🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #169

Happy Friday! The weekend is here - let's finish strong!

#WorkLifeBalance - He's at it again - Infosys CEO wnats Indian workers to put in 70 hours a week, claiming it's necessary for the country's economic growth, but others say more hours don't necessarily mean more productivity.

#RTOmandates - A study says that making people come back to the office is basically a big fail, and companies are driving away their best employees with all the monitoring and mistrust, like Dell tracking VPN usage and Amazon checking badge swipes, so naturally people are looking for the exit.

Microsoft Credits Passkey Success To Nagging Users
Microsoft credits passkey adoption to its enrolment user experience. The software megalith doesn't disclose how many customers love passkeys enough to actually use them. Microsoft introduced passkey support in Windows 11 version 23H2 in May.

Waymo Expands Driverless Car Tests To Japan
Waymo is a leading US-based autonomous driving technology company owned by Alphabet (Google's parent company). It started testing its self-driving cars in 2009. Today, it announced it will deploy its driverless cars in Japan, specifically in Tokyo, for the first time outside the US.

Apple App Store Unveils 2024's Most Downloaded Apps And Games
Apple has revealed the list of its most downloaded apps and games of the year. The list highlights the top free and paid apps across iPad, iPhone, and Apple Arcade. The year-end charts are available on the App Store's Today tab. Users can also discover the 17 standout apps handpicked by App Store Editors.

GitHub - Introduces free version of Copilot AI-powered code completion tool with 2,000 monthly code completions and limited Copilot Chat functionality.

Apple Maps - Added Look Around feature on the web beta, allowing users to explore select cities with 360-degree images.

Google VideoFX - Introduces Veo 2, a next-gen video-generating AI capable of creating clips up to 4k resolution and 2 minutes in length, with improved understanding of physics, camera controls, and realistic modeling of motion, fluid dynamics, and properties of light.

Bolt DIY | Prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web applications using any LLM you want!

Propeller | Push platform for realtime and bidirectional communication between clients and servers

The Nine Node Pillars
The Nine Node Pillars are nine principles for doing Node.js right in enterprise environments.

Boosting Dev Productivity With Finops
FinOps, a data-driven approach, can increase developer productivity by 30% and cut project costs by 25% by bridging technical and financial domains, enhancing financial governance, improving cost control and visibility, and easing tensions between engineering and operations teams.

Embracing Experimental Coding
Microsoft veteran advocates for experimental coding, encouraging developers to write code and experiment instead of planning and discussing. This approach involves writing code not documents, reducing meetings, and expressing ideas in code. Keeping experimental and mock data alongside production code can also speed up development and reduce restart times. Iterate, experiment, and code, rather than over-analyzing and planning, says the veteran.