- Pointer
- Posts
- Issue #549
Issue #549
What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read
Friday 13th September’s issue is presented by WorkOS
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.
Join the thousands of developers who trust FusionAuth for their identity needs.
— Andrew Bosworth
tl;dr: Andrew discusses the superpower of being plainspoken. “Our desire to maintain harmony can cause us to be indirect about uncomfortable truths. Our desire to influence can cause us to pre-emptively address every arcane objection. Our desire to impress can cause us to use more language than necessary. And the expectations we have internalized about corporate communication often cause us to write in a way we never would to our friends.”
Leadership Management
— Kent Beck
tl;dr: (1) Plan incrementally. The team, every week, must be prepared to decide what to do that week. Some planning processes are so painful, or require the sign-off of such overworked people, that contemplating planning weekly causes sweat to bead on foreheads. Learn how to plan lightly as to tactics & resolutely as to goals. (2) Deliver incrementally. The team must be prepared to support production while developing. This in turn requires rock solid reliable tidying & prioritizing the fixing & preventing of defects.
Leadership Management
—Daniel DeGroff
tl;dr: “The choice depends on your business model and requirements. Regulatory compliance, security, data management, and upgrade control are important considerations that will ultimately define the most effective solution for your company. Which trade-offs are you willing and able to make? Read some of the most important considerations below and decide which approach fits your business.”
Promoted by FusionAuth
Management Guide
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “Intellectual honesty is the foundation for pretty much all professional and personal growth. If you want to improve at your craft, if you want to become a stronger and wiser operator… Wes discusses what this is and how to tell if you’re being intellectually honest. Ask yourself: Is this true? What evidence do I have for and against this? Am I telling myself a certain narrative to avoid facing a truth I don’t like? How might I recognize the truth in a neutral, objective way?”
CareerAdvice
"Whether you think you can or you think you can't—you're right."
tl;dr: “This post is not advice, it's what's working for me. It's easy to pick up bad habits and hard to create good ones. Writing down what's working for me helps me maintain any good habits I've worked hard to develop. Here's an unordered list of 10 things that have helped me increase speed and maintain a respectable level of quality in the product I'm currently developing.”
CareerAdvice
— Roy Anger
tl;dr: Streamline your app's onboarding with Clerk’s customizable session tokens, publicMetadata, and Next.js Middleware. Implement a seamless experience with minimal code.
Promoted by Clerk
Management Guide
— Benjamin Dicken
tl;dr: “By the time you finish this article, you'll have learned how B-trees and B+trees work, why databases use them for indexes, and why using a UUID as your primary key might be a bad idea.”
Database
— Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya
tl;dr: “In the last couple of years, I stumbled into a way to avoid getting stuck midway in my projects. It's not just about productivity: this also lets me let go of things when I reach a good stopping point. It helps me figure out what that stopping point should be.”
CareerAdvice
— Phil Booth
tl;dr: “One of my stock interview questions goes: "When picking between dependencies to use in production, what factors contribute to your decision?" I'm surprised by how often I receive an answer along the lines of "Github stars" and not much else. I happen to think Github stars is a terrible metric for selecting production code, so this post sets out my idea of a healthier framework to evaluate dependencies.”
InterviewAdvice
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Impossibility Of Making An Elite Engineer — Kent Beck
Notable Links
Fast Grid: Most performant DOM-based web table.
Friday Deploys: Apparel and accessories for work and leisure.
Ell: Language model programming library.
Plate: Rich-text editor with shadcn.
Tetris-SQL: Implementation of Tetris in a SQL query.
Click the below and shoot me an email!
1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it