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Issue #573
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 10th December’s issue is presented by QA Wolf
If slow QA processes bottleneck your software engineering team and you’re releasing slower because of it — you need to check out QA Wolf.
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Schedule a demo to see if they can help you squash the QA bottleneck.
— Iccha Sethi
tl;dr: “Most engineering organizations I’ve worked in or led have tracked some form of engineering metrics. These range from simple metrics like uptime and incident count to more complex frameworks like DORA. As an engineering leader, you’ve probably been asked, either by someone within or outside of engineering: Why do these metrics matter? or How do they align with our business goals?”
Leadership Management
— Matheus Lima
tl;dr: “Reflecting on my first couple of years as an Engineering Manager, I realized that the lessons I learned are not unique to me; many new managers face similar experiences. That’s why I want to share these insights with you. My goal is to support and connect with other new managers who are going through this exciting yet demanding transition.”
Leadership Management
— Nishant Shukla
tl;dr: Golden Datasets have long been a reliable method for measuring AI prompt performance. But as AI innovation moves fast, companies need a more agile, flexible, and cost-effective solution to stay ahead of their competition. Enter random sampling of AI prompt performance—a cutting-edge approach that adapts to real-world data and drives scalable performance for QA Wolf customers. Stay ahead of the curve—watch the webinar now.
Promoted by QA Wolf
Management Data
— Werner Vogels
tl;dr: “The rise of intention-driven technologies is reshaping our relationship with the digital world, promoting focus and well-being over mere attention capture. All the while, a mission-driven workforce is emerging, more eager to tackle hard human problems than chase the bottom line. In the coming years, using technology for positive impact will not just be possible—it will redefine the way we think about success.”
Trends
"The best motivation always comes from within."
— Subbu Allamaraju
tl;dr: “I realized that I forget more than 99% of what I read, and only a few ideas stick in my head. That’s sad. Why spend so much time and energy acquiring and reading books to gain just a few ideas or just the memory of having read a book? That changed this year. About a year ago, I stumbled upon contemplative reading to increase the quality of my reading experience.”
CareerAdvice
— James Hawkins
tl;dr: “When Tim and I first started PostHog in 2020, I was adamant we would never hire a product manager. I wanted engineers to wrestle with hard product problems. Product managers, I believed, would just get in the way. Four years on, I admit I was (partially) wrong. We need product managers. But I was right about one thing: there is a better way. Over the past two years, we've redefined how PMs and engineers work together, and optimized everything we do for speed and autonomy. Here's our exact playbook.”
Promoted by PostHog
Product Management
— Phil Booth
tl;dr: (1) Aggregate other services into your app’s healthcheck. (2) Set a short timeout on healthcheck requests. (3) Set a long timeout on healthcheck requests. (4) Leave a long delay before starting healthchecks on new instances. (5) Set a low threshold on consecutive failures before turning unhealthy. (6) Set a high threshold on consecutive successes before turning health.
BestPractices
tl;dr: “I think the site is great. I can quickly find my favorite UUIDs and star them or browse them all to find one that’s just right. But having 5 sextillion possible values made it way harder than it needed to be to write them all down. I’m not sure why the authors of the UUID spec wanted to include so many bits! So I think the final implementation here is pretty interesting. Let me tell you about it.”
UUID
— Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya
tl;dr: “The main reason I have such an unusual setup, though, is more practical: so my arms/hands do not hurt from using my laptop. I wrote about the second iteration before, and a lot has changed since then. Now it's time to record all the previous iterations2 and then detail what's new.”
Health
Notable Reading
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Most Popular From Last Issue
Grifters, Believers, Grinders, And Coasters — Sean Goedecke
Notable Links
Eliza: Autonomous agents for everyone.
JSON5: JSON for humans.
Mise: Dev tools, env vars, task runner.
Sequin: Change data capture in Postgres.
Studio: Lightweight Database GUI in your browser.
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