I am reading this book on the life of a British on-demand courier (think UberEats or Doordash driver), and it’s been eye-opening. I realize I haven’t paid much attention to the human cost of these platforms where the companies offload the risk and the variability onto those individuals, hiding behind the faceless apps. As builders of these platforms, we engineers can and should affect changes for a more equitable platform. We all are workers.

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Software Engineering 🌐

🌟 tooling.report – Google Developers

This report compares the documented capabilities of the most popular web bundlers. I was surprised to find that Rollup ranked higher than Webpack. But before you switch your bundlers to Rollup, there are two caveats: first, the test only uses the documented features. It may be possible to achieve what you need with other bundlers. Second, you may not need all these capabilities.
On the website, you can go deeper to see what individual tests are and how they are measured.

Getting Started with FAST Components – Microsoft

I’ve never seen a component library based on WebComponents, and FAST is the first one. From its documentation, I learned how to integrate with a WebComponent library and to create WebComponents. I loved that the codebase was in Typescript, which made it easier to follow its code. I wonder how to typecheck the usages of web component libraries when the hosting code is in Typescript.

Cascading Cache Invalidation – Philip Walton

I haven’t run into this problem of cascading cache invalidation since I haven’t tried code-splitting yet. But I still found this invalidation problem intellectually stimulating.

People ❤

My Time as a Black Woman Software Engineer at Capital One – Sailor Ghoul

This article is a horrific recount of how bad management and lack of support for BIPOC colleagues can leave lasting damage not just on their career but on their health as well.

Business 💸

The Slack Social Network – Ben Thompson

Ben Thompson argues that Microsoft Teams is a vertically integrated product, whereas Slack is a horizontal product. The argument made sense until Slack acquires an enterprise identity provider service, which will create an entry into other enterprise products.

Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App – Vice

Naturally, the powerful and connected would love to avoid accountability and exposure, and, thus, have tension with the press. But harassment is many steps too far. This specific article is on how Silicon Valley elites attacked a New York Times reporter for her recent reports.

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After 3.5 months of stay-in-place, it’s amazing what a slight change in routine can do for my mood. My wife and I started going out for a picnic every weekend, and I feel most invigorated after the picnic. We also booked a one-week trip to a local Airbnb, just so that we get a change in scenery.

The biggest benefit of remote work is how we can experiment with our time and place. None of us chose to work remotely, but we can still try to make most of it. I hope all of us try something new!

Our picnic snack! (Rice cakes, homemade smoothie, and some leftover fries)

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Software Engineering 🌐

🌟 When frontend means full stack – Chris Coyier

Chris Coyier goes into different challenges we UI developers face.

Even though we all technically fall within the same big-tent title, many frontend developers wind up specializing.

Throughout my frontend career, I’ve enjoyed figuring out the data and business logic more than perfecting the beautiful user interactions, or building design systems. So I work on internal tools, and this is the specialization I am happy with.

Type-Safe Error Handling In TypeScript – Giorgio Delgado

Typescript code with many exceptions loses type-safety, especially with multiple layers with their failure states (network error, parsing error, business logic error, etc.). Other languages have “throw” annotations to guarantee safety but not Typescript.

Returning an error, rather than throwing an error is a type-safe solution for this problem. A similar technique can be used on GraphQL to provide typesafe errors.

tota11y: an accessibility visualization toolkit – Khan Academy

I find it hard to improve an app when I don’t see how my users use the app. This barrier exists in all forms: different browsers, slower network, smaller screen size, and, most importantly, assistive technologies. total11y helps me see what’s lacking in my app with a button click.

Picking Your Tech Stack For Dummies (and the future) – Stay Sassy

As a startup, your job is to innovate on one thing and one thing only. Otherwise, you are stretching yourself too thin.

People ❤

5 Engineering Manager Archetypes – Pat Kua

Pat Kua’s article is similar to Chris Coyier’s article above in that it unwraps the meaning of the title “engineering manager.” Just as we distinguish design-focused UI engineers and data-focused UI engineers, Pat Kua differentiates engineering managers with different focuses on tech, team, process, or product. Although all posted job titles sound the same, we need to find the match between what the rolerequires and what each of us enjoys.

