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- Issue #558
Issue #558
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 15th October’s issue is presented by Bucket
Feature management tools aren’t made for B2B: A/B experiments are useless, segmentation is painful, and the UIs are complex.
Bucket is simple feature flags for B2B and company-level targeting rules in a polished UI + adoption metrics and customer feedback that give your Engineers the insights they need to build better features, quickly.
— Camille Fournier
tl;dr: “Many have predicted the death of the “junior engineer” thanks to AI; after all, if AI can do all of the simple tasks, we don’t need to hire people who are only capable of handling those tasks anymore. And indeed, I was at a dinner of director+-level engineering leaders recently where many said they had turned all of their hiring to solely focus on “senior engineers” in lieu of anyone else. Anyone who has thought about this for a moment sees the obvious problems. How do people ever become “senior engineers” if they don’t start out as junior ones?” Camille explores this paradox.
Leadership Management
— Paulo André
tl;dr: “It's a long story but I recently started a CTO role and it made me reflect again on what is success for me in a role like this: (1) Results. (2) How those results are achieved. (3) How you make people feel.” While most care about the results, the best way to achieve them in a way that endures is by focusing on the list above in reverse: If people feel good about being in the team, about working with you and others, about their learning, they'll excel at doing their part in implementing systems that deliver results and results will be sustainably achieved.
Leadership Management
— Rasmus Makwarth
tl;dr: “Focusing on outcomes over outputs is a great framework to ensure that product teams think about delivering value, not just features. If you can’t tie a business outcome to a feature, you may want to reconsider its priority.” Rasmus discusses six leading indicators product teams should be tracking besides technical indicators.
Promoted by Bucket
Product Management
— Charity Majors
tl;dr: Charity discusses employee retention strategies, arguing against excessive efforts to keep employees who want to leave. She emphasizes fair compensation, transparent practices, and proactive career development.
CareerAdvice
"The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails."
— Jason Fried
tl;dr: “A appetite is like a budget. Not "we think it'll take 4 weeks" but "we're only giving it 4 weeks." That's all we've got set aside for it. Then the team tasked with the work has to get creative and figure out the 4 week version of that feature. There is no 6, 8, 10, or 12 week version when the appetite is 4 weeks. Just like there's no $7,000 vacation when you only can afford a $2500 one. And you know how that ends up if you overspend.”
Estimation
— 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
— Rox Williams
tl;dr: (1) Structure your logs. (2) Consolidate your logs at creation time. (3) Use unique identifiers. (4) Standardize log field names and types on your structured logs. (5) Avoid logging sensitive data. (6) Treat your logs as data. (7) Use a centralized logging management system. (8) Configure log retention. (9) Set up alerts. (10) Document log formats and practices.
BestPractices
tl;dr: “For building an on-call copilot, we chose between fine-tuning an LLM model or leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Fine-tuning requires curated data with high-quality, diverse examples for the LLM to learn from. It also requires compute resources to keep the model updated with new examples.”
Architecture AI
tl;dr: “B-trees are typically slower than hashmaps, but I was surprised to find fairly wide variation in people's expectations of how much slower.” Jamie compares the speed of b-trees and hashmaps.
DataStructure
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
Formbricks: OS survey platform.
Harper: Grammar checker for developers.
RAGFlow: OS RAG engine based on deep document understanding.
Swarm: Educational framework exploring multi-agent orchestration.
Surya: OCR, layout analysis, reading order, table recognition.
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