment solution. Ben Thompson draws the parallel between AWS and this new service.
youngk.im 