- Pointer
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- Issue #588
Issue #588
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 7th February’s issue is presented by WorkOS
Today’s bots can easily bypass traditional detection — executing JavaScript, storing cookies, rotating IPs, and even solving advanced CAPTCHAs. Their attacks are advanced by the day, fueled by growth in AI agents.
So how do you block these bad actors? The answer is WorkOS Radar.
A single JS script is all it takes to instantly protect your signup flow. Whether it’s brute force attacks, leaked passwords, or throwaway emails, WorkOS Radar can catch it all, keeping your real users safe from abuse.
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “As a leader, the one thing you are expected to do is make hard decisions. Unfortunately, most of us are wired to avoid conflict. So when it comes time to communicating these decisions, many leaders subconsciously look for shortcuts that allow us to get this over with as soon as possible. One of these shortcuts is defaulting to apologizing to smooth things over, while telling yourself the story that you’re being an empathetic, vulnerable leader.” Wes shares how this is a bigger deal this decays relationships with your team.
Leadership Management
— Chris Kiehl
tl;dr: Things I now believe, which past me would've squabbled with: (1) Simple is not given. It takes constant work. (2) There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity. (3) Typed languages are essential on teams with mixed experience levels. (4) Java is a great language because it's boring. (5) REPLs are not useful design tools (though, they are useful exploratory tools). And more.
CareerAdvice ThoughtPiece
tl;dr: Today’s bots can easily bypass traditional detection — executing JavaScript, storing cookies, rotating IPs, and even solving advanced CAPTCHAs. Their attacks are advanced by the day, fueled by growth in AI agents. So how do you block these bad actors? The answer is WorkOS Radar. A single JS script is all it takes to instantly protect your signup flow. Whether it’s brute force attacks, leaked passwords, or throwaway emails, WorkOS Radar can catch it all, keeping your real users safe from abuse.
Promoted by WorkOS
AI
— Ed Batista
tl;dr: Ed explores how we often avoid solving difficult but necessary problems in favor of easier, more comfortable ones. It argues that while this is understandable, true growth and meaningful solutions require the courage to venture into uncertainty.
Leadership Management
“The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”
— Patrick Dubroy
tl;dr: "The article presents five different approaches to coding, symbolized as ""hats"": (1) Captain’s Hat: methodical, by-the-book. (2) Scrappy Hat: minimal, straight to the point. (3) MacGyver Hat: results-focused, quick-and-dirty. (4) Chef’s Hat: focused on presentation, aesthetics. (5) Teacher’s Hat: emphasizing clarity, communication. Patrick argues there's no single ""right way"" to code; instead, different situations call for different approaches. "
CareerAdvice BestPractices
tl;dr: Every product & engineering team is being asked to build AI features. But that requires a deep understanding of a few core concepts: Ingesting & index customers' external knowledge, reconciling 3rd-party permissions and ACLs, and automating tasks across your customers' other apps via agent tool calling. This 3+ part video and written series (with repos) walks through how to implement each of these functionalities into your product.
Promoted by Paragon
AI Guide
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “Personally, I feel like I get a lot of value from AI. I think many of the people who don’t feel this way are “holding it wrong”: i.e. they’re not using language models in the most helpful ways. In this post, I’m going to list a bunch of ways I regularly use AI in my day-to-day as a staff engineer.”
AI Productivity
— Zach Tellman
tl;dr: Zach contrasts two approaches to building a Sudoku solver: Ron Jeffries' incremental, test-driven method versus Peter Norvig's direct, constraint-based solution. While Jeffries struggled with representation and never fully implemented constraint propagation, Norvig's AI background led him to an elegant solution using search and constraint propagation. The article uses this to illustrate how different programming backgrounds influence problem-solving approaches.
CaseStudy SystemDesign
— Julia Evans
tl;dr: “A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey and at the end I asked: “What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you?” 1600 people answered, and I decided to spend a few days categorizing all the responses. Julia shares the categories of responses here!
Terminal Survey
Most Popular From Last Issue
How To (And How Not To) Design REST APIs - Jeff Schnitzer
Notable Links
Awesome CTO: Curated and opinionated list of resources for CTOs
Jscanify: JS document scanning library.
Lucide: OS icon library.
Mathesar: OS secure, spreadsheet-like tool for Postgres data.
MegaParse: Parser for every type of documents.
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