Welcome to the inaugural edition of thelinklist.dev’s first email. I’ve rounded up some thought-provoking, inspiring, and entertaining links that I hope you’ll enjoy. Let’s dive in!
1. Lessons Learned From Payments Startups
The lessons here aren’t specific to payment startups, they appeal to a much broader audience. He talks about optimizing for change, comprehensive testing and continuous deployment to help maintain simplicity. The section on decision logs is something I’m considering how to better implement in my daily work.
2. Know your “One Job” and do it first
Charity Majors emphasizes the importance of prioritizing core job responsibilities over extracurricular activities in the workplace. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in so many other activities we forget our core ones. Extracurricular activities are a great way to grow, but you can’t lose track of your most important priorities. Definitely guilty of this from time to time.
Glyph Lefkowitz critiques the software industry’s adoption of Facebook’s “Move Fast and Break Things” mantra, arguing that it has been misinterpreted and misapplied beyond its original context. I wholeheartedly agree on this one. Too often I’ve seen engineers abuse that statement in the name of pushing out poor code quickly. I think the true mantra is more aligned with the idea of continuous delivery. This quote resonates:
Once you have made the process of releasing software to users sufficiently safe that the potential damage of any given deployment can be reliably limited, it is always best to release your changes to users as quickly as possible.
4. Himalaya: CLI to manage emails
I am, and forever will be, a sucker for cool command line tools. In the past I’ve tried other alternatives like mutt and aerc. The concept of a command line interface (CLI) tool rather than a full client sounds interesting. CLI emails sound fun until you realize how many emails are HTML and how bad rendering HTML emails is. Another cool CLI adjacent link I found was gmailctl.
5. How to hire low experience, high potential people
Hiring individuals with limited experience but high potential is advantageous for organizations of all sizes. You may not be a hiring manager, but you will surely be applying to jobs early in your career. Engineers who are later in their careers can also benefit from some of the items on this list. Everyone should be able to demonstrate transferable skills, flexibility, and willingness to learn.
6. Video: Simple Made Easy - Rich Hickey
Rich Hickey is the creator of the Clojure programming language. He’s been around the block and seen some things. In this video, he defines simple as “unentangled” or having a single role, task, or concept. This helps lead to more robust and maintainable systems. In contrast, easy refers to familiarity or proximity to one’s current knowledge, which is subjective and can sometimes introduce complexity. Hickey argues that prioritizing ease can lead to complex systems that are difficult to understand and modify over time. He also teaches you the word “complect” which is fun to drop into sentences.