Weeknotes 14

Engineering

• A great guide to writing documentation
• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code is a list of 12 questions which will help you figure out how good your software engineering team is. It is highly opinionated, and I disagree with some points, but it’s a good resource to point you in the right direction.
• This post talks about Nagle’s algorithm and how it is unnecessary in modern distributed systems.
• A mechanism to implement leader election using S3. Useful if you are already using S3 and don’t want to run a service just for leader election.

Tech

• A cool story about Git’s Origin. Crazy to think how one of the most impactful applications in software engineering was made in a few weeks. Also, proves how violating T&Cs of a product is always for the best.

Career

• A career checkup template by William Larson. It was in his book ‘Staff Engineer’ is where I came across the idea that I could do engineering pretty much my whole career and a transition to management was not necessary. This template allows you to introspect on your career by helping you ask the right questions.

Tools/Projects

• uv - A Python project and package manager. The best tool I have found to manage anything Python related.
• ChainForge. A tool that lets you visualise and evaluate prompts and models
• massCode | A free and open source code snippets manager for developers. Helps you manage your code snippets in one place. I tried it, and it was good, but I would like something a bit more integrated into my existing workflow.
• PocketBase – Open Source backend in 1 file | Has DB, authentication, admin dashboard, and file storage in a single executable. Have not used it, I will try it for some small project that I’ll do.
• GitHub — artsmolin/pythogen: Generator of python HTTP-clients from OpenAPI specification based on httpx and pydantic.