Author Archives: Young Min Kim

Young Reacts #100 – Centennial Edition 💯

My habit is my superpower. I am not great at going into overdrive and pulling an all-nighter. But I can keep doing the same thing day-in and day-out for a long time. This newsletter has been one of those things for the last 2 years. I thank you, readers, for being part of the journey. To celebrate all 100 issues, I am re-sharing the articles that made a lasting impact on me.

To the next 💯!

Celebrating 100
Photo by Floris Andréa on Unsplash

Software Engineering ⚙️

How Complex Systems Fail – Richard I Cook

I keep coming back to the lessons of this short reading almost daily. I especially find “Catastrophe requires multiple failures – single point failures are not enough.” and “Human practitioners are the adaptable element of complex systems.” insightful.

When frontend means full stack – Chris Coyier

While we are all called “frontend engineers,” we come in a different shape. That means: 1. when we look for the next role, we need to think about what we truly enjoy. 2. when we hire for our team, we need to look for the exact skills the team needs explicitly.

Blogged Answers: A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior – Mark Erikson

I read this a month ago, but I already used the article’s learnings multiple times about setState. If you skipped this article because it’s too long, please think again.

People ❤️

The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers – Daniel F. Chambliss

“Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time.” This is my kind of jam.

The Feedback Fallacy – Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

A lack of shortcomings does not make one excellent. We need to focus on each other’s strengths that make us uniquely effective.

Get your work recognized: write a brag document – Julia Evans

When busy with daily work, I forget what I achieved last week, let alone last year. Just the act of writing a brag document has saved me from impostor syndrome countless times.

Don’t ask forgiveness, radiate intent – Elizabeth Ayer

The proverb, “Don’t ask for forgiveness, ask for permission,” makes a terrible teammate. When we are part of the team, we need to radiate intent and align better.

Speed as a Habit – Dave Girouard

I started asking, “when do you think will finish the thing?” and that cleared up a lot of uncertainty when collaborating. There are more great tips I haven’t internalized yet.

Business 💸

The rise of the global first startup – Elizabeth Yin

The article was written before the COVID. I can only imagine that the trend is now far more accelerated since everyone’s remote.

The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate – Lina Khan

With the Biden administration next year, we will see how the antitrust issue will play out. But I hope the administration continue the inquiry and reform where necessary.

Thank you for reading this issue. I hope you stay with me for the next 100!

Young Reacts #99

In the US, the daylight saving time ended over the last weekend. The start and end of daylight saving time reminded me of when I was working on data visualizations.

If you store and render the data in UTC, you can safely assume that every hour exists. But that’s not true if you want to represent the data in timezones with daylight savings. I remember that our visualizations would break because 2 AM is missing when the saving time ends (you also get two data points for the same hour when the daylight saving starts). It’s a funny reminder that even seemingly absolute things like time can’t be relied upon in programming.

Photo by Ocean Ng on Unsplash

Software Engineering ⚙️

ts-prune – Nadeesha Cabral

While code linters can automatically detect unused variables inside the modules, it has been very time-intensive to find unused modules; I manually global-search exported variables (it gets much, much worse if the same names are used for different variables). This CLI tool promises to automate that process.

Why Rounded Corners Are Easier on the Eyes – UX Movement

Have you wondered why your designer always round corners? Here are your answers: First, sharp edges make the object look brighter and harder to look at. Second, we are raised to avoid sharp objects in the physical world. And last, smoother paths make it easier to process the information.

Myths about useEffect – Kent C. Dodds

I started using hooks as soon as they’ve become available. However, I still learn every day. In this article, I found the shift in perspective from “when does this effect run” to “with which state does this effect synchronize with” illuminating.

Rebuilding Twitter’s public API – Twitter

Twitter is building its public REST API with a GraphQL backend. In other words, if you hit their REST endpoint, they translate your request into a GraphQL request to an internal GraphQL endpoint. I am most curious about how Twitter develops and maintains the internal GraphQL schema for both consumer app use cases and the REST API use cases.

People ❤️

Career ladders aren’t enough – you need a thoughtful promotion process, too – Sarah Milstein

If a company leaves the personnel decisions solely up to the managers, it is hard for employees to see that the process is fair. The process needs an explicit and well-understood structure to justify its decisions.

