Hasnain says:

This was a really good read - I liked the framing of how management responsibilities have changed a bit in the industry over the last few years, and Honeycomb’s approach was quite refreshing. And the quote really hit home for me:

“Why? Admittedly, partly for crass practical reasons: so many of the best and most promising managers I know have left management roles for senior IC roles since 2018, and as someone who has to hire managers, this creates a supply problem for me. Sincerely though, I also observe that a truly staggering number of Honeycomb’s most effective, most admired senior ICs are former managers, and while they seem quite happy and I wouldn’t wish them back to their old roles, the fact that all of these smart, thoughtful, driven, emotionally intelligent people all chose to leave the same high-paying, respectable role must mean something (yes, respectable—it is unfortunately a fact universally acknowledged that every in-law is more impressed by “Engineering Manager” or “Director of Engineering” than “Senior Software Engineer” or “Staff Engineer”).

Partly, this is just a sign that we’ve made senior IC roles more appealing—more lucrative, more autonomous, with clearer career progression—as we intended to do! This is good. But I think it is also a sign that the job of engineering manager has gotten harder, and in many organizations, it can now feel like an unwinnable game, caught between two distinct and sometimes conflicting generations of expectations. “

Hasnain says:

Climate change is real and is unfortunately going to lead to so many more deaths unless radical action is taken. My heart goes out for these folks - and if you can donate, please do.

““Pakistan is under an unprecedented monsoon spell and data suggests the possibility of re-emergence of another cycle in September,” she said.

Two of the worst-hit provinces – Balochistan and Sindh – have received 298mm and 689mm rains respectively this year, which is about 400 percent more than the 30-year average.”

Hasnain says:

I wonder if there has been follow up research here since this study was done since the results are quite staggering.

“The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we’re talking about. The school district didn’t reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it’s consistent with a growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution, which finds that everyone from chess players to baseball umpires to workers in a pear-packing factory suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted.

If Gilraine’s result holds up to further scrutiny, he will have identified what’s probably the single most cost-effective education policy intervention — one that should have particularly large benefits for low-income children.”

Hasnain says:

Great little piece of technical advice I hadn’t heard about before.

“Once you lose the autoplaying videos, the popups, the cookies, the cookie consent banners, the social network buttons, the tracking scripts, javascript and css frameworks, and all the other junk nobody likes — you're probably there.

But, assuming you've tried your very best to fit everything into 14kB, and can't — the 14kB rule is still useful.

If you Make sure the first 14kB of data you send to your visitors can be used to render something useful — for instance some critical CSS, JS and the first few paragraphs of text explaining how to use your app.”

Hasnain says:

Come for the feature announcement, stay for the great Rust praise. This matched my experience too.

“So, what did we learn? We all expect performance and dev processes to improve. Those indeed happened. What we didn’t expect was the extent to which dev velocity increased and operational incidents decreased. Dev velocity, which was supposed to be the claim to fame of Python, improved dramatically with Rust. Built-in testing, CI/CD, benchmarking, and an overzealous compiler increased engineers’ confidence in pushing changes, and enabled them to work on the same code sections and contribute simultaneously without breaking the code base. Most impressively though, real time operational events dropped almost to zero overnight after the original release. Sure, there are still surprises here and there but, by and large, the core engine has been shockingly stable and predictable.”

Hasnain says:

I love these blogs as I keep learning more about SQLite. Looking forward to the next one!

“While there are always trade-offs between design choices, the vast majority of applications will benefit from WAL mode. The SQLite web site helpfully lists some edge cases where the rollback journal would be a better choice such as when using multi-database transactions. However, those situations are rare for most applications.

Now that you understand how data is stored and transactions are safely handled, we'll take a look at the query side of SQLite in our next post which will cover the SQLite Virtual Machine.”

Hasnain says:

I think what’s not appreciated as much in the reporting on this great move is the 5% income cap and 20 year limit on loans. I still wish education would be free but this is a great first step.

“Biden on Wednesday also announced a new income-driven repayment plan that would cap monthly payments for undergraduate loans at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, down from the rate of 10% under most existing plans.”

Hasnain says:

Cue stargate reveal in 3,2,1…

“"After all, why would Congress establish and task a powerful new office with investigating non-'man-made' UFOs if such objects did not exist?"

"Make no mistake: One branch of the American government implying that UFOs have non-human origins is an explosive development."”

Hasnain says:

Given that this is coming from Mudge, this is likely highly credible and quite worrying to read. There’s always two sides to the story though and I wonder what context we’re missing out on. Like for example none of the reporting I read on this mentioned that the CISO also left at the same time - I hope that was due to an oversight (she’s arguably not as famous as Mudge) and not due to sexism. But.. it still seems notable enough to warrant a mention at least?

“But, the disclosure says, Zatko soon learned “it was impossible to protect the production environment. All engineers had access. There was no logging of who went into the environment or what they did…. Nobody knew where data lived or whether it was critical, and all engineers had some form of critical access to the production environment.” Twitter also lacked the ability to hold workers accountable for information security lapses because it has little control or visibility into employees’ individual work computers, Zatko claims, citing internal cybersecurity reports estimating that 4 in 10 devices do not meet basic security standards.”

Hasnain says:

“Years have passed since the experiments that accidentally bore these results were conducted. A whole new suite of experiments now use Jefferson Lab's higher energy 12 GeV beam to explore nuclear physics.

"One thing I'm very happy about with all these older experiments is that we trained many young students and they have now become leaders of future experiments," Chen said.

Only time will tell which theories these new experiments support.”