I had a bit of a crisis last week. On my bed lying, I realized that I would be almost 50 in 15 years. I don’t have as much time as I thought I would (you may say 50 is the new 40, but I don’t buy it). So I am spending this holiday season contemplating where I want to be and identify the specific areas I need to improve. These are the questions I’ve been thinking about:

Do I continue down the technical path or return to management? Which one will I be better at?
Do I keep working at Netflix or move (I told myself that I would work here for 5 years)? If I do move, then where?
Most importantly, what do I want from my career and my life?

Software Engineering ⚙️

Measuring app stability to reduce technical debt – James Smith

I always found it hard to create a metric for UI app stability. Two suggested metrics look like a good starting point: “a percentage of successful application sessions” and “a percentage of daily active users who do not experience an error.”

The Import On Interaction Pattern – Addy Osmani

This article contains a list of useful performance tips if you are building a large application. As my team plans to build micro frontend components next year, these tips will come in handy.

ts-morph – David Sherret

ts-morph is a wrapper library to help manipulate Typescript’s abstract syntax tree. This is useful if you need to update some Typescript code automatically.

People ❤️

Simple Burnout Triage – Ben McCormick

One simple question to self-check if you have burnt out:

If you take the pace & quality of the last 2 months of your life and repeated it again and again, how long would you be able to sustain it?

A better offer letter – Henry Ward

Lack of transparency around a startup’s preference stack bites employees in less-than-ideal exits. I am not sure if Henry Ward’s own company Carta still does it (the post is from 2016), but this transparency level should be the norm.

Reimagining Employee Productivity in 2021 – Sabry Tozin

Now that we survived the year of the pandemic and normalized remote working, what’s next? A VP of Engineering at LinkedIn shares his perspectives. I especially liked his point that “[e]very professional interaction we have in this new world is scheduled, and this is not how we’re accustomed to work.”

Business 💸

Roku Torments Entertainment Giants in Quest to Dominate Streaming – WSJ

As the streaming market becomes more competitive, the device makers’ power is increasing. Roku is leading the smart TV market and throwing its weight around.

My director just started recruiting an engineering manager for my team. Luckily, my teammates and I will be on the panel for the interview. I call it lucky because it is rare to get a chance to pick their manager, who will determine a large portion of their experience at the company and future career trajectory.

But since it’s rare, I don’t have any prior experiences to rely on. I “picked” my managers by choosing to accept an offer based on the limited information from the interviews. After some mulling, I came up with three focus areas: performance management, IC growth, and autonomy (context, not control in Netflix jargon). I will see if these are in line with the rest of the team this week.

Software Engineering 🌐

web-vitals: Essential metrics for a healthy site – Google Chrome Developers

Google announced a small lib to track website performance, along with a useful Chrome extension. Since some tracked metrics are not standard (Largest Contentful Paint, for example), some wonder if this is Internet Explorer all over again. They may be right, but all my users are on Chrome 🤷🏻‍♂️

Facebook iOS SDK causing Crashlyics outage – Crashlytics

Over the last week, a bad Facebook iOS SDK crashed all popular apps (Tiktok, Spotify, Tinder, and A LOT more) integrated with Facebook. From the sideline, I find it amusing that a P0 incident by Facebook caused outages across the entire iOS ecosystem. No doubt, this incident sucked for Apple too. I wonder if we will see some changes from Apple.

DevTool Layers Panel – Supercharged – Google Chrome Developers

Have you wondered how to see how your divs are stacked? Layers panel is the answer!

People ❤

Micromanager, Absentee Manager or Thought Partner — Which One Are You? – Kim Scott

A micromanager is a well-known failure mode of a manager. But the lesser-known end of the spectrum, an absentee manager is just as harmful. Read about how to tell if you are one or the other and how to find the balance.

How to Prep for Speaking at a Virtual Conference – Ivan Burazin

Tech workers are likely to stay home at least for the next six months, and more conferences are now virtual. Ivan Burazin gives several logistics tips on how to set up your environment.

Business 💸

Startup Offense and Defense in the Recession – Elad Gil

I didn’t think about how long the recession will last after the economy starts to reopen. The timeframe Elad Gil suggests, 2-3 years, looks like a reasonable estimate assuming we find an effective treatment or a vaccine in a year or so. A better way to plan is to assume 1-2 year recovery after the medical breakthrough. We are running a marathon.

Bye, Amazon – Tim Bray

Amid this crisis, Amazon is winning a larger share in the market and more power over its workforce. Tim Bray quit his job as a VP of AWS over “Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.” There are contradicting accounts about how this went down, but I believe we will hear more stories like this on Amazon considering its size.

The ELIZA Effect – 99% Invisible

A short story on how people have interacted with bots with natural language interfaces starting from ELIZA in 1966 and how we interact with Siri or Google Duplex now. People’s expectations change over time. I now expect all chatting interfaces to be powered by bots. Similarly, the next generations will expect all voice interfaces to be powered by bots.