Business 💸

How Riot created the virtual universe of the 2020 League of Legends World Championships – Polygon

Because of the current pandemic, much of the League of Legends world was held in a closed space without live audience. To create a dynamic stage suitable for the competition of this level, Riot Games used the virtual studio based on Unreal Engine, also used by The Mandalorian. I very much look forward to how this technology will change film productions.

NVIDIA Announces Cloud-AI Video-Streaming Platform to Better Connect Millions Working and Studying Remotely – NVIDIA

Instead of saving bits with more efficient compression, Nvidia saves by regenerating the image with AI on its cloud platform based on a few key points. It is most useful if your upload bandwidth is limited. Here is a link to the demo video.

Young Reacts #98 – React 17

I don’t have many things to share, so I will keep it short. Happy Halloweens!

Photo by Łukasz Nieścioruk on Unsplash

Software Engineering ⚙️

React v17.0 – React

React 17 is out. The goal of this release is to make it easier to upgrade React in the future. While there are no new features, that doesn’t mean there are no breaking changes. Watch out for subtle changes in event propagations.

Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid – Joshua Comeau

Setting up a clean, scalable layout saves many headaches down the line. Please read this guide if you are starting a new project. I am sure I will come back to this article many times in the future.

People ❤️

Engineering management 101: evaluating your team’s performance – Camille Fournier

The key lesson in this article is that “[e]valuations start long before it’s time to actually determine a rating.” If you are a manager, set your expectations explicitly and communicate them repeatedly with your reports. As a report, we all should strive to clarify the expectations.

Rejections – Vishnu Bharathi

When I was looking for a job before, I found the whole process demoralizing. That feeling of strangers scoring your past achievements and potential hurt my self-esteem. I hope you read this article and find it encouraging to know that you are not alone on this journey to your dream job.

Business 💸

United States v. Google – Ben Thompson

The Department of Justice of the United States sued Google for its alleged anticompetitive behavior. That alleged violation is how Google pays smartphone makers to be the default search engine, which improves its algorithm with more data and takes away the breathing room from the competitors.

Young Reacts #97 – npm v7

Waymo started its public self-driving service in Pheonix, Arizona on October 8th. I was curious about how the service worked and found this video. The video captures four trips from start to finish, showing the streets, the in-car screen, and the app screen simultaneously.

Around the one-hour mark, the car enters the busy Costco parking lot. Humans find it hard to drive there, but it navigated the lot without a hiccup. Very Impressive!

The video reminded me of the famous line by William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Software Engineering ⚙️

Presenting v7.0.0 of the npm CLI – npm

Workspaces, more predictable installs, and better peer dependency management! I was slightly worried about delays or changes because Github acquired npm, Inc before v7 work was done. But I am glad to find my concerns were unfounded.

TypeScript to WebAssembly: The What, The How And The Why – Fernando Doglio

Maybe not every day, but there will be a time when we need to do a computation-heavy task in a browser. But if we don’t know Go or Rust already? AssemblyScript is a great alternative that utilizes a subset of Typescript syntax to write WASM.

Writing JavaScript tools in other languages – a new trend? – Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

This post discusses the pros and cons of using a non-JS language for JS tooling. A tool creator will have to tradeoff between performance gains and the JS community.

People ❤️

Email to former board member – Ryan Caldbeck

A startup CEO shared an email to a former board member publicly as he stepped down. The email gives you a look at how sausages are made (or how dysfunctional boards can be). No matter what we do for a living, we are all humans with our frivolities.

Business 💸

A Quarter Century of Hype – 25 Years of the Gartner Hype Cycle – Mark Mine

A great way to get out of hype is to look at the long term trend. The visualization below connects 25 years’ worth of the Gartner Hype Cycles.

Young Reacts #96 – Rust-based Javascript tools

Lately at work, I’ve been migrating my servers from AWS instances to Docker containers. Although the internal tools try to provide the turn-key migration experience, I found that many hidden assumptions, especially regarding the dev machine’s environment, created gaps in the process. I often had to spend hours fixing the bad states from half-complete commands. Which is fine. I accept those hours as the price I pay for being an early adopter. But I do hope my notes and feedback will create a more stable foundation for the future adopters.

Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash

Software Engineering ⚙️

Rust-based Javascript tools: Boa and RSLint

Two exciting, albeit experimental, tools popped last week. Boa is a parser, and RSLint is a linter (obviously). I am looking forward to performance gains from these native tools. At the same time, I worry that I won’t introspect the source code of these tools as easily.

