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Issue #586
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 31st January’s issue is presented by Sourcegraph
There’s a lot of BS about AI coding agents. Sourcegraph’s AI coding agents actually work.
Our code review agent uses specific rules you define, instead of trying to replace humans entirely. They use search + AI to help you define rules precisely and eval against recent PRs.
This actually works, which is why devs at companies like Stripe, Uber, Coinbase and more are using Sourcegraph. Start using Sourcegraph or sign up for the Feb 6 livestream for early access and live demos.
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “This article will be about more than just the software tool that I use, even though it is central to it. Instead, I'll focus on the way using this tool allows me to categorize the way that I work into tight loops of gathering, deciding, and executing. This is a mental model that I've found to be very effective in managing my day-to-day work, and enables me to keep the pace high for myself and my team.”
Leadership Management
— Will Larson
tl;dr: “This chapter starts by exploring something I believe quite strongly: there’s always an engineering strategy, even if there’s nothing written down. From there, we’ll discuss why strategy, especially written strategy, is such a valuable opportunity for organizations that take it seriously.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: There’s a lot of BS about AI coding agents. Sourcegraph’s AI coding agents actually work. Our code review agent uses specific rules you define, instead of trying to replace humans entirely. They use search + AI to help you define rules precisely and eval against recent PRs.
Promoted by Sourcegraph
Management AI
tl;dr: “Most management teams aren’t dumb and do their best to establish strong accountability cultures. But we wanted to share a few common ways that smart people screw up accountability on their teams, often despite the best of intentions – and what to do about them.”
Leadership Management
"He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader."
— Alexey Makhotkin
tl;dr: “In this database design tutorial I’m going to show how to design the database tables for a real-world project of substantial complexity. We’ll design a clone of Google Calendar. We will model as much as possible of the functionality that is directly related to the calendar.”
Database
tl;dr: WorkOS makes enterprise-grade authentication and user management effortless. With just a few lines of code, integrate powerful features like SSO, SCIM, and RBAC in minutes—not months. Designed for B2B SaaS, WorkOS offers modular APIs, a first-in-class dev experience, and onboarding assistant to eliminate complexity for your engineering team. Best of all? User Management is free for up to 1 million MAUs and includes MFA, bot protection, and more.
Promoted by WorkOS
UsefulTool
— Thorsten Ball
tl;dr: Thorsten poses questions about future implications of AI: Will this affect programming language adoption? Will code optimization shift to focus on AI readability? Could prompts replace stored code? Will we need new ways to handle AI-generated technical debt?
ThoughtPiece AI
— Sven Schindler
tl;dr: “Maintaining a high-quality library is key to creating a seamless design experience for our users. As part of the quality process, swapping an image in a template with another image sometimes becomes necessary. For example, if a third-party media library partnership expires, anywhere we've used their content in the library needs to be replaced. As expected, this is a lengthy process involving extensive manual resources. So naturally, the question arises, can we automate solving it?”
ML
tl;dr: “At Uber, our MySQL fleet is the backbone of our data infrastructure, supporting a vast array of operations critical to our platform. Uber operates an extensive MySQL fleet, consisting of over 2,300 independent clusters. Building a control plane to manage this fleet at such a massive scale, while ensuring zero downtime and no data loss, is among the most challenging problems in the industry.”
MySQL
Most Popular From Last Issue
Working Fast And Slow — Sean Goedecke
Notable Links
Exo: Run your own AI cluster at home.
Keymapper: Cross-platform context-aware key remapper.
KHI: Log visualization tool for Kubernetes.
Requestly: HTTP Interceptor for browsers.
System Design Primer: Learn how to design large-scale systems.
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