You shipped to prod, so what?
Learn about measuring the impact of the features you are building, a brief history of Instagram's architecture, and the scary down-trend in software developer jobs.
Hey Techies!
Last week, I hit 100 subscribers after getting 10 subscribers from the last post 🚀.
In my newbie newsletter world, getting 10 subscribers on a single post is the definition of “viral” 😆
Thank you for being a part of the ToT community, let’s keep learning together! 🙌
Why Engineers Must Care About Product-Market Fit (And How To Do It) (7 min)
It is not rare that engineering teams ship features without any idea if those features are bringing value to users or if they are adopted. Organizations where “Getting it to GA” becomes the main goal risk going completely blind on how their users use their product. In this one,
shares the value of measuring the success of what you are building 📊 and some practical advice on how you can do that. If you are building a product, reading this will make you a better engineer and your organization will benefit from you caring about the impact of what you are building.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn why and how to measure your features
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
15 lessons from 15 years in tech (7 min)
In this one,
shares a lesson from each of his 15 years in tech. From the power of product-first thinking and avoiding overengineering to career growth tips, Owen will give you actionable tips you can start using today 👌.Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn tips from experienced techie
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How Instagram Scaled Its Infrastructure To Support a Billion Users (15 min)
This system design piece shares a story of how Instagram went from developers manually adding servers before the weekend to avoid crashes to where it is today. You will learn about some neat system design nuances, such as solving the “thundering herd” problem with the Memcache Lease mechanism.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn about Instagram’s architecture
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Software engineering job openings hit five-year low? (11 min)
Software Developers job listings have hit a five-year low, and in this episode of Pragmatic Engineering, we get an analysis of why that could be the case. By the end of the article
shares that he is “sure that LLMs are a leading cause of the fall in software developer job postings”. Read all about this gloomy trend in the tech industry.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn why developer jobs are going down 📉
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
The Six Steps to Saying No — Why Being a Team Player is Not Necessarily Great (7 min)
If you are a high-achieving engineer/manager, saying no is a skill to learn. Otherwise, you could end up burned out burning the midnight oil on non-impactful endeavors. This article introduces you to why saying no is important and what can go wrong if you keep saying yes to everything.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Learn why to say “no”🫸
ToT Rating: ⭐
Managing people you don't like (7 min)
Humans are very biased creatures, and often, those biases lead to irrational decisions. Even our engineering brains, despite emphasis on rationality and logic, are flawed in many ways. In this article,
and share their experiences working with people they did not like, challenge the popular “beer test” 🍺, and talk about how being biased towards people you do like can make you build weaker teams.Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Learn how and why to work with people you do not like
ToT Rating: ⭐
Mentoring doesn't solve all problems. The 4 people every software engineer needs to grow fast without burnout (5 min)
We often have wrong expectations from mentoring. We confuse mentorship with coaching, teaching, or consulting. This article gives a great overview of all these learning relationships, which can help us better focus our growth.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn about (non) mentoring
ToT Rating: ⭐
Your First Step to Engineering Leadership: Becoming a Senior Dev (6 min)
This article talks about how becoming an Engineering Manager requires you to be a Senior Engineer first.
shares the different types of engineering leaders and how to act like a senior engineer.Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn about the road to Engineering Management
ToT Rating: ⭐
See you soon! 👋