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- Issue #548
Issue #548
What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read
Tuesday 10th September’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.
— Kent Beck
tl;dr: “While all elite engineers face these contradictions, there are as many paths through them as there are engineers.” Kent discusses the pattern he’s seen elite engineers take on with the following: (1) Longevity and diversity of projects. (2) Success and failure. (3) Mentored and self-directed. (4) Urgency and slack.
Leadership Management
— Doug Turnbull
tl;dr: “Coaching junior employees becomes its own force multiplier for innovating at scale. It’s not about the added labor, it’s about a psychologically safe culture that values teaching and learning, and the innovation that this unlocks.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: SCIM provisioning is a table stakes feature that nearly every enterprise customer requests. It enables secure and automated user lifecycle management, allowing users to be seamlessly onboarded and offboarded from applications. But building SCIM in-house is incredibly complex. There is a ton of fragmentation you have to deal with because each identity provider (Okta, Azure, etc.) has different ways of interpreting the SCIM protocol.
Promoted by WorkOS
Management Security
— Camille Fournier
tl;dr: “The only solution to this is to think early and often about the systems of accountability you have to set up. This is much, much harder than micromanaging details, because every system of accountability you set up will eventually be gamed. So in addition to accountability, you need to foster a strong, ethical company culture that encourages transparency while allowing for some mistakes.”
Leadership Management
“Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work."
— Eliran Turgeman
tl;dr: “A big debate among developers is whether to write code for today’s problem or to build a general-purpose solution for future needs. Both approaches have their pros and cons. Specific-purpose code can quickly become messy. But overly general code can add unnecessary complexity. This post, obviously opinionated, argues for a middle ground. That’s the sweet spot, as always.”
BestPractices
tl;dr: This playbook outlines the specific steps an organization should take when setting up a sustainable observability framework from scratch. Establishing a repeatable observability framework prevents critical visibility gaps, improves availability, reduces operational costs, and streamlines incident management - among other key business outcomes.
Promoted by Datadog
Observability BestPractices
— Mike Hadlow
tl;dr: “This clock tells a story. We start at midnight, 12 o’clock, with a simple new requirement which we quickly code up as a little application. It’s not expected to last very long, just a stop-gap in some larger strategic scheme, so we’ve hard-coded all the application’s values. Months pass, the application becomes widely used, but there’s a problem, some of the business values change, so we find ourselves rebuilding and re-deploying it just to change a few numbers. This is obviously wrong. The solution is simple, we’ll move those values out into a configuration file, maybe some appsettings in our App.config. Now we’re at 2 on the clock.”
ThoughtPiece
— Baldur Bjarnason
tl;dr: “This is going to get automated, weaponised, and industrialised. Tech companies have placed chatbots at the centre of our information ecosystems and butchered their products to push them front and centre. The incentives for bad actors to try to game them are enormous and they are capable of making incredibly sophisticated tools for their purposes.”
LLM AI
— Alex Harri
tl;dr: “I recently decided to unveil the mystery that is the clipboard and wrote this post using my learnings. We'll focus on the web clipboard and its APIs, though we'll also touch on how it interacts with operating system clipboards.”
Guide
Most Popular From Last Issue
Basic Things — Alex Kladov
Notable Links
Anthropic Cookbook: Code and guides designed to help build.
Continue: OS AI code assistant.
Follow: Next gen information browser.
System Design Primer: Learn how to design large-scale systems.
Tech Interview Handbook: Curated interview preparation materials.
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1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it