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Issue #544
What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read
Tuesday 27th August’s issue is presented by FusionAuth
FusionAuth integrates with any tech stack and is deployable anywhere – cloud, on-premise, or even the server running under your desk.
You're less than five minutes from login / registration, social logins, SSO, MFA, passwordless, user management, passkeys, and much more.
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— Will Larson
tl;dr: Will covers: (1) When to write strategy, in particular the pain points (like cross-team friction) and opportunities (like senior hires) that are good moments to start writing. (2) How much strategy your org can tolerate, avoiding the traps of writing so much that it’s ignored or so little that there’s not much impact. (3) Using strategy altitude – how permissive a given strategy is and where it’s implemented – to manage the overhead that strategies creates. (4) Mechanisms to debug whether you’re doing too much or too little strategy work.
— Ted Neward
tl;dr: “There's a whole host of mistakes that companies often fall prey to with respect to those they have leading teams, and I thought it a good idea to collect them into one place, under the umbrella heading of "manager antipatterns”.”
— James Walker
tl;dr: Passwordless authentication is a better option than traditional passwords, improving security and increasing convenience by removing the challenges associated with passwords. James explains how passwordless works using methods like magic links, biometrics, or one-time codes, and the benefits it provides engineering leaders and CTOs.
Promoted by FusionAuth
— Marc Gauthier
tl;dr: “As a manager, doing one on one meetings with your direct reports is your most important tool. I’ve talked a bit before about opening lines, but I figured it could be interesting to dig into how I handle this every week with my teams. I think it’s important to have a clear format shared to direct reports. This frames the conversation and helps the manager fullfil the objective, while giving some insights to the direct report regarding what this is all about.”
"What you do has far greater impact than what you say."
— Daniel Tsui, Quess Liu
tl;dr: “In this blog, we describe how we built a system that gates every code and configuration change to our core backend systems (1,000+ services). We have several thousand E2E tests that have an average pass rate of 90%+ per attempt. Imagine each of these tests going through a real E2E user flow, like going through an Uber Eats group order. We do all this fast enough to run on every diff before it gets landed.”
— Sean Chapman
tl;dr: Understanding the impact of each of your deployments is crucial, especially as they become increasingly frequent. Chances are, your team is either aiming to increase shipping velocity or has already started deploying “continuously”. And while CD comes with a host of well-established benefits, it also introduces a heightened risk of introducing new errors and issues. Today, Raygun takes a look at the state of continuous deployment according to survey data, so you can see how you stack up compared to other teams.
Promoted by Raygun
— Eric Zakariasson
tl;dr: “While semantic search is trendy, good old lexical search is still the backbone. Semantic techniques can improve results, but they work best when added to a solid text-based search foundation. In this post, we’ll explore how to use Postgres to create a robust search engine.”
— Chay Choong
tl;dr: “One useful way to preserve institutional knowledge in a dev team is to grow a collection of useful snippets, scripts, or workflows. Some companies like Slack and Shopify have their own internal CLI. The modern terminal Warp has a pretty sick feature for documenting and sharing workflows. It's quite easy to get started with your very own CLI.” Chay shows us how.
— Murat Demirbas
tl;dr: “We discussed a paper that uses LLMs for automatic root cause analysis (RCA) for cloud incidents. This was a pretty straightforward application of LLMs. The proposed system employs an LLM to match incoming incidents to incident handlers based on their alert types, predicts the incident's root cause category, and provides an explanatory narrative... The use of LLMs for RCAs spooked me viscerally.”
Algorithms We Develop Software By - Grant Slatton
ChartDB: Free OS database diagrams editor.
Fuite: Finding memory leaks in web apps.
Handwriter: Handwriting synthesizer.
Instant: Realtime client-side database.
LitServe: Lightning-fast serving engine for AI models.
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1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it