Practical guide to solving hard problems

#461 – February 27, 2022

sponsor

Retool is the fast way to build internal tools

Retool is the fast way to build internal tools. Visually design apps that interface with any database or API. Switch to code nearly anywhere to customize how your apps look and work. With Retool, you ship more apps and move your business forward—all in less time.

this week's favorite

Practical guide to solving hard problems

I sometimes find myself in a position of needing to write some code that I’m just not sure how to write. Been there have you? Here are the steps I take when I’m stumped. No huge revelations here, just hard-earned advice.

What does it mean to listen on a port?

In the corner of the student union building there is a coffee shop, and in the corner of the coffee shop are two students. Liz taps away at the keyboard of the battered hand-me-down MacBook her brother gave her when she moved away to college. To her left on the bench seat, Tim scrawls equations on a coil-bound notebook. Between them is a half-empty cup of room temperature coffee that Liz sporadically sips from to stay awake.

Logging at Twitter

While centralized logging previously existed at Twitter, it was limited by low ingestion capacity and limited query capabilities, which resulted in poor adoption and failed to deliver the value we hoped for. To address this, we adopted Splunk Enterprise and migrated centralized logging to it.

Why you should care about creativity

I’ve found there’s a tool that’s often overlooked in this industry. It’s useful to both creators and managers, from the smallest business to the largest. That tool is creativity. It has a positive connotation, and yet it remains underused for its usefulness. A pity, because it’s only due to a lack of knowledge. Many people don’t know why creativity is important and how to harness it.

The four innovation phases of Netflix’s trillions scale real-time data infrastructure

I think it’s a perfect time to summarize my learnings building the real-time data infrastructure at Netflix. I hope this post will help platform engineers develop their cloud-native, self-serve streaming data platforms and scale use cases across many business functions.

courses

Introducing Technical Strategy from Reforge - Apply Today, Begins March 21

Gain a practical toolkit to develop and strengthen your strategic thinking with this 4-week program created by Harsh Sinha (CTO at Wise) and Bryan Dove (CEO at CommerceHub). Learn how to define a technical strategy, optimize it based on company context, assess strategic trade-offs more effectively, and ultimately guide the product roadmap to deliver business impact.

newsletters