Polymath Engineer Weekly #27
It's a weekly newsletter this week ;)
Hello again, once more we are here with great reads.
Links of the Week
“But most importantly, I’ve learned - and all the people I talked to agreed: Bazel does deliver on its promise of fast and correct builds. Other tools like Pants and Buck exist, but Bazel is the clear category leader. If I had a mono-repo with several million lines of code in it, I’d want a consistent way to build things and a fast way to get feedback on those changes. Doing so would pay for itself over time because developer time is expensive. Bazel is the tool for that job.“
Tech Predictions for 2023 and Beyond
“At this point, the sports themselves will truly start to become a data stream that we can analyze and make decisions on in real time—player hydration, ball movement, field saturation—all of it, aggregated, and richer than anything we see today. And with more data comes further innovation. In the not-so-distant future, we will reach a point where teams are running constant what-if simulations in the background during every game, enabling them to better predict the impact of their decisions in the moment. Technology, itself, will become the competitive foundation for professional sports.“
“It is important to remember that the initial virus has to be basically good. If so, the viral spread is assured as long as it is portable. Once the virus has spread, there will be pressure to improve it, possibly by increasing its functionality closer to 90%, but users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing. Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing.“
Building Uber’s Go Monorepo with Bazel
“To keep the master branch of our Go monorepo in the green state, meaning all code on the master branch can be successfully compiled and tested at any time, we perform a series of checks before landing a commit to the master. These checks include building and testing all packages changed in that commit, as well as all dependent packages transitively. Depending on how many packages are affected by a commit, the checks can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.“
Writing docs well: why should a software engineer care?
“The cartoonist Richard Guindon has a famous quote: “writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” You might have an impression that you understand something well, but that sense of clarity is often an illusion, and when you go to explicitly capture your understanding in a document, you discover that you didn’t understand things as well as you thought. There’s nowhere to hide in your own document.“
We Will See the Return of Capital Investment on a Massive Scale
“But in a world where large parts of the global economy are in a system of financial repression, there will be all sorts of capital controls. That means that as an investor, you best invest in jurisdictions where you plan to spend your retirement. To me, that means I don’t want to be invested in China at all, for example. The risks of getting stuck there are way too high, as the example of Russia has shown. Many investors today still pretend that we’re in the system that we had from 1980 to 2020. We’re not.“
Book of the Week
The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
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