The Pulse #83: Happy Leap Day!
29 February is causing problems in software systems across the globe. It’s a good reminder on how few assumptions we should make about dates – and why to use a date library when you can.
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Happy Leap Day! It’s a special day that occurs once every four years – and it happens to also be the day of the latest edition of The Pulse publishes. For today only, I’m replacing the “Industry Pulse” section with news of this leap day disrupting software systems across the world.
Happy Leap Day! Around the world, software systems are struggling with this leap day which adds a day to February. These are systems built with incorrect assumptions about dates – and which probably don’t use a proper date library. Learn from their mistakes, and don’t try to write your own date-handling logic – unless you’re ready to handle at least 112 edge cases!
Klarna’s AI chatbot: how revolutionary is it, really? Klarna launched its AI chatbot, built in collaboration with OpenAI, which the company wants to use to eliminate 2/3rds of customer support positions. But is it as revolutionary, and as likely to replace jobs, as Klarna claims? My take is that it’s a well-written bot, but I’m dubious that it’s as disruptive as that.
Affirm paid $10M for Fast’s engineering team. As the one-click startup ran out of money, its then head of engineering brokered a deal with buy-now-pay-later scaleup Affirm, which paid $10M in cash in return to give out offers to 80-90 Fast software engineers.