Issue #547

What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read

Friday 6th September’s issue is presented by Stytch

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Get back eng cycles you’re losing to authN & authZ issues 🐛 

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: “You make decisions, allocate resources, and make plans — all based on words. This is why it’s important that your language accurately reflects a few things: intent, meaning, severity, level of certainty, stakes and power dynamics.” Wes describes how to use words that accurately reflect what you mean.

Leadership Management

— Alex Kladov

tl;dr: “After working on the initial stages of several largish projects, I accumulated a list of things that share the following three properties: (1) They are irrelevant while the project is small. (2) They are a productivity multiplier when the project is large. (3) They are much harder to introduce down the line.”

Management

— Reed McGinley-Stempel

tl;dr: As artificial intelligence reshapes application security, new threats emerge alongside innovative protective strategies. Reed explores the challenges posed by AI-driven attacks and offers proactive measures to strengthen your security framework, empowering you to safeguard applications while maximizing AI's potential for resilience.

Promoted by Stytch

Management Security AI

— AbdulFattah Popoola

tl;dr: “All the struggling organizations I have worked in shared one common characteristic. They had process deficiencies: some did too little, while some did too much. The best-performing orgs? They did just right. This post offers suggestions and tips for leaders seeking to introduce change.”

Leadership Management

"Leaders grasp nettles."

— David Ogilvy

— Amy Fu

tl;dr: “Although a product's requirements can change often, its fundamental ideas usually change slowly. This leads to an interesting insight: if we write code that matches the fundamental ideas of the product, it will be more likely to survive future product changes.”

BestPractices

— Ian Vanagas

tl;dr: “Everyone at PostHog “dogfoods” our product, including non-product teams like marketing and sales. This helps ship faster, intercept problems, stay motivated, deeply understand our product and develop empathy. But none of this happens by accident. It requires a strong, intentional culture of feedback, transparency, and simple, repeatable processes. This is how we do it.”

Promoted by PostHog

Process

— Tomas Stropus

tl;dr: “This cycle of enthusiasm, struggle, and disappointment has become all too familiar. It’s the Hydra Project Effect: no matter how much progress I make, new challenges always seem to sprout in their place. But while this pattern may seem unbreakable, I’m determined to find a way to tame this beast. In this post, I’ll explore strategies for breaking out of this cycle of endless beginnings and unsatisfying middles.”

CareerAdvice

— Hillel Wayne

tl;dr: “Some function programmers stay "shared mutable state is the enemy". I think it's more like "time is the enemy", and time represents itself as mutable state. If a state update is purely internal and cannot affect the observable state, then it does not advance time. I find this a good model to reason about abstract systems.”

State

— Caleb Porzio

tl;dr: First, here's a quick recap of my open source journey: 5 years ago, I left my day job with no plan. 5 days later, I started working on an open source project called Livewire. 1 year later I started another project: Alpine.js. Within 2 years I had made a GitHub sponsors account and ramped it up to $100k/yr. Ever since I've been working on those same two projects and selling stuff along the way to fund my work on them.

Entertaining

Technical Coherence - Jack Danger

Courses: Anthropic's educational courses

AppFlowy: Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI.

Bombardier: HTTP(S) benchmarking tool

FetchFox: Scrape anything with AI

Free Public APIs: Tested every day


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1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it

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