I skimmed through dozens of newsletters this week. Here’s some interesting articles I found.

Traits of Exceptional Engineers (mid length read)

This one is totally worth reading and remembering. Exceptional Engineers:

1. Are ambitious and determined (crave feedback and new challenges)
2. Habitually simplify (working simple code that’s easy to maintain)
3. Can debug anything quickly (the quicker you can fix, the more time you can spend building value)
4. Help others be great (leading with kindness and support)
5. Know what’s valuable (solving big valuable problems and act like they’re spending their own money)
6. Are creative and positive (they give everyone hope, courage, and creative freedoms)

I also learned about the Saff Squeeze method of debugging. I just use debuggers like binding.pry in Ruby.

Removing uncertainty: the tip of the iceberg (longer read)

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• Prioritize uncertain parts of the project and focus on getting answers
• Reduce uncertainty by prototyping, designing, writing code, and shipping
• The more predictability that you have within your team, the more possible that it is to commit to your milestones
• The article goes through some examples of prototyping

Google Chrome’s now pauses idle tabs (1 min read)

This new “feature” has allowed me to open 3 times as many tabs, to my own dismay 😞

Apparently, Our Society Is Not Prepared For This Much AI Awesome (longer read)

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• Various institutions and companies are getting flooded with AI generated content
• Some of it good quality, some not so good
• People who co-write with AI and do fact-checking can produce better work and gain a deeper understanding of the subject
• Everybody needs to get used to this new reality

37signals (Basecamp) to Save $7M Over 5 years Through Cloud Exit (2 min read)

• Putting your app in the cloud is fast and cheap, until it’s not
• Other companies may be feeling the hefty cloud bill
• David Heinemeier Hansson and team have estimated they will save $7 million dollars over 5 years by switching some or all of their systems to on-premise solutions