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Issue #545
What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read
Friday 30th August’s issue is presented by WorkOS
WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS.
With modular and easy-to-use APIs, integrate complex features like SSO, SCIM, and FGA in minutes of months.
High-quality documentation and seamless onboarding for your users eliminate unnecessary complexity for your engineers.
User Management is also free up to 1 million MAUs and includes MFA, bot protection, RBAC, and more.
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “The heartbeat is a communication that looks back at the strategy, recaps the key points, and then shows how it has been implemented in the time since the last heartbeat. It's a chance to show how the strategy is living and relevant, and that it's not just a document that was written once and then placed on the shelf.” James shares strategies for doing so.
Leadership Management
— Ravi Gupta
tl;dr: “Most people think of demanding and supportive as opposite ends of a spectrum. You can either be tough or you can be nice. But the best leaders don’t choose. They are both highly demanding and highly supportive. They push you to new heights and they also have your back.”
Leadership Management
— Min Kim, Kristopher Hughes
tl;dr: For high-growth startups, time is the single most important resource. It’s so important that months of delay in shipping SSO and SCIM can result in a potential revenue loss of $7.95M compared to using a pre-built solution. The ROI difference is staggering too: 9% for a homegrown solution vs. 1,954% for a pre-built one. This article explains the methodologies used to calculate these numbers.
Promoted by WorkOS
Management Guide
— Marc Gauthier
tl;dr: “When I started managing the engineering department at my company, I wanted to have an interesting team meeting involving the entire team. My objective at the time was to set up a meeting that people would look forward to, going beyond simple team & company updates. It’s now been a few years since the first, and while not all presentations are a complete success, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.” Marc discusses the meeting format.
Leadership Management
“To lead people, walk behind them."
tl;dr: “Humans are bad at judging the absolute value of things. We can't estimate tasks, can't assess what's important, and we're poor predictors of impact. But we’re really good at taking two problems and saying "Yep that one's worse than the other one". You can take this insight and use it to create an ordered list of priorities. Go pair-wise through your fires, swap to put the bigger fire on top, and after n^2 iterations you'll have a stack ranked list of fires from biggest to smallest.”
Leadership Management
— Lior Neu-ner
tl;dr: “Running experiments is equal parts powerful and terrifying. Powerful because you can validate changes that will transform your product for the better; terrifying because there are so many ways to mess them up. I’ve run hundreds of A/B tests, both in my previous life as a growth engineer at Meta, and on my personal side project. These are some classic mistakes I’ve learned the hard way and how to avoid them.”
Promoted by PostHog
Product
— Andy Sammalmaa
tl;dr: “If you’re writing log statements, you’re doing it wrong. This is a pretty incendiary statement, and while there has been some good discussion after, I figured it was time to write down why I think logs are bad, why tracing should be used instead, and how we get from one to the other.”
Observability
— Frank Fiegel
tl;dr: “Usually I would just power through reading the minimized code to understand the implementation. However, I realized that I never tried asking ChatGPT to do it for me... So I copied all of the above code and asked ChatGPT to "explain the code”.”
AI Productivity
— Santiago Pedroza
tl;dr: “I classified the entirety of SafeDocs using a mixture of LLMs, Embeddings Models, XGBoost and just for fun some LinearRegressors. In the process I too created some really pretty graphs!”
AI LLM
Manager Antipatterns - Ted Neward
Bandit: Find security issues in Python code.
Daytona: OS dev environment manager.
Firecrawl: Turn websites into LLM-ready markdown.
Kotaemon: OS tool for chatting with documents.
The Monospace Web: A minimalist design exploration
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1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it