In case you missed it-

The Prime Video team originally built a Video Quality Analysis service very quickly with Lambda + Step Functions.

They soon realized that passing data between distributed components was expensive. So they refactored their code to run as a single service. This was a distributed microservice with various serverless components that needed to pass data between steps (they used S3).

It got refactored into a single microservice (no more S3 between steps).

The team says they reused most of their code making this refactor inexpensive.

I'm solo parenting this morning and the 4yo wants to be left alone for a bit.

Here are 10 personal finance things I'm glad I learned about 10 years ago: 1/ Max out every retirement benefit

Max out your 401k, at least to get that employer math. This reduces your taxable income.

Max out your Roth IRA. If you're married you can 2x this even if your spouse is unemployed.

Max out your HSA. It is a triple tax advantaged power IRA.

Hey, look at that! I went from 0 to 5K followers in...14 years 🥳😂😂

Here is my growth strategy and some observations about some of my most popular tweets: I use Twitter as a way to document my life.

I'm a parent, runner, saas builder, engineer, former engineering director, cook, violinist. I tweet about all of it. This may not a good strategy if you're a small account wanting to grow.

It’s important to drive your own work-life balance. You only have the cognitive load to juggle so many balls. Can you drop some?

What *worked* for me was taking 2 weeks off to just staycation and work on my health, then shortening my week by taking Fridays off. #DevDiscuss

https://twitter.com/ThePracticalDev/status/1506435581496152066

Not everyone can afford to destress by travel, and traveling is a logistics nightmare for me (kids, dog, chickens, plants, pandemic). However I do have plenty of PTO, so I use them up by just being a dad and husband 100% of the time. Cooking, running, biking, reading. #DevDiscuss

How do you build a fullstack app from scratch? I see this question here all the time.

The answer is something like:
- next.js
- python
- sagemaker
- tailwindcss
- C++
- typescript
- java
- sql

Makes 0 sense.

Here's a guide on building a fullstack JavaScript app in 15 mins 🧵 We're going to use Remix for this project.

Get started with:
❯ npx create-remix@latest

This will set up a directory with code and run npm install for you.

Start the site to see it:
❯ npm run dev

💯 You can tell an engineer why something won’t work based on your experience but they are far more likely to retain a lived experience.

My thing in those situations is to say “let’s see what happens if we try that approach”.

Don’t say “do it & you’ll see why it’s wrong”.

https://twitter.com/ksylor/status/1494675737793728518

It’s also entirely possible that their suggestion will work, and you the senior engineer is going to learn something invaluable.

The most valuable skill for a junior dev to learn is "communication".

I've been interviewing engineers for 15+ years, and maybe this advice will seem obvious.

A quick thread of great communication in an interview to help you land that software dev role.

https://twitter.com/SergiiKirianov/status/1478658976686481409?s=20

The interview intro

Your interviewer will intro themselves and rundown how the next 30+ mins will be spent.

When they ask you to introduce yourself, remember that this is part of the interview!

You're not a prisoner of war, don't just state your name and rank, and go quiet.

Casually browsing SaaS startups on @microacquire this morning to see if I want to buy one in the 5-10K range that has a low but steady MRR.

These are validated ideas with momentum and can shave several months to years off of your early founder journey.

Anyone else into this? There's more interest in this than I expected. Here are a few other marketplaces I browse from time to time:

Flippa lists domain names, iOS/Android apps, blogs, ecommerce sites, SaaS, Amazon FBA.

Weirdest use of Airtable today?

✨ I made a no-code feature flag system with Airtable and am using that to hide or display sections on a Next.js site. ✨

That's one way to help a client who can't decide when exactly something should go live on their site. 🤷🏾‍♂️ Here's how I did it. First I have a table that looks something like this. This is what the client sees when they edit the "Features" table (base, in Airtable lingo).

Coming to @netflix next Halloween starring Vanessa Hudgens, the newest film in the series-

The Princess Switch: Princess Witch 👸🏽🧙‍♀️ @netflix Vanessa Hudgens has a déjà vu when she sees the same exact cat walk by twice. 🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛

The Princess Switch: Matrix Glitch

If you are building a SaaS from scratch, have your Users belong to Teams, and attach billing information to the Team not User. While you're there, create a Membership model to be the join table between User/Team and assign a role to the User like Owner, Admin, or Readonly. This signals that your app is business-friendly. It allows you to assign limits and features at the Team level. It allows for users to ask for their accounts to be deleted without it affecting the billing status of the entire team. It allows a team to kill a teammate's account.

What a crazy world— my 5yo just requested me to please not be loud or crazy because she has a call at 10 with her class. oh good, they're all doing the "can you see me? can you hear me?" thing and I'm just glad that this is universal.