After a week of attending training classes and watching hours of educational content, I am feeling the pressure to prove what I can do even though I know I shouldn’t. My manager already asked me to coach my teammate on their project, which will be both an opportunity to show my impact and a danger to derail my onboarding. I will need to keep myself balanced through these early weeks.

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Software Engineering ⚙️

On Endings: Why & How We Retired Elm at Culture Amp

I found the technical discussion of their experience with Elm enlightening. But I loved reading about the psychological aspect of publicly retiring a technology they championed even more. I appreciate the author’s courage to update the decision when their circumstances have changed and to share their decision publicly.

Yarn 2.2 🚅🌟 Dedupe, Faster, Lighter, …

I was always curious why the module lock files (yarn.lock and package-lock.json) end up with duplicate sub-dependencies when one version satisfies all requirements. Yarn and npm behave slightly differently: Yarn prioritizes stability, so it may reuse but not upgrade the sub-dependency of an existing module. On the other hand, npm prioritizes novelty, so it will always choose the latest valid version for the new module’s sub-dependency.

Issue: Analyze webpack compilation stats for performance insights

I knew GitLab was transparent, but I didn’t expect their technical work artifacts like this issue to be publicly available. I was looking to measure our webpack build performance and could lean on how GitLab measured their build performance.

People ❤️

Mass Layoffs and Absentee Bosses Create a Morale Crisis at Meta

In the name of transparency, Meta announced that there would be more layoffs a month ago. The next round of layoffs is right around the corner now, and the employees are panicking. It doesn’t look like the kind thing to do, but it probably helped the employees to get more financially ready for potential unemployment.

The $26 billion design startup Canva refuses to conduct layoffs. So it’s shifting employees into new roles

An excellent internal mobility system can help the org retain its employees’ domain knowledge and cross-pollinate ideas. Many at Square considered leaving Square but instead moved to internal opportunities that suited their interests. Seeing that, I sometimes wonder whether I would have stayed longer at Netflix if I had fully explored internal options.

Business 💰

Stripe 2022 Annual Letter

I was surprised that over a hundred companies process more than $1 billion through Stripe. I assumed that it’s cheaper to build the technology in-house at that scale. But I must be underestimating the complexity of payment processing.

Happy WebGPU Day

Chrome has shipped WebGPU, which improves how web browsers utilize GPUs better. It can enable Stable Diffusion to run on web browsers without the cloud.

Interesting Finds 💡

Testing readability tests: Flesch–Kincaid, ARI, and Gunning Fog

The fact that all these online tools to calculate readability return different scores for the same tests blew my mind. It makes sense now, but I never thought to double-check those free online tools.