Links - April 27, 2016
- I was an undercover-bot for 2 months. Here is what I learned. Ami Ben-David - Chatbots Magazine - Medium
I don’t buy the bot craze. The technology is not there yet, and as the author well describes, the user experience feels just like calling a bank, or a telco, and being greeted by a distorted digital voice asking how one can be helped. Some day.
- The Rising Costs of Scaling a Startup Tom Tunguz
An oldie, but goodie. Someone should repeat this analysis and include 2015/2016 data. We’ve probably already crossed the 2x threshold.
- 15 Fundamental Laws of Software Development Matthew P Jones - Exception not Found
One of those lists that invariably will be printed out, and pinned to a cube, by a grumpy coworker.
- Generally Accepted Accounting Standards (GAAP) Fred Wilson - AVC
This reminded me of the Planet Money episode on CEO pay and how hard it is to actually measure how employees are compensanted.
- F*** You, I Quit — Hiring Is Broken Sahat Yalkabov - Medium
I have been on the other side of the table of many interviews since I started working at Apple. It is unbelievably hard to gauge the skills of a front-end engineer, even more so when more than half the people involved in the interview process do back-end work day to day.
- Antitrust and Aggregation Stratechery - Ben Thompson
As is mentioned toward the end, “the most effective monopoly killer is the next monopoly.”
- Wikipedia’s Piracy Police Are Ruining the Developing World's Internet Experience Jason Koebler - Motherboard
Sometimes, free is a problem.
- The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction Jay Kreps - LinkedIn Engineering
To be honest, I haven’t finished reading this, but it was profusely recommended by randos on HN and coworkers alike. The preferred stack, and the JS framework du jour might have changed since then, but the basics are still the same. This essay tries to explain distributed systems fundamentals from “the log” up.