Month summary — October 2024

How lions, tigers, and tarsiers went geek.

To sum up, the Netherlands is a unique relocation destination that offers a very beneficial environment for IT specialists with a 30% tax ruling, excellent work-life balance, and outstanding standard of living.

In his time at Meta, he’s conducted over 2,000 interviews and has seen every mistake in the book. He will share the biggest mistakes with you and what to do instead.

Much of this may be “duh”, but there might be a few rules you haven’t considered yet.

With so much focus on the US, there’s a lot of opportunity in Europe-if you can find it.

How I went from a $350K FTE to $700K+ doing my own thing.

What helped me get 5 promotions in 10 years at Google.

Did you know that in October this year, DRY principle will celebrate its 25th anniversary? It was proposed by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas in The Pragmatic Programmer book in 1999.

How should we use htmx?

Uber broke apart an open source tool to massively compress their logs.

A job in Big Tech is a career goal for many software engineers and engineering managers. So what leads people to quit, after working so hard to land these roles?

The Art Of Getting Your Shit Done

The true essence of a software developer’s role combines many different skills, mindsets, and disciplines.

NotebookLM is your personalized AI research assistant powered by Google’s most capable model, Gemini 1.5 Pro.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about how I run these AI tools on my device without the need of leaking any data to external services. Today, I’ll describe how I used them to help me with the task of extracting the key information and learnings from all the videos I won’t be able to watch.

While understandable, given that the hardware requirements for AI stuff are massive, I find unsettling the continuation of the trend of all your data and interactions being shared with a remote company.

Motivated by the high interest in developing with LLMs, we have created this new prompt engineering guide that contains all the latest papers, advanced prompting techniques, learning guides, model-specific prompting guides, lectures, references, new LLM capabilities, and tools related to prompt engineering.

If you’re worried your phone might be spying on you, sharing your data and location without you realizing, then a new report this week will make alarming reading.

Tenable Research discovered a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that is now fixed and that we dubbed CloudImposer. The vulnerability could have allowed an attacker to hijack an internal software dependency that Google pre-installs on each Google Cloud Composer pipeline-orchestration tool. Tenable Research also found risky guidance in GCP documentation that customers should be aware of.

Exceptions in Python is one of those areas that have a surface layer that most people know, and a deeper, almost secret one that a lot of developers don’t even know exists.

OpenAI’s DevDay event yesterday (October 1st 2024) didn’t invite press (as far as I can tell), didn’t livestream the event and didn’t allow audience livestreaming either. I made a last minute decision to live blog the event myself.

Educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration. Managed by OpenAI Solution team.

That said, I like a number of modern command line tools, many written in Rust, which are typically blazing fast and have better command-line interfaces than traditional Unix tools.

A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to ‘find’

All-in-one guide to getting a tech job abroad 🌎

In September 2024 we took part in a Live Coding Workshop and Showcase at the Festival of the Mind 2024 in Sheffield. Together with the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, we spent the afternoon making bleeps with code, before heading out for a live demo at the Spiegeltent in the city centre.

The full Django Day Copenhagen 2024 playlist.

The full EuroPython 2024 playlist

The hard choices – what we most fear doing, asking, saying – are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail, in a simple but powerful exercise he calls “fear-setting.” Learn more about how this practice can help you thrive in high-stress environments and separate what you can control from what you cannot.