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Issue #554
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 1st October’s issue is presented by Speakeasy
Slow API integrations can block revenue streams.
Great SDKs solve this problem but tend to be very resource-intensive. Speakeasy’s platform makes crafting type-safe, idiomatic SDKs for enterprise APIs easy.
Make SDK generation part of your API’s CI/CD and distribute libraries that users love at a fraction of the cost of maintaining them in-house.
— Will Larson
tl;dr: “If I could only popularize one idea about technical strategy, it would be that prematurely applying pressure to a strategy’s rollout prevents evaluating whether the strategy is effective. Pressure changes behavior in profound ways, and many of those changes are intended to make you believe your strategy is working while minimizing change to the status quo (if you’re an executive) or get your strategy repealed (if you’re not an executive). Neither is particular helpful.”
Leadership Management
— Andy Sparks
tl;dr: The founder of Visa “preached that great managers spent 50% of their time managing themselves, 25% managing up, 20% managing across, and 5% managing down. In comparison, most actual managers preoccupy themselves with a hell of a lot more downward management than 5% of their time.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: API design is important, yet it is only useful if it's well-documented and consistently represented across every API surface area (docs, SDKs, etc.). OpenAPI gives you greater visibility into your API, enabling you to unify all aspects of errors, responses, and parameters, ensuring consistency. This open-source documentation project will help you understand the OpenAPI Specification.
Promoted by Speakeasy
API
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “But this isn't an article about how bad we are at estimating, nor does it offer any solutions for you to getting better at estimating. In fact, I want to focus on why dates are pretty dangerous things to be throwing around in the first place, and what an alternative might look like that could save you a lot of pain.”
Leadership Management
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
— Eliran Turgeman
tl;dr: Eliran discusses 3 ideas that resonate with him the most from the mentioned book: (1) Zero-tolerance towards complexity. (2) Smaller components are not necessarily better for modularity. (3) Exception handling accounts for a lot of complexity.
CareerAdvice
— Dr. Panos Patros
tl;dr: Dr. Panos Patros, VP of Engineering at Raygun and a seasoned expert in the engineering field, recently wrote an article about the importance of building robust, scalable software by prioritizing quality.
Promoted by Raygun
BestPractices
— Daniel Terhorst-North
tl;dr: “There are 4 primary types of evidence I look for in an interview, which are, in order of general importance, experiential, hypothetical, opinion, and credential. (1) Experiential evidence: things the candidate has done. (2) Hypothetical evidence: what the candidate thinks they would do in a given situation. (3) Credential evidence: what the candidate is qualified to do. (4) Opinion evidence: what they think about things.” Dan gives example questions of each.
Leadership Management
— Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya
tl;dr: “The first time I went on call as a software engineer, it was exciting—and ultimately traumatic. Since then, I've had on-call experiences at multiple other jobs and have grown to really appreciate it as part of the role. As I've progressed through my career, I've gotten to help establish on-call processes and run some related trainings. Here is some of what I wish I'd known when I started my first on-call shift, and what I try to tell each engineer before theirs.”
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: “I walk through how to build a query language in Python. No required knowledge of query languages is required to follow this guide. You will find this article easier to understand if you have some knowledge of trees.”
Python LanguageDesign
Most Popular From Last Issue
SQL Tips And Tricks — Ben Nour
Notable Links
Crawl4AI: OS LLM friendly web crawler.
Harper: Grammar checker for developers.
Mitata: Benchmark tooling.
Pagoda: Full-stack web development starter kit in Go.
Screenpipe: Local AI screen & mic recording.
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1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it