I will skip the following week’s newsletter as I am traveling to visit my family in Korea. I hope you get some time this summer to recharge as well!
Software Engineering ⚙️
Proposal: GraphQL Composite Schemas Working Group
There have been a lot of movements in the federated GraphQL space. Just recently, Hasura launched its offering (GraphQL Join), and Apollo launched a new major version of its famous Apollo Federation. The proposed GraphQL working group wants to ensure minimum consistency between different federation solutions.
People ❤️
Persistent Models vs. Point-In-Time Goals
Just as there is a hierarchy of executions (company-level vs. team-level), there is a hierarchy of KPIs (north star metrics vs. project-level metrics). When I’ve conflated them in the past, it became frustrating to measure the success of projects because attribution was not easy.
Do We Still Need Teams?
In some past roles, I felt my “team” was not a team but just a group of people who reported to the same manager. Now, I have the vocabulary to describe that group: “co-acting groups.”
Anti-pattern: The Engineering Managers’ Group
This article made me reflect on how often I interact with my peer managers. And the answer is, I don’t really 😅
Business 💰
A Framework for Navigating Down Markets
I found some techniques helpful in evaluating startups: valuation multiples (valuation divided by annual revenue) and burn multiples (cash burn divided by net revenue add). If you are talking to startups, ask them to share the necessary information (revenue, burn rate, etc.) to get these.
Interesting Finds 💡
Bionic Reading
Bionic reading is a clever way to highlight the essential parts of words so that our brains can read texts faster. I am curious how it will be to read blog posts with this when the extension launches. The following is the first paragraph of my previous post with bionic reading. How does it feel?
My team experienced an outage this week. All outages are enlightening, but this one stood out as it cut across the systems owned by two other teams. One team launched a feature that dramatically increased the demand on our system, which led to an issue with the other team’s system. When the other team resolved that issue, my team’s system experienced a sudden increase in demand, falling behind the requests.
Uncertainty Saves Lives – the Peltzman Effect
Peltzman Effect, or Risk Compensation, is a theory that people behave more dangerously when they feel safer. You can see that from driving and dealing with COVID.
youngk.im 