Issue #571

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

December 3rd, 2024

Tuesday 3rd December’s issue is presented by Fern

Let Fern do the heavy lifting of generating and publishing client libraries so your team can focus on building the API.

— James Stanier

tl;dr: “Tech companies are opting to keep their size fixed as they ride out the current economic phase that has higher interest rates and less cheap investment available. As a result, managers are now expected to have more direct reports, less layers, and to be more hands-on with their teams.” What exactly can you do in order to be in the details? And is it possible to do this without micromanaging? James shares techniques. 

Leadership Management

— Dan Rockwell

tl;dr: (1) Seek feedback. (2) Eliminate the word “discuss” from agendas. (3) Expect people to state their point before they explain it. (4) Shorten one-hour meetings by 16.67%.

Leadership Management

tl;dr: Prior to using Fern, Cohere dealt with a classic SDK challenge. Like most dev-products, their users utilized a variety of languages. This created a design problem: each language had different type systems, primitives, and concurrency models. Read more about how Cohere was able to solve this by leveraging Fern's generators to build and maintain type-safe, idiomatic SDKs across multiple languages.

Promoted by Fern

Management SDK UsefulTool

— Alex Ewerlöf

tl;dr: Staff Engineers sit at the intersection of technical leadership and organizational impact, but their role is often misunderstood. While they share technical accountability with Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers are uniquely positioned to work across multiple teams, focusing on complex systems and technical strategy rather than people management. Alex elaborates in this post. 

CareerAdvice

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done."

— Bruce Lee

— Peter van Hardenberg

tl;dr: Peter explores why creating truly simple software remains an elusive goal. Through examples ranging from defensive coding to scaling challenges, he illustrates how complexity isn't just about technical difficulty - it's an inevitable result of systems interacting, evolving user needs, and organizational dynamics. 

CareerAdvice Video

tl;dr: Engineering leaders are trying to figure out if their team is using GitHub Copilot, how much they're using it, and its impact on their work. Download this slide deck from Jellyfish, analyzing data from 4,200+ developers at 200+ companies, and start understanding whether you're getting adequate return on your AI investments.

Promoted by Jellyfish

Management AI Productivity

— Will Larson

tl;dr: Wardley Mapping is a strategic planning tool that helps visualize how business components evolve over time, from novel ideas to industry standards. Will shares resources that guide might be useful for leaders. 

Leadership UsefulTool

— Simon Willison

tl;dr: “I’ve worked on various event websites in the past, and one of the unintuitively difficult problems that inevitably comes up is the best way to store the time that an event is happening. Based on that past experience, here’s my current recommendation.”

TimeData

— Julia Evans

tl;dr: “The reason why “pipes get stuck” sometimes is that it’s VERY common for programs to buffer their output before writing it to a pipe or file. So the pipe is working fine, the problem is that the program never even wrote the data to the pipe!”

Terminal

Advent of Code: Calendar of small programming puzzles.

React Scan: Detects performance issues in React apps.

Screenshot-To-Code: Convert screenshots & designs into functional code.

Steel: OS browser API for AI agents & apps.

Vince: Self hosted alternative to Google Analytics.


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