Hidden Features of Chrome DevTools – Martin Heinz

I believe all engineers must be able to debug efficiently. Once I got comfortable with the Chrome DevTools debugger, it made debugging much faster than using console.log. But the DevTools have a lot more features. I’ve used the Performance tab and Conditional Breakpoints heavily lately.

People ❤️

An update on efforts to reduce spam with Hacktoberfest: introducing maintainer opt-in and more. – Digital Ocean

The Hactoberfest snafu perfectly exemplifies how a well-intentioned system can incentivize bad behaviors. Before this update, the old system rewarded pull requests to open source projects with free t-shirts while relying on the project maintainers to discern spammy pull requests. In the end, the spammers overwhelmed the maintainers and created media backlash. Never underestimate how motivated bad actors will be.Domenic Denicola @domenicUgh, oh no, October is starting. Prepare for a month of spam pull requests… whatwg/html has already been hit hard, at 5 in the last 3 hours. @hacktoberfest, please please stop this annual tradition of wasting maintainers’ time. You are a net negative for the world.September 30th 2020161 Retweets721 Likes

The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect – Bruce F. Webster

When a team first gets founded, it’s easier to recruit top-level talents into the team. Vision and autonomy are great motivators. But it is also easy to lose them because they have so many options. Like many things, it’s easier to keep the already-high talent density high than to rebuild the team.

Business 💸

House Democrats push Congress to break up Big Tech monopolies – Engadget

After the congress hearing with Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google CEOs, the US House Democrats suggest that the four companies be broken up. All companies argue that breakups will cause consumer harm. That may be true in the immediate future. But these dominant monopolies are hurting future innovations and consumer gain.

The Full-Stack Startup – Chris Dixon

As Chris Dixon defines, full-stack startups own all necessary pieces around their users, thus enabling better user experience. It’s not just Amazon now. Many companies do this now: Peloton, Lemonade, Netflix, etc. These investments, on top of the enabling software, will also create a lasting moat.

“피드백”이라는 단어를 들으면 가슴이 철렁하는 느낌부터 먼저 듭니다. 잘한 점에 대한 피드백은 인색하고 부족한 부분에 대한 피드백(좋게 말해 constructive feedback)만 자주 받기 때문이라고 생각합니다. 저도 이 글을 읽기 전엔 긍정적인 피드백보다 부정적인 피드백을 훨씬 더 많이 줬습니다. 하지만 하버드 비즈니스 리뷰에 올라온 이 글을 읽고 제 피드백 방식을 바꾸게 되었습니다.

이 글에서 최고는 제각기 다른 모습을 띠고 있다고 한 부분이 특히 와닿았습니다. 호날두와 메시는 세계 최고의 축구 선수지만 각자 다른 방식으로 득점을 합니다. 이런 공격수가 되려면 수비나 헤딩을 못 한다고 그 보충 연습을 할 게 아니라 자신이 잘하는 부분을 극대화하는 것이 필요합니다. 단점이 없다고 최고가 되지 않습니다. 오히려 최고가 되려면 장점을 갈고 닦아야 합니다. 그러기 위해 우리는 서로의 단점을 고치기보다 장점을 더 길러줘야 합니다.

저는 이 글을 읽은 이후 매일 동료와의 협업에서 긍정적인 부분을 일부러 찾아 구체적으로 그 부분이 어떻게 저에게 도움이 되었는지 피드백을 남기고 있습니다. 제 적은 노력이 동료들이 최고가 되는데 이바지했으면 하는 바람입니다.

The Feedback Fallacy – Harvard Business Review

Young Reacts #95 – Erikson’s A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior

I watched a fascinating talk on GraphQL. Its premise is what made it fascinating; to convince people on the other side, we need to understand their reasoning to the point where we can make the argument more convincing than they can. Instead of talking about why we need to use GraphQL, Robert Zhu discusses the pitfalls of GraphQL at a GraphQL conference so that we understand the skeptics. Watching this talk made me reexamine how I promoted new ideas at work.

Software Engineering ⚙️

Blogged Answers: A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior – Mark Erikson

As I worked on building an interactive and performant table of thousands of items, I learned I still didn’t fully understand how React hooks behave. For example,

  • When I have multiple setState statements, will they force the component to rerender multiple times?
  • When I use multiple useEffect hooks, in what order do they run?
  • How is setState from useState different from the class component’s this.setState?

