TLDR 2023-11-07

Gergely Orosz is the author of The Pragmatic Engineer blog and spent over a decade working as an engineer and engineering manager at companies like Uber and Microsoft.

His new book The Software Engineer's Guidebook follows the structure of a typical career path of a software engineer, from intern or new grad through all the way to being successful at the staff/principal positions.

It summarizes what he learned while being a developer and how he approaches mentoring engineers at different stages in their careers. Check out this definitive guide to software engineering careers here!

OpenAI has hosted its first-ever developer conference, almost a year after the company released ChatGPT to the public. This article provides an overview of the announcements from the event. The company plans to launch a GPT store later this month. It has introduced a copyright shield that defends customers from legal action. GPT-4 Turbo is now available. Anyone can now create custom versions of ChatGPT.

YouTube is testing a new 'play something' button on its mobile app that directs users to a random video. The feature directs users to both YouTube Shorts and full-length videos. It is unclear whether the feature takes into account users' watch histories when picking videos. YouTube has been working on the feature since at least around May.

Prophetic is a tech startup that aims to bring lucid dreams to a wider audience by developing a wearable device designed to induce the experience when desired. It uses ultrasound and machine learning models to detect when dreamers are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams. Prophetic’s Halo device is slated for release in 2025. A render of the device is available in the article.

Apple is designing a battery with a new composition of raw materials. It aims to dramatically increase the silicon content to increase capacity and shorten charging times. One of the main issues with using silicon for batteries is that silicon expands during charging and powering. Apple is also researching the use of carbon nanotubes as a conductive material to improve battery performance. The new battery may be launched as soon as 2025.

Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components that works with all frameworks and CDNs. It is fully customizable with CSS, includes a dark theme, and was built with accessibility in mind. Shoelace features first-class React support and built-in localization.

Some of the new additions and improvements announced at OpenAI's DevDay include a new GPT-4 Turbo model, a new Assistant's API, and new multimodal capabilities. Pricing was reduced across many parts of OpenAI's platform. The new features are now available to customers. This article covers the update in detail.

Remote work is like a video game that pays. There are many similarities between video games and remote software engineering. This blog post looks at insights and lessons learned over almost two years of remote work. Remote work can be very rewarding, but it is not all rainbows and unicorns. Getting to know the people that you work with in person can help improve communication and collaboration immensely.

A Hacker News thread on developers' passions. Topics discussed include developing a life purpose, powerlifting, running, small city council politics, and mental health. A similar thread from exactly a year ago is linked to in the original post.

While Bumble now has a clear line of succession, the move leaves Slack in a bit of a pickle.

xAI's PromptIDE is a development environment for prompt engineering and interpretability research.

Braid was a company that designed and shipped a type of multi-user financial account called a money pool - it took two and a half years for the company to find product-market fit, after which it grew - but the company was dead just a few months later.

This post breaks down the setup for a one-person SaaS tech startup, from load balancing to cron job monitoring to payments and subscriptions.

Pay transparency has not significantly altered average wage ranges listed in job postings, but more employers are including a range of cash benefits, perks, and flexibility options.

Even Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, one of the five US companies currently worth over a trillion dollars, wouldn't do it all over again if he had the chance.