Polymath Engineer Weekly #49
Polymath Engineer Weekly #49
Are you curious today?
Hello again. Enjoy the reads ;)
Links of the week
Our audience has oddly asymmetric capabilities. By relentlessly pressing for more features sooner, they can spoil software development over the long term. However, they can’t do anything to directly improve software development. They can mess it up, but they can’t fix it.
The fast as a service prototype demonstrated a single API endpoint rewritten in Go and was built around the premise that improved API responsiveness was a feature that’d flow into increased user satisfaction. A popular conference slide making the rounds at the time made the case that what would seem like minor differences in responsiveness had major impact on the subjective user experience:
< 100ms: Feels instant.
100ms – 1s: Feels fast.
1s+: Feels slow. Dangerous territory where users would lose interest, and might hit the back button or otherwise start to multitask.
You Can't Hack Product Positioning
As Robert F. Smith, the founder of Vista Equity, famously said, “All software companies taste like chicken. They’re selling different products, but 80% of what they do is pretty much the same.” If we keep to this metaphor, we know the critical place to focus is that 20% differentiation. During these difficult economic times, it is more important than ever to frame your product in a league of its own. This is the only way to create outlier companies.
These types of questions are especially salient right now. Investors are more stringent with their capital, and customers are warier than ever about adding yet another SaaS tool to their budget.
The Complete Beginners Guide To Autonomous Agents
And keep in mind that this is the very beginning of this new paradigm. It’s not perfect, it hasn’t taken over the world yet, but the concept is frighteningly powerful and with increased development and experimentation will quickly find it’s way into our daily lives.
How to Use Engineering Metrics 📊
Metrics are always a means to an end. For me, the goal is to get visibility into what's happening in the development process/developer experience and insights on the things that I should pay attention to.
The Art of Delegation: a step-by-step guide to build a stronger team
What is important is the final result, not the way to reach it. You have a specific way of working and it got you where you are. Each person is beautifully individual and creative in their working approaches. Take a leap of faith and trust that your employees can reach the expected goal in a different manner, as long as they are left to breathe.
Book of the Week
Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition Is Reshaping Global Markets
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.