Polymath Engineer Weekly #25
25 already?
Hello again, we are at the issue #25 this week. Very cool how these posts accumulate over time. Thanks for your support ;)
Links of the week
How Stripe Built a Writing Culture
“The first emails I saw from our CEO [Patrick Collison] literally had footnotes,” Nunez recalls. “He structured his emails to be like research papers and put the peripheral information at the bottom so as not to detract from the core information.“
“Configuration management should make it easy to rebuild production from scratch. Otherwise, you’ve got a disaster in the offing.
This creates an environment suitable for demos and end-to-end test automation.”
Designing Spotify Radio’s recommendation system (Machine Learning system design)
“In that case, one good way of recommending content is to predict the probability of engagement with the users. For that, we can consider this as a binary classification problem and state the problem as follows.
Given a user, a song, and a context (time, location, and season), predict the probability of engagement for each track and order tracks using that score.“
The SPACE of Developer Productivity
“This framework, called SPACE, captures the most important dimensions of developer productivity: satisfaction and well-being; performance; activity; communication and collaboration; and efficiency and flow. By recognizing and measuring productivity with more than just a single dimension, teams and organizations can better understand how people and teams work, and they can make better decisions.“
Adam Bender - Principal Software Engineer at Google
“Google's Staff Engineers are expected to solve mostly open-ended problems where solutions are not-at-all clear to very senior people who need them solved. At a company of our scale, Staff also means a lot of coordination (read: meetings, docs, and emails). Google also makes a special point of calling out the importance of Staff engineers providing mentorship to more junior folks. Perhaps the quality most often cited during promotion attempts of Staff engineers is the "ability to reduce chaos from the system".“
The Changing Fortunes of Japanese Camera Manufacturers
“Over the last decade, we have witnessed the changing fortunes of three Japanese manufacturers with three different responses. Pentax has decided to “stick” with what it was already doing, Nikon has chosen to wipe the slate clean and “switch” completely to a mirrorless future, while Olympus has pulled out completely, “off-loading” its camera division.“
Book of the Week
Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.