Last Tuesday, I said something in a meeting that I couldn’t stop regretting. I worried that I sounded like I was publicly questioning my colleague’s decision. I was so worried that I sent them an apology the next day.

It turns out, however, that they didn’t take offense at all. They told me they understood my question and appreciated my honesty. I was relieved but also realized I had been too self-conscious.

I am a conscientious person by nature. But sometimes, my conscientiousness can get the best of me. I can overthink things and worry about what other people think of me. But that’s the tradeoff I am willing to take for being conscientious, and I will be a bit more courageous to share my worries with others.

Software Engineering ⚙️

The Pyramid of Alerting

Just as we have the test pyramid, the author proposes the pyramid of alerting. Even though the author is focused on data processing, their idea to create tiers between alerts is worth exploring. We can have three levels of alerts: operational, workflow-focused, and business outcome-focused alerting:

Operational alerting focuses on the throughput and error rates of APIs and user interactions.
Workflow-based alerting focuses on known use cases. (ex: session error-free rate, task completion rate)
Business-outcome alerting focuses on business KPI (ex: Netflix’s streaming per second, Stripe’s payment processing volume)

MDN’s new “ai explain” button

MDN Web Docs faced a backlash against a generative ai-based feature to explain examples on its docs. Soon after, the feature was rolled back, but now it looks like it will be enabled again with a disclaimer. While I think the reactions are overblown, I agree that a reference site should not use generative ai, which is prone to hallucinations.

Background Removal in the Browser

This newly open-sourced library lets you remove an image’s background using ML in a browser (see demo). This results from various technical advances: WebAssembly to run low-level code in a browser and a small enough machine learning model to run in a limited environment.

People ❤️

28 Questions to Ask Your Boss in Your One-on-Ones

Even if I won’t use these questions verbatim, I liked having the list of themes to focus on during my 1:1. This will remind me to focus more on offering support to my manager. Here are the themes from the article.

Ask for Guidance and Input
Clarify Priorities and Expectations
Align with the Organization and Its Strategy
Seek Growth Opportunities and Career Advancement
Get Feedback on Your Performance
Build a Relationship
Offer Support

Quivr – Your Second Brain, Empowered by Generative AI

Ever since I read Knowledge work should accrete, I keep thinking about ways to build on my learnings. I wonder if a solution like Quivr will be the answer, which will consume all my content and provide a ChatGPT-like interface.

Business 💰

Did Google mislead advertisers about TrueView skippable in-stream ads for the past three years?

TrueView is Google’s video ad platform for advertising both in and out of YouTube. This report finds that over 70% of ad spend was spent on inventory below YouTube’s quality standards. Google, of course, is refuting the claim, but it’s hard to trust them when they don’t allow independent validations based on independently collected data.