Tech News - TL;DR
AWS Lambda increased ephemeral storage from 512 MB to 10 GB. Earlier, users could not cache larger data locally in the Lambda execution environment, making it harder to scale and do complex computations.
EU negotiators agree on new Digital Markets Act It places “restrictions on combining personal data from different sources, mandates to allow users to install apps from third-party platforms, prohibitions on bundling services, and a prohibition on self-preferencing practices.”
It mandates “interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms.Turns out that the LAPSUS$ hackers that hacked Microsoft and Okta are teenagers
Top picks from social media
Reddit: What keeps you motivated as a software engineer?
Money
Knowledge. Mastering a topic. Money.
An outlet for creativity. Paying my mortgage. I'm competitive by nature and want to be on top.
Originally solving complex problems is satisfying. Having people walk up to you and saying they wanted something like what you did X years ago.
Also, when your work is used in ways you never expected to solve some hard problems. The last two I didn’t know are motivations until they happened.
Culture and promotions at Meta
TL;DR
Levels are hidden and it’s frowned on to ask. So, everyone keeps wondering what the level of their colleague is.
Promotions are private - communicated between manager and direct - and there are no announcements.
To get promoted above IC5 you need several IC6+ people to vouch for you.
Web 3
Term of the Day - DAO
DAO - Decentralised Autonomous Organisation in simple words is the Web3 equivalent for the concept of company in the usual world.
The difference is that, unlike companies, DAOs are not owned by one or a few individuals. DAOs are owned and run by a decentralized group of people. The rules to run the company are baked into the blockchain.
DAOs differ in the way they give membership to people. You can just pay and get membership in some DAOs, some DAOs ask you for a proposal on how you can contribute and then admit you.
Just because :D
AI/ML
How Google docs auto-generates summaries?
Google published a blog on how they implemented the new summaries feature in google docs.
TL;DR
Data: Used self-supervised pre-training, that uses large amounts of unlabeled text to learn general language understanding and generation capabilities. Then, in a subsequent fine-tuning stage, the model learns to apply these abilities on a specific task, such as summarization or question answering.
Serving: Used knowledge distillation, where knowledge from one large model is transferred to a smaller efficient model. knowledge from a large model to a smaller more efficient model.
Become a 10x engineer
Service incident at Github - What would you do in this situation?
Github observed that a shared database table’s auto-incrementing ID column exceeded the size that can be represented by the MySQL Integer type: 2147483647. When larger integers were inserted into ID column, the database rejected the value thereby resulting in errors.
Assume you are the engineer at Github responsible to fix this. How would you approach fixing this issue on production?
Discuss with your friends and colleagues and figure out approaches to handle this situation. Will share some approaches in the next edition.
Guiding principles after 20 years of programming
When making decisions about the solution all things equal, go for this priority:
Security > Reliability > Usability (Accessibility & UX) > Maintainability > Simplicity (Developer experience/DX) > Brevity (code length) > Finance > PerformanceNever start coding (making a solution) unless you fully understand the problem. Don’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Don’t do speculative programming.
Write pure functions. Avoid overriding, inheritance, and implicit smartness as much as possible.
Tech debt is like fast food. Occasionally it’s acceptable but if you get used to it, it’ll kill the product faster than you think (and in a painful way).
Don’t attach your identity to your code. Don’t attack anyone’s identity to their code. Realize that people are separate from the artifacts they produce. Don’t take code criticism personally but be very careful when criticizing others’ code.
Realize that every code has a life cycle and will die.
Transitioning from IC to Engineering Manager - Advice from former Director of Engineering, Twitter
IC engineers that newly transition to manager roles fall into trap of keeping themselves busy in coding and reviewing to escape from doing management work.
David recommends following what he calls an event loop to avoid falling into this trap.
One could create a checklist by dividing their work into the following matrix and making sure they give attention to all of these tasks. Y-axis is a type of task and X-axis is the frequency at which you should do.
Humour and Rant
Tapa Career Services
Which company should I join next? Should I go for a startup or FAANG? What compensation is fair for me to expect? What type of work culture would I prefer? What is the culture of x,y,z company etc. are some questions that bother engineers.
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