A bit of self-reflection: I spent much time planning and coordinating tasks between people on my project team last week and not much coding. Even though I believe that’s how best I can contribute to the team’s success, I worry that I am not spending time learning more about our codebase. I want to learn more about it because I feel like I am missing a lot of details, making my role in leading projects more challenging. I will make more time to take on tasks in unfamiliar areas and learn to navigate the hairy parts from now on.
Software Engineering ⚙️
Client Controlled Nullability: A path to True Schema Nullability
This write-up helped me see the tradeoff between schema expressiveness and execution resilience. Since GraphQL’s error-handling behavior cannot be customized to each client’s needs, the current best practice is to mark everything as nullable for maximum resilience. But when CCN enables that customization, the schema can express “true nullability.”
The Fall of Stack Overflow
Surprisingly, the traffic and the number of questions and answers have dropped by more than 35%. It’s not entirely due to generative AI since the number of posts decreased slowly since 2020. Are other communities, such as Reddit, Discord, and YouTube, taking over?
Use reverse-i-search to quickly navigate through your history
I cannot believe I haven’t learned this shortcut despite coding professionally for ten years. Because I find it difficult to remember long commands, I keep a list of those commands in a text file. This shortcut will save me at least 5-10 minutes every day.
People ❤️
Not posting a salary range? You may be losing half your applicants
I can attest to this result. When recruiting early this year, I preferred roles with salary ranges that matched my expectations and didn’t bother with those that were way below my expectations. Interestingly, I was more disinterested in postings without the ranges than those slightly below my expectations.
Business 💰
AI and the Job of an Amazon Seller
There are more than 2.5 million sellers on Amazon, and the tools continue to make launching a new e-commerce business easier. By commoditizing sellers, Amazon will maintain its dominant position.
Rise of AI newsbots shakes up India’s media landscape
An AI news anchor sounds scary, but I also appreciate that the AI can now deliver news in 75 different languages, which would be very expensive to produce for human anchors (not just the labor cost of the human anchors but also the production cost).