This excellent guide by Redux maintainer Mark Erikson answered all of my questions.

Demystifying Cache Normalization – Apollo

If you are using Apollo client, you need to read this article. It explains how Apollo Client uses GraphQL’s typed schema to denormalize and cache the responses and also goes into the limits of the Client in specific mutations.

People ❤️

Coinbase is a mission focused company – Brian Armstrong

Coinbase CEO announced that “we don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus” while “we need to do a better job of being authentic about who we are.”

This announcement is full of irony. We cannot be authentic when we cannot talk about the things that impact us. Unless, of course, all your issues are already mainstream that they aren’t deemed “political.”

GitLab’s outbound recruiting model – Gitlab

GitLab has turned its recruiting model on its head. They explicitly state that “we do not accept inbound applications for our roles.” Looking back at my manager days, I realize all my best hires were from referrals and outbound sourcing. Maybe it’s not a bad approach if I can invest a significant amount of time recruiting.

Business 💸

Bond was the last straw: Regal and Cineworld will reportedly close all theaters in US and UK next week – The Verge

With the disappointing result from the highly expected movie “Tenet” and other blockbusters postponed until 2021, the second-largest US theater chain is also now shutting down its operations until 2021. Given the way things are going in the US, I wonder if any theaters will survive at all.

Young Reacts #94 – Why do you do code reviews?

During the QA session after my talk (which feels so long ago since I also moved on Friday), I was asked what I find the most exciting/stimulating for my career lately. After some thoughts, I realized the preparation for the talk was that. I never spoke in front of hundreds of people. I never gave a non-technical talk. I never gave a talk over Zoom. There were so many firsts for me, and I am proud of myself. I didn’t know that I could talk about my career, or anything really, coherently for 20 minutes. Now I know!

I especially want to thank my wife Eunyoung, for her support and patience to listen to me over and over for the last month. 🥰

Software Engineering ⚙️

A Better Code Review – Gilad Peleg

Code reviews have become a standard engineering practice. But not everyone agrees on the why. I believe that they are a way to spread knowledge. They are too late in the process to change the design meaningfully and too unreliable to catch bugs. Based on that belief, I should surface those important pieces better. Why do you do code reviews?

Why we decided against GraphQL for local state management – OkCupid

The OkCupid team explains why they don’t find Apollo’s local state management is not yet ready. While I think the cons are mostly Apollo client’s issues, the article can be helpful if you want to understand pros and cons of using the Apollo client for local state management. For the record, I think the Apollo client is too heavy-handed, and React state and reducer hooks can meet most of my needs.

Headless Recorder (previously Puppeteer Recorder) – Checkly

At my team, writing an automated e2e test takes a lot of effort. So much so that I get scared just thinking about writing it. The exposed API for our internal framework is so granular that I have to manually add “wait” statements for a dropdown to open after a click. We chose our internal framework over Cypress for consistency, but I still want a helper extension like Headless Recorder.

People ❤️

Stephen Wan: Staff Engineer at Samsara – Stephen Wan

Here is another Staff Engineer interview. These interviews give me a peek into not only the works but the lives of the engineers, and I love that very much. I also appreciate that Wan calls out having an organizational history as one of the reasons he became a staff engineer. It has put my current work in a longer-term perspective.

The Management Flywheel – Camille Fournier

The lesson applies even if we are not a manager. I understand that it is tempting to do something big to prove ourselves after joining new teams. But that is precisely the wrong move to make. We need to start small, learn more, and build momentum.

Business 💸

Google to Increase Push for Apps to Give Cut of In-App Purchases – Bloomberg

Amidst anti-trust scrutinies, Google seeks to standardize Android app payments around Google Play. I first found the move surprising. But I’ve learned that the larger developers got exemptions from the policy, which doesn’t look good from a regulatory perspective.

2020 Bundles – Ben Thompson

A concise overview of how different subscription bundles fit with the corporate strategies: Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Microsoft Xbox All Access, and Apple One.

Young Reacts #93 – Sunsetting Moment.js

I am giving my first big conference talk in front of 450 people (!) tomorrow about how curiosity and courage led me to create a more significant impact in my current role. Unfortunately, the talk will be in Korean, so I won’t share the slides or the live recording here. But I hope to share my lessons here after the presentation.

