- Pointer
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- Issue #577
Issue #577
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 27th December’s issue is presented by Augment Code
Every quarter, Codem's developers must master new complex codebases. Their architects do it monthly.
Join their co-founder to learn how they cut onboarding time by 3-5x using context-aware AI.
You'll see their approach in action with a live demo, practical techniques for faster ramp-up, and criteria for selecting Augment as their AI partner. Jan 9, 11am PT / 2pm ET.
tl;dr: “Being the CTO of a small and mid-size enterprise has been a totally different ride compared to what I’ve seen in the big corporate world. One thing that’s clear to me now? The title might stay the same no matter where you go, but what you’re actually doing as a CTO can vary wildly depending on the industry and the company’s growth stage... The author dives into some of the mental frameworks that have helped me navigate these shifts.”
Leadership Management
— Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec
tl;dr: AWS VP shares a framework for Principal Engineer roles developed at Amazon. The framework defines six key roles: Sponsor (project lead), Guide (technical expert), Catalyst (idea launcher), Tie Breaker (decision maker), Catcher (project rescuer), and Participant (contributor). This helps organizations optimize senior engineers' impact and develop talent effectively.
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Developers must ramp up and navigate the new complex codebase of a new customer every quarter. Architects need to do that every month. Learn how they transformed this challenge into a competitive advantage using deep context AI.
Promoted by Augment Code
Event AI
— Jessica Kerr
tl;dr: “My work does not reduce to measurable outcomes. Much of what I accomplish as an engineer and as a developer advocate amounts to creating conditions that make it more likely for the company to succeed. I resist and resent most metrics, yet I don’t mind OKRs the way Honeycomb does them.”
Leadership Management
“I never lose. I either win or learn.”
— Daniel Gerlach
tl;dr: “I often encounter codebases with lousy logging practices. This manifests itself in useless logging missing context or in over-logging thereby bringing down the whole system. People often forget that logging is expensive. In the following I want to list the most important logging traits for modern cloud native applications.”
Logging BestPractices
— Sam Rose
tl;dr: A visualized guide that covers: (1) What a Turing machine is. (2) What can and cannot be computed. (3) What it means to be Turing complete. (4) How modern computers relate to Turing machines. (5) How to write and run your own programs for a Turing machine.
Guide
— Kamal Marhubi, Julia Evans
tl;dr: “Let's find out how well you know computers! All of these programs have a variable number in them. Your mission: guess how big number needs to get before the program takes 1 second to run.”
Performance
— Geoffrey Litt
tl;dr: “I want to tell you about a neat experience I had with AI-assisted programming this week. What’s unusual here is: the AI didn’t write a single line of my code. Instead, I used AI to build a custom debugger UI… which made it more fun for me to do the coding myself.”
AI
Notable Reading
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Most Popular From Last Issue
Git - Beyond The Basics — Anders Sundman
Notable Links
Clay: High performance UI layout library in C.
Monolith: Lightweight recommendation system.
SeleniumBase: APIs for web automation, testing, and bypassing bot-detection.
Shortest: AI-powered natural language end-to-end testing.
Yazi: Fast terminal file manager.
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