Reducer #4: Homoiconicity & Continuous Profiling
Engineering
Fix Fast for Finding and Fixing Regressions - Facebook Engineering @ engineering.fb.com
A defect detected in the integrated development environment (IDE) while an engineer is coding can be fixed in minutes. Likewise, a defect detected while a diff is being reviewed can be fixed in hours. However, if that same defect can land and make its way into production, it can take days to deliver a fix.
Heard about this article from Facebook research on a podcast. Good backing data to increase developers’ autonomy in production for faster and cheaper software delivery.
Homoiconicity & Feature Flags — Martin Klepsch @ martinklepsch.org
Of the more than 230 feature flags that have been removed, only about ten needed additional adjustments for indentation.
Great article showing how Lisp makes it easy to build automations to refactor code. Language doesn’t make things simple only for humans.
Honeycomb’s Secret to High-Performing Teams @ Ship It! DevOps, Infra, Cloud Native
The mention to Facebook’s Fix Fast article. The cost of fixing a bug grows exponentially with time. AirrQuote (Time 0:13:07)
Shipping is your company’s heartbeat. If shipping code is a big event, you have a problem. It should be a minor, routine, boring thing that happens all the time.
Everyone tests in production. The only question is do you admit you do it and build guardrails to do it safely or not.
AirrQuote (Time 0:16:45) - Do not use shortcuts to ship things to production in emergencies. Make sure your main pipeline is fast enough to ship a one-line change in a few minutes.
AirrQuote (Time 0:22:55) - A big part of the value of software companies is the people working on the systems. If you swap the people from a team with a new group with the same experience level, things will stop working.
Continuous profiling takes the one-off profiling that we used to run when things went wrong and keeps them running 24/7. It used to cost a lot in performance for the application to generate the profiles and storage to persist them. The landscape evolved to make these two things viable.
AirrQuote (Time 0:01:21) - Four thousand span traces on a Rails app. Is it worth it?
AirrQuote (Time 0:10:07) - There is no magic. Profilers that automatically instruments applications generate too much data with every method call from libraries and other things we don’t care about. On the other hand, manually instrumenting is costly as we have to say what we care about. #ideas
AirrQuote (Time 0:11:05) - Be careful with the AI-Ops and other new buzzwords that promise to delegate your operations to some software. It’s one of the hardest parts of building software, and humans aren’t leaving it anywhere soon. At least not with the current state of tech.
AirrQuote (Time 0:13:27) - Pyroscope uses a different storage engine than alternatives from Datadog and major cloud providers. In Pyroscope, you can zoom in to the timeline to spot problems instead of knowing what you are looking for upfront.
AirrQuote (Time 0:21:10) - Education is a big part of distributing a new technology. The same way Honeycomb had to educate people about using traces, Pyroscope teaches people that profiling can be easy to use at scale.
AirrQuote (Time 0:24:00) - Tracing is good when the problem has network hops. Profiling is good when a single thing is generating the problem. AirrQuote (Time 0:26:58)
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Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash
Writing
030: Sam Parr - Growing to 2M Subscribers and Selling Your Newsletter @ The Nathan Barry Show
Ryan Holliday is great at introducing examples faster.
Sam Parr mentions his technique to improve writing by handwriting great authors’ work. The idea is that you start to find patterns and apply them to your own writing. This is not optimal, and you could get better at writing new things. But the whole point of the technique is to be easy, not optimal.
She was small and curvy, wearing a lacy white dress and holding a hairbrush in one hand. The soft light was reflecting in her eyes and making her milk-pale skin seem to glow.
The lacy white dress hugged her small, curvy figure, and she held a hairbrush in one hand. Her milk-pale skin glowed in the soft light - and her eyes reflected in it.
I’ve been watching Abbie Emmons videos to improve my writing. They are great. I always found it difficult to add variation when using active voice. This example from one of her videos blew my mind.
Business
Ep. #37, Up the Ladder With Jay Simons of Bond @ EnterpriseReady
Atlassian migration from single-tenant on-premises to the single-tenant cloud was one of the few successful cloud migration cases. AirrQuote (Time 0:48:24)
Take the prior experience as a data point and not a rule for how things should be done. AirrQuote (Time 1:12:48) #ideas
Lessons for Early Stage Founders @ calv.info
If you don’t yet have a product-market fit, your goal should probably be getting your first 3-5 customers using the product. If you’ve hit the level where you now have dozens of users, your goal should be growing by orders of magnitude. It’s better to get in the habit of setting and driving towards goals rather than being too worried about their exact semantics. Worst case, you pick a better goal later.
If you have 24 months of runway and a clear list of things you’d do if you had more copies of yourself: you probably aren’t spending time to hire the people you need.
Ilya was right. He started a six-month focus on recruiting. He built our initial success engineering team, our sales engineering team, and our CSM team. His work allowed us to hit 2.5m in revenue in the next year.
Tools
Zen - Improve Posture Prevent Back Pain @ www.yayzen.com
Enable your webcam to correct your posture
I’ve tried a few side projects on this, happy to see a company working on it, webcam for posture correction is power. Will try.