If you only read one thingThe Arc PMF framework (16 minute read) Product-Market-Fit (PMF) is the biggest company problem I see with my startup clients. Too often they skip finding PMF and then have a big problem with development, product management, sales and marketing. The article has the best PMF framework I have seen until now. It resolves around three PMF situations: (1) âHair on Fireâ: Solve a clear urgent problem, (2) âHard Factâ: Solve universally accepted pain-point, (3) âFuture Visionâ: New reality through visionary innovation. Each situations needs a different approach on finding customers and making sales. Excellent! https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pmf-framework/ Video of the week
What a powerful video. Weâre closed to others and new ideas. Like in hiring. Like in development. Like in the video. And then we are open and something wonderful happens that we would not have expected, like in the video. Video of the week (3:55 minute read) Graph of the week
Fixing All The Bugs Wonât Solve All The Problems (3 minute read) âIn software, as in manufacturing, some problems occur due to bugs or âspecial causesâ, and some are âcommon causeâ due to the nature of the systemâs design and implementation. Fixing bugs is removing special causes. Removing bugs greatly improves software quality, but it wonât impact âcommon causeâ issues.â
Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekMeta Uses Monolith to Ship Threads in Only Five Months (12 minute read) Now that the pendulum swings back, Meta does it (for an MVP at least). âThe main backend component is a large Python codebase using a custom version of the Django Framework, named Distillery, that integrates with an older PHP component called WWW. The data is stored in TAO, a write-though cache that operates on a graph data model, which in turn uses UDB, a sharded MySQL deployment, that stores all the data. Additionally, the ZippyDB key-value cache stores transient data, and Async, a serverless function compute platformâ Python and PHP and old components. Not cutting edge languages and frameworks. Deliver value. Make deadlines. Donât get an arrow to your knee. https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/04/meta-threads-instagram-5-months/ Forcing master to main was a good faith exploit (2 minute read) I disagree with DHH here. Having used RCS,CVS,SVN,HG and Git for decades, the
change was easy, and today I even feel As a sidenote: What to expect from groups who define themselves by an ideology? One will always find a way to look purer, until [see end of French Revolution]. What does the parliament do, create more laws. Because this is their identity. Laws. So they create laws. Just like developers. Sometimes it would be good if developers would just play table soccer (âKickerâ) instead of writing more code, that will become technical debt soon. But they write code. My nature is that of a Scorpion. So whatever identity you create (âprocess implementation groupâ), they will not stop. Be careful. https://world.hey.com/dhh/forcing-master-to-main-was-a-good-faith-exploit-b21ee30c Your (Graph) Data Fits in Memory (8 minute read) Itâs like this. Youâre stuck with a mental model of technical capabilities when you first grow in this industry. I still think memory is valuable, I grew up with 40k of memory. Often developers are stuck with outdated mental models they acquired. Todayâs computers are very fast and have lots of memory, what data could you put completely in memory for 10x performance? https://jazco.dev/2024/04/15/in-memory-graphs/ A comprehensive list of 2023 & 2024 tech layoffs (10 minute read) And there are many. The jury is still out, over hired or anticipating the coming AI wave? https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/15/tech-layoffs-2023-list/ A very thorough article on code reviews. Lots of CTOs do them the wrong way. âCTOs?â you might ask? Yes, if the CTO doesnât give guidance on code reviews, developers will review code just as they see fitâit might end in âI would have done it differentlyâ As in the article, have a checklist with the real things that need to be reviewed. https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/code-reviews/ Not only xz - More software projects may have been targeted for sabotage (5 minute read) After xz nearly made it into every SSH in the world, there seem to have been more attempts to get exploits into open source packages, this time, again, javascript. Not that Javascript is the only ecosystem vulnerable (how many dependencies does your application use? 10x more deps == 10x more risk), but the tendency for every project to have a huge amount of dependencies, high market share, weak NPM governance and bad tooling (whenever I install something with NPM, Iâm warned of dozens of open security problems) make Javascript (Typescript) the primary target. I feel Rust or Go are much different. Investors are growing increasingly wary of AI (6 minute read) The pendulum swings, as it always does. The pendulum you depend on, in which direction is it currently swinging? https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/15/investors-are-growing-increasingly-wary-of-ai/ Anxiety and Procrastination: What to Do About It (16 minute read) Anxiety (+) Procrastination https://solvingprocrastination.com/anxiety/ Free for developers (6 minute read) List of free (cloud) resources for developers. Good to know if youâre small. Or want to leave your current job to do your own thing. I found the list handy. https://free-for.dev/#/?id=major-cloud-providers Programming Language Scalability (10 minute read) Several times Iâve tried to get into Ruby and Python code bases that I have not written. Without type annotations - at least for me - itâs very difficult to get a quick and thorough understanding of the code. The article pins it on meta-programming. Onboarding new people is a pain. With increasing turnover due to remote work, this pain becomes more painful (ha!). The article agrees, Ruby and Python donât scale. https://blog.sulami.xyz/posts/programming-language-scalability/ The UX of UUIDs (8 minute read) A simple code change from this Join the CTO newsletter! | |