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

Software Engineering ⚙️

Moment.js Project Status – Moment.js

Moment.js, the de-facto standard Javascript library to handle time and timezones, has announced its active development, thanks to newer libraries like Luxon and the new Temporal proposal. I first used this library in my first job eight years ago, and still use it in my current role. Kudos to the Moment.js team to have shepherded the project to this point 🎉

If you are interested in learning more about the issue with “Date” in Javascript, read this.

Fluid Framework – Microsoft

Fluid Framework is “a collection of client libraries for distributing and synchronizing shared state” without a customized server application.

Tools like Google Docs, MURAL, and Figma have raised the bar for all collaborative applications. The business users expect real-time collaboration inside their tools now. I bet my team will have to implement something similar soon.

Speedy Neural Networks for Smart Auto-Cropping of Images – Twitter

People found yet another example of biased algorithms, this time on Twitter itself. The algorithm above seemingly prioritizes white people over black people when cropping images for the feed.

People ❤️

Things To Know About Engineering Levels – Charity Majors

Charity is on fire with her writing lately. This blog post is another gem. It scratches the exact area I’ve been wondering: how to get to that next level. Two takeaways for me: first, “not every opportunity exists at every company at every time.” Second, more practically, don’t join a startup without much high-level work to do, or a company already with enough staff/principal engineers.

Meeting everyone on a new team – Anna Shipman

Anna, a Technical Director at FT.com, recollects her introductory 1:1s with her 50-person organization. The article is very detailed and makes an intriguing read.

But I was a bit taken back because, even when her people explicitly told her that they enjoyed building relationships with her, she chose not to make the 1:1s recurring. I am used to and expect regular quarterly reviews with my skip-level managers. I suppose everyone has their preference.

Business 💸

ByteDance picks Oracle as partner to try to save TikTok U.S – Reuters

It is old news that Oracle, not Microsoft, will buy TikTok in the U.S. I am not sure what Oracle will buy exactly yet, given the Chinese sanction against the export of recommendation algorithms. In the meantime, the U.S. government bans TikTok and WeChat.

TLDR Stock options – LTSE Tools Team

This interactive tool provides a reality check on the value of the stock options you get from your prospective employers. The real challenge is to figure out where the employers fall on the curve, given that they likely won’t provide any information that might turn you away.

Young Reacts #92 – Remote pay tradeoff

Silicon Valley companies are having debates about remote work. Not only is there a question of whether to go remote-first or not, but there is also one of whether to adjust pay. Teams have to think through three angles:

  • Should they be paid according to their contributions to the company, which may not change meaningfully based on their locations of work?
  • Should there be an adjustment based on cost-of-living so that employees don’t feel more incentivized to work remotely?
  • Should there be an adjustment based on cost-of-labor so that employers can pay competitively across different labor markets?

I find them all valid perspectives to have, which makes the debates all the more difficult.

And there is an issue of reliable data availability. Industry-specific cost-of-labor data are sparse in non-tech hubs. While changing compensation policies is tricky, the companies should get ready to learn and adjust their systems as their first tries at the problem play out in the talent market.

Photo by Christine Roy on Unsplash

Software Engineering ⚙️

We need more inclusive web performance metrics – Scott Jehl

The typical web performance metrics do not answer vital accessibility questions such as:

  • When and how are accessibility trees built and exposed?
  • Does client-side javascript block executions of assistive technologies?

Avoid Export Default – TypeScript Deep Dive

I’ve instinctively avoided default exports in Typescript. But it is nice to see the drawbacks listed. To me, the most significant pain points are the lack of autocomplete and typo protections.

People ❤️

How I operated as a Staff engineer at Heroku – Amy Unger

If one stays at the same place long enough to operate at the Staff level, it’d be easy to accept the status quo—because they are the status quo. Amy suggests that old-timers should “invest in meeting new folks as a counterbalance.” I agree 100% and took a note of it to follow through.

Every Public Engineering Career Ladder – Shawn Wang

This collection of career ladders would have been useful in my previous role. I thought I’d share for those who influence their teams’ career tracks.

Business 💸

Xbox All Access seems like one of the best deals in gaming – Ars Technica

Xbox All Access is an enticing proposition for which I would seriously consider signing up. Rather than competing with Sony on Sony’s turf, Microsoft leverages its investment in the cloud infrastructure and creates a new axis to compete—subscription and streaming games. A lot of transactional consumer products and experiences now are subscribable.