2 min read

Through the stack 1.13 (Week 20)

This is "Through the Stack," a weekly list of links relating to topics relevant to Lead developers (actual or aspiring) working with an internet-related product.
Many lead developers, tech lead, and staff engineers have their hands in many projects and influence many layers in their organizations. This publication aims to share thoughts and content relevant to such profiles.
If you have comments or content to suggest, please reach out to us by email through-the-stack@imfiny.com.

This week ...

We go through the stack as always: from how we work (#noestimates, agile) to Cloud hosting (AWS news and GCP's embrace of Terraform's use) with stops in software engineering (about Python and Ruby).

While this week there is no book listed we do list a couple of conferences that are coming up.

Have a good read and a good day!

No estimates & agile talks

There is quite a bit of food for thought for anyone involved with building software. In a fascinating echo to the previous episode of this newsletter, an interesting post appeared in my feeds: "Relative estimation is a waste of time". Sam Haynes manages to condense and articulate the point in this excellent read very well.

Another post circling the same topics also reached my feeds from Smartly's blog: "Optimizing our product development for scaling up". Again, we can see similar topics as the one covered in Qonto's way (discussed in Week 18/19 and "Value analysis and technical dive-ins".

Languages

While there is quite some press around newer languages (Elixir, Go, Rust, ...) Ruby and Python are doing well (thank you for asking).

This week we saw Shopify announcing that they are doubling down on improving Ruby: "Shopify invests in Research for Ruby at Scale". This is not without reminding us of another work from Shopify last year: "Building a new JIT compiler for CRuby". And interestingly enough, they also published a follow-up on this last week: "Our experience porting the YJIT Ruby compiler to Rust".

And Python has some exciting things coming for fall: "Python is getting faster: major performance tweaks on the horizon".

I also published a little post on the gems I generally use for Ruby and Rails projects: "A choice of gems". The Reddit thread got some interesting comments too.

In the cloud

AWS announced that there is now a way to ''easily" link a lambda to a URL. Making it simpler to make a quick tiny piece of code to serve a little feature or side task: no more API Gateway to work with for such a simple thing.

Digging a bit further into Google Cloud Platform lately, I found that they embrace the use of Terraform nicely and publish good practices.

In the words of ...

An interesting read on how things went to a new backend engineer at Deliveroo over a year.

Sentry's team published a post-mortem following their incident on the 6th of May.

Conferences

Epilogue

This episode is coming to an end. If you want to talk about these topics or share some comments on them, you can reach out to me (see at the top and bottom of the newsletter for details).

Imfiny?

This content is written and published by Imfiny, a consulting company based in France. We do Ruby software engineering and DevOps in the Cloud (AWS, GCP, and others). We train and support teams in their journeys to grow code, infrastructure, and practices (production engineering, incident management, retrospectives, ...).
We have courses available on https://learn.imfiny.com/. We are available for 3 to 18 months contracts. Contact us.

Illustration Photo by Grovemade on Unsplash