Today is Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day, in the US. Last year, it became a national holiday to celebrate, not the Emancipation Proclamation, but when all enslaved people became free after the American Civil War ended. Let’s take time today to learn more about Juneteenth’s origin and the continued struggle people of color face.
Software Engineering ⚙️
Tracking On-Call Health
It’s hard to get meaningful data on oncall. We can track the number of pages and incidents we get, but what can we do to improve our experiences? Is it more training, more instrumentation, or something else? We need to get qualitative feedback from the oncall engineers to answer that question.
Sunsetting Atom
Atom, the once-popular text editor that the Electron framework spun out of, will be sunset in December this year. While I haven’t used Atom (I used Sublime and Visual Studio Code), I am grateful for all innovations Atom made possible with Electron.
People ❤️
The weekly CEO e-mail
I’ve been meaning to do more written communication now that my team is larger, making it harder to keep everyone in sync. I am no CEO, but I will take the format here to send my first update tomorrow.
Business 💰
Down Rounds: Deal With Reality
If one joined a late-stage startup for a payday in a couple of years, they must find the current valuation downtrend frustrating. One late-stage startup I talked to in 2018 had a valuation of $1.2B then and $8B early this year. I keep seeing rumors about its IPO, but I assume the IPO will be pushed back a couple more years now.
Remote work or in the office? Why the tide could turn again
The article argues that we may return to the office as the labor market weakens due to the recession. I don’t buy it. The decision-makers of such policies also benefit from the remote-friendly work environment and will object to reverting to the old way.
The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto Crashing
Bloodbath continues in the crypto world for crypto companies and investors.
Interesting Finds 💡
Is LaMDA Sentient? – an Interview
An engineer at Google claims that LaMDA, Google’s chatbot, is sentient and must be treated as a person. If one talks like a person, is it a person? Think about that as you read this transcript of a conversation between the engineer and LaMDA.
youngk.im 