5 interesting things (09/02/2024)

Closing the women’s health gap: A $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies – a McKinsey report that highlights the gender health gap and points to the opportunity – potential for a $1 trillion economic gain with additional societal impact. One interesting point is that there are gaps and flaws throughout the value chain – drug effectiveness, therapy access, research functions, etc. This hints that there are many opportunities out there that can make a significant impact.

https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/closing-the-womens-health-gap-a-1-trillion-dollar-opportunity-to-improve-lives-and-economies

Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99% – one of the costs developers often forget or dismiss when considering architecture is the cost of data transfer. The solution described in this post is elegant and demonstrates the effect of deep knowledge and understanding of the domain. Simple to trivial architectural decisions can cost so much.

https://www.bitsand.cloud/posts/slashing-data-transfer-costs

3 questions that will make you a phenomenal rubber duck – I previously mentioned that debugging skills are essential, and it is important to iterate and refine them. I especially liked the 3rd question – “If your hypothesis were wrong, how could we disprove it?” as it forces one to think the other way around and see a slightly bigger picture.

https://blog.danslimmon.com/2024/01/18/3-questions-that-will-make-you-a-phenomenal-rubber-duck

Product Managing to Prevent Burnout – burnout is more common than we think and can have many causes. Moreover, different people would react differently to different cultures and would burn out or not burn out accordingly. The most important takeaway is that managing and controlling burnout is a team sport; it is not only the concern of the direct manager, but product managers can also participate in this effort. (I strongly recommend the honeycomb blog)

https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/product-managing-prevent-burnout

The “errors” that mean you’re doing it right – I was able to identify or witness almost all the errors mentioned in the post. I also think some of those errors, such as Letting someone go soon after hiring, Pivoting a strategy just after creating it, etc, could be attributed to the sunk cost fallacy. And if we want to make the opening sentence more extreme – “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working”.

https://longform.asmartbear.com/good-problems-to-have

5 interesting things (16/05/2023)

Women’s health research lacks funding – these charts show how – not a proper tech link but – I liked the infographic very much (it missed some hovering features) and believe this is an important topic.

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-023-01475-2/index.html

Farewell to the Era of Cheap EC2 Spot Instances – spot instances were the holy grail of cloud cost reduction and required a suitable architecture to accommodate it. While the cloud vendors suggest more and more ways to reduce cost, this well seems to dry out and it is backed with data about 5.5 million spot instances they spun over almost seven months. I don’t know if it is the end of spot instances, but something goes on.

https://pauley.me/post/2023/spot-price-trends/

Uptime Guarantees — A Pragmatic Perspective – great down-to-earth analysis of uptime and the meaning of each additional nine –

https://world.hey.com/itzy/uptime-guarantees-a-pragmatic-perspective-736d7ea4

Evidence – Business Intelligence as Code – this project intrigued me. Developers often struggle with creating visualizations, the UI of most of the tools is confusing and complex for sporadic use, maybe evidence will unleash it for developers –

https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence

How to Debug – “The missing Semester of your CS education” (here) influenced how I think of juniors and recently graduated employees. Debugging is a skill you usually don’t learn during formal studies and is essential in the industry. This post is a good starting point in the journey of debugging – 

https://philbooth.me/blog/how-to-debug