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February 21 · Issue #27 · View online
Weekly Readings on Software Engineering & Technical Leadership.
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Welcome to CTO Insights #27! The newsletter is based on top Software Engineering and Technical Leadership content from the past week, it is free and made for your weekly reading.
Subscribe here if you want a fresh issue every Sunday morning.
This week I’m introducing a new section to the newsletter - Featured. Each week, I’ll be featuring tools or technologies that aim to make our work life easier.
If there are any exceptional tools you are using, or you’ve built something you’d like to share with the community, let me know!
This week’s favorite - Equity for Software Engineers at Big Tech and Startups explained and the latest initiatives around - Location-Based Pay.
Do you want to help? Share CTO Insights with your network on LinkedIn or with someone you feel will benefit from it and hit the thumbs up button on the bottom. Ready? Let’s talk software, technology, and leadership.
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Qulture.Rocks - Performance Reviews, OKRs, 1:1s, and Development Plans
Qulture Rocks is an online platform for Feedbacks, Performance Reviews, OKRs/Goals, 1:1s, and Development Plans for growing companies. They are a YC company, working on developing a fully customizable Performance Management platform.
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How Facebook Keeps Its Large-Scale Infrastructure Up and Running
Facebook spends billions yearly to keep its data centers up and running. Having so many servers, certain types of failers are to be expected. Once MachineChecker creates an alert in a centralized alert handling system, a tool called Facebook Auto-Remediation (FBAR) then picks up the alert and executes customizable remediations to fix the error. This post talks about how exactly they manage to keep all of their hardware functional and reliable.
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Building a Rule-Based Platform to Manage Netflix Membership SKUs at Scale
Business Complexity, Reliability, Operational Efficiency, and Maintainability, are four main areas where Netflix started experiencing issues as they grew. As a result, they re-built their legacy SKU catalog from the ground up and set 4 core principles for the new one, including:
- Ownership Clarity
- Self Service
- Audibility
- Observability
An incredible story with a detailed explanation of each step in the process.
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Equity for Software Engineers at Big Tech and Startups
A growing number of startups and big tech companies offer equity - stocks, options, and others - as part of software engineering compensation. As most of the engineers have no idea how all of this works, Gergely took some time to educate us. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about the pros and cons of accepting equity, then the article offers more than enough insights.
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Why Building Trust Is the Core of Every Successful Team
What makes or breaks a team? This is a question Tim Enwall will answer in this blog post. Here’s a brief overview of the secrets hidden inside:
- The Seven Optimal Functions of a Team
- Trust and Relationships
- The Trust Equation
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"Location-Based Pay" - Who Are You to Complain?
Recently, Facebook announced that they’ll be paying their remote workers based on where they live. 😲 Whether this is a good idea or not, someone is always going to come out a winner and someone a loser. If you want a bit more clarity on the matter, then I suggest reading what George Blackshaw has to say. “I might regret writing this if I move out of London” - George
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How We Introduced Levels to Our Engineering Organisation without Losing People
Dafna Rosenbum is the co-founder of a tech company. Her company has 30 engineers and none of them have levels. The first thing she does in her blog post is she tells us how this badly affects productivity. When it’s clear to people what’s expected of them, stress goes down. With daily feedback and low stress levels, productivity goes up. 😌 Then, Dafna moves to the execution phase, revealing how to implement levels without risking decreasing productivity or even losing any of her valuable engineers.
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The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class
Some of the most popular creators on Youtube and Tik-Tok like Charli D’Amelio and David Dobrik bring in millions of dollars annually while countless more creators struggle to barely get noticed.
David Dobrik’s monthly AdSense checks from the platform were $275,000 for an average of 60 million views.
Charli D’Amelio — who recently became the first TikTok creator to surpass 100 million followers — is estimated to be worth $4 million at age 16. 😱 Many struggle to bring in these numbers their entire lives. This post by Li Jin sparks a wonderful idea involving a middle class for creator platforms. Read the rest of her story here.
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Deep Learning to Translate Between Programming Languages
Facebook creates the first AI system able to translate code from one programming language to another without requiring parallel data for training.
In our evaluations, the model correctly translates more than 90% of Java functions to C++, 74.8% of C++ functions to Java, and 68.7% of functions from Java to Python. 😲 Read how they developed their TransCoder and learn more about the project. At the end of the article, you will also find that they’re releasing a test set to help others with evaluating code translation models. 🙏
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Little Things Make a Difference
Christie Lenneville (UX VP at GitLab) shares some great examples of improving user experience by fixing the little things that are hard to even notice. 🔍 These issues may be hard to notice, but they make a crucial difference in improving user experience and design. Have a look at what features Christie focuses on in this post. You may even get a few ideas for improving your own projects.
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The problems with MVPs in legacy replacement
In one of the previous CTO Insights issues, we talked about part 1 of the Problems with MVPs in Legacy Replacement. Part 2 dives deeper into the topic and reveals more insights on the following features:
- Endowment Effect
- Loss Aversion
- Process Segmentation
That’s far from being it! Read the rest of part 2 here.
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Cisco Live 2021 - Digital Networking Event
The first global Cisco Live event in 2021. They aim to bring all tech professionals together and inspire them. The world is full of more possibilities than ever before, so let’s join together, take everything we have learned, and TURN IT UP. March 31 - April 1, 2021- Online
Free Pass
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If you are working on tools for engineers or you are an event organizer and you want to get featured in the newsletter email me at [email protected] All submissions are FREE - I’ll add them only if I feel they bring value to the community.
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