Interesting content Friday — 2019/05/24

[Article] How to Deliver Constructive Feedback in Difficult Situations

Link: https://medium.com/s/please-advise/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf

Giving feedback in difficult situations can be very uncomfortable, but luckily, there are techniques to make it less uncomfortable and more effective. This article introduces Nonviolent Communication, which can be a great tool for those tough conversations. “Great communication isn’t just about what you say, it’s about what other people hear.”

Big thanks to our CEO, Vin Vacanti, for sharing this article.

[Project] Cython — C Extensions for Python

Link: https://cython.org/

I spent this week running benchmarks against DRedis and experimenting with different types of optimizations. DRedis is written in Python, and I don’t feel comfortable re-writing the project in C, but tools like Cython can be a great help to get a hybrid solution. After I added static typing to the parser code, I saw some promising performance improvements (I will write more about it when I’m done).

Cython is very powerful, and I am amazed at how quickly you can change a few lines and get some performance boost. All of a sudden writing C extensions for Python became less scary!

[30min Video] How Netflix Thinks of DevOps

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTKIT6STSVM

Netflix has strong engineering teams, and I found interesting the way they approach DevOps. Many companies want to apply DevOps to their problems, but Netflix seems to focus on finding what they need and what works for their company culture (spoiler: the result is similar to DevOps).

I can see many similarities with our approach at Yipit. We took the time to analyze our engineering problems, built platforms and processes to empower our engineers and augment their impact, and as a result, created Readypipe. We’re not at Netflix’s level, but we can learn from their experience and improve our organization.