Why we can’t stop fighting about cancel culture – Vox

To cancel someone (usually a celebrity or other well-known figure) means to stop giving support to that person. –Merriam-Webster

I hear the term “cancel culture” around but didn’t quite get it, so I read more about it. In essence, social media gives voices to the ignored and holds our establishments and leaders to the higher standard.

Business 💸

Apple doubles down on its right to profit from other businesses – Techcrunch

Despite WWDC 2020 starting this week, Apple and its Appstore policy are embroiled in the controversy with Hey, a Basecamp’s email client. Apple’s seemingly arbitrary and opaque bureaucracy has been a burden on the iOS developers for a long time. I doubt that, given its dominant and lucrative position, Apple will change its policies unless the regulators step in.

The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police – MIT Technology Review

I doubt these decisions by the big companies can contain facial recognition technology employed by the small dev shops (the tech is mostly open-sourced). How will we hold not just the big tech companies but those providers accountable?

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Over the last three weeks, I interviewed five manager candidates for my team. The conversations were fascinating, where I wish I had more time to hear more of their stories. Here are my key takeaways:

• I was surprised that most candidates were directors, managing multiple teams. I heard before that Netflix engineering managers operate at a director capacity. I wonder if that translated into the sourcing target.
• I was glad to see racially diverse candidates: three females, one Hispanic and one Black. I have given positive feedback to my director about this.
• I had a hard time judging between a weak yes and a weak no on the scale of 1-4. Even when I wasn’t too excited about the candidate, I felt like they would do a decent job and gave 3. Should that be a strong no, given Netflix’s high-performance culture? I need more calibration on the scale.

I loved talking to managers from small startups to big corporations. The notes from this experience will come in handy when I return to management in the future.

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Software Engineering 🌐

“GraphQL has two distinct type systems by design: nominal (for output type) and structural (for input types).” – Ivan Goncharov

I have been confused about GraphQL backward compatibility because whether GraphQL uses a nominal or structural type system was not clear from the spec. This comment on Github is the only source I found about GraphQL’s nominal output type. To be more specific, input types are structural, but individual fields are nominal.

Speeding up a Git monorepo at Dropbox with <200 lines of code – Dropbox

It is always eye-opening when the seemingly constant operations like “git status” start slowing down at scale. I never thought about git commands’ linear performance.

Spark Joy by Running Fewer Tests – Shopify

Here is another article on tackling challenges with regards to a monorepo’s scale. Metaprogramming and dynamic types make Ruby an ideal language for small teams. However, the language does not scale as the organization grows.

As a side note, I like their chosen metrics to measure success. I wonder if Shopify’s deployment quality stayed the same.

2020 Developer Survey – Stack Overflow

I am late to the party here; Stack Overflow released the survey result late May. Rust is the most beloved language, and Windows is the most used development OS (surprise!). There is a gender divide as well: men are asking for Stack Overflow dark mode when women are talking about its toxic culture.

By the way, if you live in a non-English speaking country, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to it. The survey skews heavily towards the western world and the English speaking population.

People ❤

Set an Aspirational Hourly Rate – Naval Ravikant

Since I started working, I tried to make tradeoffs in hourly rates, too. As a result, I treated my out of office time as “free” because none was going to pay me for it. So Naval’s point, “no one is going to value you more than you value you,” or instead, I should value myself more than the market does, is a significant shift for me.

Business 💸

Solving online events – Benedict Evans

An excellent dissection of offline conferences (content, networking, meetings) and what is easy to do online and what is hard. Will networking be accomplished online? More importantly, will it be less biased by where you are and how you look? I hope so.

Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First – ProPublica

Amazon, like any other retail distributors, has its private brands. That’s why some argue this isn’t an anti-trust issue. But Amazon’s listing page isn’t just a dumb shelf at Walmart. It’s driven by a recommendation engine that consumers trust to produce the best results for them. There is potential consumer harm here when the recommendation pushes more of Amazon’s products.

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