‘Is that button spacing worth it?’: When engineers should challenge designers
Happy Saturday and welcome back to the newsletter! As always, read on for some of the best software engineering insights, opinions, and news pieces from the week.
//From the Triplebyte blog
When and how UI engineers should challenge design choices
If you’re an engineer who works on UI, it's your duty to implement the vision of designers and product managers to the best of your ability. At the same time, you're not merely a cog in the machine. Sometimes, it makes sense to say "no" — or at least offer insights and options that allow the product team to make more strategic decisions. Here’s how to do it effectively. read()
Counterpoint: Stop trying to force Big O into software development
Our recent blog about why engineers should embrace and understand Big-O notation to help them best implement algorithms in their work started a bit of a discussion. (Hacker News thread here.) To bring the counterpoint side of this argument to our blog pages, I welcomed in one commenter (a writer and engineer in his own right) to pen their full case for why Big-O's usefulness in software development – and software developer hiring – is often overplayed. read()
Pomodor-no! Here’s the best way for engineers to time block their work days
In today's WFH life, it's actually more possible to completely commit to time blocking, a system that can help you organize your day so as not to waste a single moment. This engineer’s particular method for doing it can be especially great for seamlessly handling coding tasks right alongside the kind of administrative work or team communications surprises that try to pop in to disrupt your flow. read()
//Around the Web
💬 “You really don’t need all that JavaScript, I promise.” The summary for this video, which is hosted by Web Standards Project member Stuart Langridge, should be enough to hook front-end devs of all calibers: “JavaScript is your behavior layer ... But at some point everything changed: the tail started to wag the dog instead and development became JavaScript-first. We'll talk about how you maybe shouldn't rely on JS as much as you're told to, and some practical strategies for how to build sites without reaching for a JS framework as first, last, and only tool for making the web.” watch()
🤖 So, natural language models are writing op-ed columns now? If you follow AI news, you know of the GPT-3 deep learning language prediction system that was released by the OpenAI org this summer. Well, The Guardian decided this week to publish an opinion article that the news site said was “written by GPT-3.” Of course, this simply meant prompting the AI to generate some text about “why humans have nothing to fear from AI,” with the system spitting out lines like: “I believe that the truth will set us free. I believe that people should become confident about computers. Confidence will lead to more trust in them.” The publication went on to explain that it edited GPT-3’s several drafts down to a single article – “no different to editing a human op-ed.” I thought the idea was fun enough and showed an effort by the mainstream media to spotlight some advancements in machine learning (even if at a pretty shallow level), but not everyone on the internet appreciated The Guardian’s experiment. read()
🏢 Four learnings from the first four years of working at Facebook and Instagram. This blog from software engineer Jacky Wang offers a dash of career advice from someone who’s held their own at a FAANG company. Jacky talks about the soft skills that have helped him, the usefulness of emotional detachment from your projects, and even dishes a couple of inside operational tidbits from these Tech Giants. read()
🏆 Lastly, you can now show that you’re Triplebyte-certified on your various profiles around the web! Want to flaunt your software engineering skills? Of course you do. The new candidate certificates recently launched at Triplebyte are awarded to engineers who perform in the 90th percentile (or higher) on our various skills assessments. To get your digital certificate:
Sign up for Triplebyte and take one of our role-based software engineering quizzes (Generalist, Front-End, DevOp, etc).
If you score in the top 10% of our community of 200,000 engineers: Huzzah! You’re Triplebyte-certified and you should expect en email that explains how you can access your certificate and share it on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
If you’ve already taken a Triplebyte assessment in the past and scored high enough to earn a certificate, you should be getting one, too! Be on the lookout for an email about it.
//Jobs
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