Last week, I completed two mid-year promotion packets. Promotion committees determine engineer promotions at Square, and a manager’s role is limited to recommending a promotion and preparing the promotion packet, which should detail a potential promotee’s past achievements. As the committee members are not personally familiar with the promotee’s work, the packet has to contain a lot of evidence. So the manager and the promotee have to do some deep archeology.
I found it quite painful and time-consuming, so I will recommend to all my reports that they record a summary of their work as they wrap up a project.
Software Engineering ⚙️
How we avoided alarm fatigue syndrome by managing/reducing the alerting noise.
Defining a measurement of a complex situation is half the battle. Once we have a metric, it’s easier to sell the idea to the team, track the progress, and declare success. But metric definitions should be team specific. In my team’s case, we define a noisy alert as any self-resolved alert, unlike this article.
Ecma International approves ECMAScript 2022: What’s new?
ECMAScript continues to make progress. This year’s most significant change is the addition of private field declarations (the original proposal), quite more substantial than the year before.
Fresh 1.0
Here is yet another JS framework promising to deliver minimal JS to the client. This one is optimized to work well on Deno’s edge computing platform (Deno created this framework).
People ❤️
Power Tool: Fact vs. Story
A few months ago, I was going through a confidence crisis and was afraid that I could get fired. My mentor advised me to separate the facts from the stories I told myself. I found signs that my org valued my contributions (sponsoring my coaching program, continued support from my skip-level leads, etc.). I got over the hump and am now doing much better mentally, and my team has turned around.
Interesting Finds 💡
How Meta uses AI to better understand people’s ages on our platforms
Age is an essential factor for platforms to tune the users’ experience. But how do you protect users even when they lie about their ages? Meta uses how a user interacts with the platform to deduce their age.
What is black and white and read all over?
This font is designed to simplify emojis specifically so that it’s less skeuomorphic and more symbolic.
youngk.im 