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- Issue #593
Issue #593
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 25th February’s issue is presented by WorkOS
Code reviews are critical but time-consuming. CodeRabbit acts as your AI co-pilot, providing instant Code review comments and potential impacts of every pull request.
Beyond just flagging issues, CodeRabbit provides one-click fix suggestions and lets you define custom code quality rules using AST Grep patterns, catching subtle issues that traditional static analysis tools might miss.
CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 5 million PRs, installed on 1 million repositories, and used by 50 thousand Open-source projects.
— Chelsea Troy
tl;dr: “In my experience, it is at least the case that when programmers become trial-by-fire managers, they realize they don’t know how to do their jobs. Technical leadership — tech lead roles, principal eng roles, and even the dreaded “player-coach” role—those sneak up on people. A lot of times there’s still programming involved, so folks feel prepared. Their experience has exposed them to technical decisions and it got them promoted, so the way they do it is probably fine. Right?” Chelsea discusses 3 pitfalls she commonly sees.
Leadership Management
— Will Larson
tl;dr: Will covers: (1) Why diagnosis is the foundation of effective strategy. Conversely, how skipping the diagnosis phase consistently ruins strategies. (2) A step-by-step approach to diagnosing your strategy’s circumstances. (3) How to incorporate data into your diagnosis effectively. (4) Dealing with controversial elements of your diagnosis. (5) Why it’s more effective to view difficulties as part of the problem to be solved, rather than a blocking issue. (6) The near impossibility of an effective diagnosis if you don’t bring humility and self-awareness to the process.
Leadership Management
— Desmond Obisi, Aravind Putrevu
tl;dr: In this guide, you’ll learn about the most common anti-patterns that pop up during code reviews and how to easily tackle them with artificial intelligence (AI).
Promoted by CodeRabbit
CodeReview AI Management
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “I realised the other day that I actually have a straightforward heuristic for this. I count the number of times I have this thought:“Oh nice catch, I didn’t think of that!””
CareerAdvice
"Management is nothing more than motivating other people."
— Armin Ronacher
tl;dr: This week I had a conversation with one of our engineers about “shitty code” which lead me to sharing with him one of my more unusual inspirations: Flamework, a pseudo framework created at Flickr. Armin discusses the framework, which he describes as “messy but effective.”
Tips
tl;dr: Isaac Johnson, a Principal Software Engineer and DevOps Architect with experience at multiple Fortune 500 companies, reveals the key capabilities he looks for when evaluating monitoring platforms for enterprise DevOps teams. He offers a candid look at common monitoring pain points and discusses how to overcome them.
Promoted by Datadog
DevOps
— Declan Chidlow
tl;dr: “I propose that the advent and integration of AI models into the workflows of developers has stifled the adoption of new and potentially superior technologies due to training data cutoffs and system prompt influence.”
AI
— Divya Patel
tl;dr: “We challenged ourselves to use this opportunity to showcase Canva's AI capabilities. We wanted to leverage generative AI to create a personalized and engaging experience that users could easily share on social media and spark a sense of accomplishment and connection with our brand. This blog post delves into the campaign design process and highlights how we used generative AI to deliver a personalized and engaging experience to millions of Canva users.”
ML
— Simon Tatham
tl;dr: “Recently I was called on to explain the ‘XOR’ operator to somebody who vaguely knew of its existence, but didn’t have a good intuition for what it was useful for and how it behaved. For me, this was one of those ‘future shock’ moments when you realise the world has moved on. When I got started in computers, you had to do low-level bit twiddling to get anything very interesting done, so you pretty much couldn’t avoid learning about XOR. But these days, to a high-level programmer, it’s much more of an optional thing, and you can perfectly well not know much about it.”
DeepDive
Most Popular From Last Issue
Gaining Years Of Experience In A Few Months — Marc Gauthier
Notable Links
Browser-use: Make websites accessible for AI agents.
DeepEval: The LLM evaluation framework.
MDQ: Jq for markdown.
Neut: Functional programming language with static memory management
Typia: Super-fast type framework.
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