Welcome to The Steady Beat, a weekly-ish round-up of hand-picked articles and resources for people who make software products: designers, engineers, product managers, and organizational leaders.
By the numbers - Stripe
- $1 trillion — In 2023, Stripe processed $1 trillion in total payment value, matching the GDP of only 19 countries.
- 5 million — Stripe’s infrastructure supports a staggering 5 million database queries per second.
- 10,000 — DocDB, Stripe’s internal database-as-a-service, supports over 10,000 distinct query types across petabytes of financial data.
- 2 — The entire protocol for switching traffic from source to target database shards during migrations takes less than 2 seconds.
ByteByteGo, 7m #engineering #scaling #development
Flip the Switch: Default to On
Tired of building killer features only to watch them flop? Jaryd Hermann has a fix: the “default adoption trick.” Instead of waiting for users to discover new features, set them to “on” by default. This strategy ensures immediate impact, speeds up feedback loops, and boosts user satisfaction. By making features integral to workflows, you sidestep adoption hurdles and create seamless experiences users can’t live without. Just remember to validate, monitor closely, and offer easy opt-outs to keep everyone happy.
How They Grow, 8m #productmanagement
Scaling Trust: The Quest for Reliable AI
Trust remains a major hurdle for the further development of LLMs and scaling their use. LLMs often produce unreliable or fabricated answers, especially in high-stakes fields like science or medicine. To build trust without sacrificing scalability, Étienne Fortier-Dubois describes an approach that blends manual evaluations, crowdsourced feedback, and LLM-based “auto-evaluations.” By incorporating human oversight and prompted benchmarks, says Fortier-Dubois, developers can create a far more reliable evaluation pipeline, ensuring that their AI-generated output is more trustworthy and therefore, ultimately, scalable.
Elicit, 10m #ai #engineering #development #llm #qa
Bright Spots on Every Corner
The Hydrant Directory is turning everyday street hydrants into a vibrant design resource, offering free color palettes derived from public infrastructure. Artists and designers can freely use these palettes without attribution, though the hydrants themselves belong to the neighborhoods that painted them. Launched in 2023 the directory highlights the often-overlooked work of street artists, adding a splash of creativity to our daily grind. Dive in and get inspired.
Day Lane, 25m #design #inspiration
Mindfulness: A Leadership Tool
Mindfulness isn’t just a zen luxury; it’s a business necessity for sharp, effective leadership. Amidst the chaos of running a company, leaders often drop mental fitness first, but it’s essential for making sound decisions, boosting team morale, staying focused, fostering creativity, and maintaining consistency. A “Default Mode Network” fuels our internal monologues, distracting us with doubts and fears. Practicing mindfulness, especially through meditation, builds resilience against these distractions. A consistent practice can transform your leadership, making stressful decisions manageable and improving overall business outcomes.
Startup Patterns, 6m #leadership #management
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