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- Issue #546
Issue #546
What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read
Tuesday 3rd September’s issue is presented by Clerk
Clerk offers everything you need to provide your users a secure experience, tailored to your needs
Pre-Built customizable components (Sign-up, Sign-in, User profile) streamline the authentication process, increasing developer velocity and allow you to match your branding
Flexible authentication solutions: MFA, Social Sign-On, Magic Links, Passkeys, or Custom OAuth Providers
Polished user experience purpose built with developers and end-users in mind
Simplify complex organization and role-based management with multi-tenant support
— Kent Beck
tl;dr: “My intention in this note is to reclaim the phrase ad hoc from those who use it as a pejorative, especially as applied to infrastructure. Instead, building infrastructure ad hoc is the safest, most efficient strategy. It carefully balances the risks inherent in creating infrastructure, stages investment, and realizes economies of scale.”
Leadership Management
— Dan Luu
tl;dr: “The benefit from asking a stupid sounding question is small in most particular instances, but the compounding benefit over time is quite large and I've observed that people who are willing to ask dumb questions and think "stupid thoughts" end up understanding things much more deeply over time. Conversely, when I look at people who have a very deep understanding of topics, many of them frequently ask naive sounding questions and continue to apply one of the techniques that got them a deep understanding in the first place.”
CareerAdvice
— Jack Danger
tl;dr: “Software development slows down over time. I wrote a whole book to help leaders reverse this slowdown and the central point of the book is a process any engineering leader can apply. I call this process Technical Coherence and you can mostly achieve it in a single meeting with your leaders. You can implement it in your org gradually or all at once.”
Leadership Management
— Raphael Gaschignard
tl;dr: “A team has a set of values, and members of those teams have values. If everyone is in perfect alignment, you might argue that there are blind spots. But if people are highly performant along those axes, then the blind spots almost don't matter. Meanwhile, if you have a team of 2 people, and they have a huge values gap, their job now becomes a tug-of-war, on top of the normal work of building things.”
Leadership Management
“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock."
— Thorsten Ball
tl;dr: “Always leave your code unfinished the day before. That way I always know I can come back to a small problem that may only require three minutes to fix a test, or write a new method, or whatever the case is. Once I've been doing code for five or ten minutes, I tend to quickly become sucked into the problem and it's much easier to jump into the harder code at that point. Same rationale for stretching before doing exercise, basically.”
CareerAdvice
— Lior Neu-ner
tl;dr: Grab your popcorn and take a 30 minute break from your day to watch four developers compete by planning and building an app that to help protect the community from monsters — in under 5 hours. Which developer will save us?
Promoted by Clerk
WebDev Entertaining
— Tom Moertel
tl;dr: “In this post, we’ll look at some clever algorithms for taking samples. These algorithms are fast and easily translated into SQL.”
SQL
— Baldur Bjarnason
tl;dr: Baldur argues we’ve been in a FOSS surplus due to the software industry’s high margins and wealth created by engineers, allowing both companies and individuals to invest in open source. “The derived FOSS surplus generates billions, if not trillions, of dollars of value for the economy and most of the costs – cost of creation, opportunity cost, and the cost of OSS competing with your more lucrative proprietary products – is absorbed by the makers.”
ThoughtPiece Trends
— Eduardo Blancas
tl;dr: “I’m pretty excited about the new structured outputs feature in OpenAI’s API so I took it for a spin and developed an AI-assisted web scraper. This post summarizes my learnings.”
AI LLM
Tracing: Structured Logging, But Better In Every Way - Andy Sammalmaa
Departure Mono: Monospaced pixel font.
Firecrawl: Turn websites into LLM-ready markdown.
OpenObserve: Cloud-native observability platform.
WatchYourLAN: Lightweight network IP scanner.
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1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it