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- Issue #595
Issue #595
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 4th March’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked connects the context across your team’s code, discussions, and docs to instantly answer questions about your application. Now everyone can get their work done – without having to dig for answers or interrupt their teammates.
Teams like Drata say they save an hour or more a day per engineer with Unblocked.
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “The short answer is that it depends exactly on what you mean by coding. I think that there is a big difference between being in the code and writing code. All managers should be in the code, but not all managers should be writing code.” James elaborates.
Leadership Management
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “If you say “good enough” and there are 50 operators listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 different ideas of what “good enough” means. This is a problem (and opportunity) for you.”
Leadership Management
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: The biggest challenge in software development isn’t writing code. It’s finding the context to know what code to write.
Promoted by Unblocked
AI Management
— Murat Demirbas
tl;dr: “Entrepreneurs think and act differently from managers and strategists. Entrepreneurs use effectual reasoning, the polar opposite of causal reasoning taught in business schools. Causal reasoning starts with a goal and finds the best way to achieve it. Effectual reasoning starts with available resources and lets goals emerge along the way. Entrepreneurs are explorers, not generals. Instead of following fixed plans, they experiment and adapt to seize whatever opportunities the world throws at them.”
CareerAdvice
“Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence boils down to curiosity.”
— Dan Luu
tl;dr: "Dan discusses the effectiveness of simple architectures in software development, using Wave, a $1.7B company, as an example. Wave's architecture is a Python monolith on top of Postgres, allowing engineers to focus on delivering value to users. The article emphasizes that simple architectures can be created more cheaply and easily than complex ones, even for high-traffic apps. Despite the trend towards complex, microservice-based architectures, Dan argues for the ""unreasonable effectiveness"" of monoliths, detailing Wave's choices, mistakes, and areas of unavoidable complexity. Simplicity in architecture can lead to success, allowing companies to allocate complexity where it benefits the business. "
Architecture
— James Hawkins
tl;dr: “Most companies love to set artificial deadlines. They’re the easiest way to “increase urgency”. But they have a nasty habit of manifesting into meaningful deadlines. Deadlines that generate mountains of debt and slow you down over time. I call this the deadline doom loop and it’s one of the reasons we don’t have product deadlines at PostHog.” James discusses how the loop plays out and principles for escaping the loop.
Promoted by PostHog
AI Management
— Tim O’Reilly
tl;dr: “There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it. It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new.”
AI ThoughtPiece
— 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: The project involved 3.5 trillion lines of types, totaling 177 terabytes, and took 12 days of continuous processing to render the first frame. It was a year-long journey of 18-hour days, requiring custom tools, thousands of tests, and deep programming knowledge. The result is likely the largest TypeScript codebase ever created.
Typescript Video Entertaining
Most Popular From Last Issue
Manager Antipatterns — Ted Neward
Notable Links
Maestro: E2E automation for mobile and web.
OlmOCR: Toolkit to linearize PDFs for LLM datasets / training.
Superglue: Self-healing open source data connector.
Warp On Windows: Modern terminal with AI.
Yaak: Desktop API client.
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