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Issue #581
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 14th January’s issue is presented by Nango
A developer-first platform for building native product integrations with 300+ APIs.
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— Peter Yang
tl;dr: (1) So you must hold steadfast to "it's not good enough yet. (2) Great products are built through continuous tinkering and adjustments. (3) Don’t confuse the work behind the work with the actual work. (4) If you’re building 0-1, be ready for emotional whiplash. (5) The battle is won in the trenches of daily iterations.
Leadership Management
tl;dr: “People-pleasing tendencies manifest in many different ways, such as saying “yes” when you really want to say “no,” or by putting other people’s happiness above your needs. While this tendency is often rooted in good intentions, people pleasing can often be a hindrance to our growth.”
CareerAdvice
— Bri Cho
tl;dr: Customers want to connect your product with their other key business tools. Building these integrations in-house can be painful and time consuming, while pre-built solutions are often limiting. Should you build integrations in-house, or turn to a third party solution? This build vs buy guide offers a handy framework to help you decide.
Promoted by Nango
Leadership Management
tl;dr: “I’ve focused very heavily on overcoming flaws in my mind for the past ~11 years. Initially it was because I had to overcome huge problems that significantly reduced my quality of life. But years after I overcame them, I still continue to ‘debug’ my own mind because I like the growth and quality of life I get out of it. And also because it’s just interesting.”
CareerAdvice
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”
— Patrick Roos
tl;dr: “This comprehensive collection gives architects the techniques they need to not only design solid architectures, but to seamlessly align them with business goals. Learn how these techniques enable architects and teams to make informed decisions, minimise risk, and communicate effortlessly with stakeholders.”
Architecture
tl;dr: From brainstorming on the go to neatly structured retrospectives, fully prepared meetings, or ready-to-share strategy documents—you can now do real work without a keyboard. LLMs are unlocking new ways of working, these are our favorite voice-based workflows for managers tired of being tethered to their screens.
Promoted by Tana
Productivity
— Julia Evans
tl;dr: “There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it all came out of the box. My immediate reaction was “oh, getting a modern terminal experience isn’t that hard, you just need to….”, but the more I thought about it, the longer the “you just need to…” list got, and I kept thinking about more and more caveats. So I thought I would write down some notes about what it means to me personally to have a “modern” terminal experience and what I think can make it hard for people to get there.”
Terminal
— Marc Gauthier
tl;dr: “I like it when running a production system is boring. No outages, no hotfixes, no on-call duties… no problems. It might sound unachievable, but there are steps you can take to get closer to this state. One approach to get there I really like is being defensive with my code.”
Tips
— Lorin Hochstein
tl;dr: “Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mode involves overload. There’s a lot of great detail in Humpries’s write-up, and I recommend you read it directly in addition to this post.”
Resilience
Most Popular From Last Issue
What Makes Strong Engineers Strong? - Sean Goedecke
Notable Links
Crawl4AI: OS LLM friendly web crawler & scraper.
Friday Deploys: Apparel and accessories for work and leisure.
Steel: OS browser API for AI agents & apps.
Storm: LLM-powered knowledge curation system.
Wren AI: Chat with data to generate Text-to-SQL, charts & spreadsheets.
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