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Happy Sunday!
Welcome to the fifteenth edition of this newsletter. I spent Saturday travelling to my parent’s place in Delhi, which is why this letter is coming out a day late this time. The smell of early winter is already in the air here, and I’m sure many of you are looking forward to Diwali festivities. Here’s you weekend dose of great technical reading!
From the blog
This week I wrote about speeding up software delivery by deploying as frequently as possible. IMO we attach way more importance to deploying software than we should - it is (and should be) a mundane activity. I tried to model and analyze the entire software delivery pipeline in reverse and applied a bit of constraint theory style thinking to identify the bottlenecks at each step. TL;DR - Think in terms of deploying changes (not complete features), use feature gates, and automate deployments. Check out the article for the full scoop! Article Link
From the great interweb
- Edgar Dijkstra was one of the most influential and controversial leaders in the computing industry. Here is a great (not too long) history of his life and work which is entirely worth reading. I did not do a lot of the behind the scenes action that this article covers.
- I'm still on the theme of writing advice on this newsletter since this is one of the things I am learning as I share. David Perell has this AWESOME guide on writing online effectively.
- Erik Dietrich has a great article on how software developers stop learning by getting labelled experts too early in their careers. This “familiarity disguised as expertise” pattern is something that I have fallen into myself, and seen others suffer it too. If the description seems to fit you, it might be time to consider mixing things up again.
- The Netflix engineering team has published an article on the way they identify priority traffic to shed load effectively. For those who have encountered it before, the Netflix tech blog is full of articles sharing real data and techniques like this. I definitely recommend spending time on it.
That's it for this week folks. Happy weekend!
-Kislay
