We are well into Q3 planning at my work (we are already ten days into Q3, but my org usually finishes our quarterly planning half a month into a quarter). When I started in this role, I felt disoriented because I didn’t have context on most items on the roadmap. It didn’t help that I hadn’t been part of quarterly planning previously and that my PM was stretched too thin to provide the context.

But after nine months, I find myself actively leading; I have work I want my team to accomplish, I know why other teams are asking for our help, and I understand how the process works. My mentor at Netflix told me to be patient before I started this role — that it would take much longer for managers than engineers to build context and work productively. Now I understand what he meant.

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Software Engineering ⚙️

Things You Should Know About Databases

90% of the operational problems my team are on databases (especially transactions), so I found the part on database isolation levels in this article useful.

Bun is a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime

Here is a yet-another Javascript runtime. Bun differentiates itself by using JavaScriptCore (the engine used by Safari). When I first read this, I was skeptical since I remember an effort to make Node run on other Javascript engines (node-chakracore). But it looks like that effort is now refocused on addons. So using JavaScriptCore is a meaningful differentiator.

GitHub Copilot Labs

GitHub Copilot has an experimental feature to explain a code snippet in plain English 🤯

People ❤️

The Pushback Effects of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Age in Code Review

Google published research on how its engineers of different demography experience different levels of pushback.

Women authors face higher odds of pushback than men; Asian, Black, and Hispanic/Latinx authors face higher odds than White authors; and older authors face higher odds than younger authors.

Causality is difficult to show, but we must watch how we interact with different colleagues.

Business 💰

Elon Musk says he won’t buy Twitter

On July 8, Elon Musk sent a letter to break the merger agreement. I can’t imagine how stressful it would be to work at Twitter right now.

We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

SaaS is all the rage because, once a paying customer signs up, they stay paying for a long time. But this VPN company chose to give up the subscription model for customer privacy. The decision must have been difficult but may have been easier as the founders own 100% of the company.

Interesting Finds 💡

How a fake job offer took down the world’s most popular crypto game

A phony job offer duped an employee into downloading a malicious PDF file, which compromised the company network.

How to blur your house on Google Street View (and why you should)

I didn’t know it was possible to do this. I can see myself doing it if I lived in a single-family house.