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Issue #607
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 15th April’s issue is presented by QA Wolf
Bugs sneak out when less than 80% of user flows are tested before shipping. But getting that kind of coverage — and staying there — is hard and pricey for any size team.
QA Wolf’s AI-native service gets engineering teams to 80% automated E2E test coverage, helping them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.
With QA Wolf, you get:
✅ Unlimited parallel test runs
✅ 15-min QA cycles
✅ 24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation
✅ Zero-flake guarantee With QA Wolf
With QA Wolf, Drata’s team of 80+ engineers achieved 4x more test cases and 86% faster QA cycles.
⭐ Rated 4.8/5 on G2
— Will Larson
tl;dr: Will covers: (1) Exploring strategy creation to find strategies you can learn from via public and private resources, and through creating learning communities. (2) How to diagnose the strategies you’ve found, to ensure you learn the right lessons from each one. (3) Policies that will help you find ways to perform and practice strategy within your organization, whether or not you have organizational authority. (4) Operational mechanisms to hold yourself accountable to developing a strategy practice. (5) My final benediction to you as a strategy practitioner who has finished reading this book.
Leadership Management
— Bjorn Roche
tl;dr: There are times when leader must head-off mistakes. Here are a few examples: (1) Starting a project that likely won’t ship, or won’t benefit the company. (2) Believing a pet project will get them outsized recognition. (3) Making a decision that will commit the company to something that isn’t a good long-term fit. (4) Over-emphasizing long-term or abstract benefits to the detriment of shipping. (5) Diving in too quickly to make changes to a system, resulting in unforeseen or unpleasant consequences for other teams.
Leadership Management
tl;dr: "Just like athletes need more than one drill to win a competition, AI agents require consistent training based on real-world performance metrics to excel in their role. At QA Wolf, we’ve developed weighted “gym scenarios” to simulate real-world challenges and track their progress over time. How does our AI use these metrics to continuously improve our accuracy? Visit our website to learn more."
Promoted by QA Wolf
Management AI
— Murat Demirbas
tl;dr: “Tech rewards leverage, not shortcuts. Optimize for momentum and stack useful skills, relationships, and systems. Compounding is the strongest force in your career.Don’t chase trends. Understand them. Ride the ones that match your strengths. Learn to take a step back, and aim for depth, clarity, and direction.”
CareerAdvice
“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”
— Phillip Carter
tl;dr: “I hate to be that hype guy, but uhh, can you think of something as impactful to the world as computers and information technology have been since the introduction of personal computers in the 1970s? Well, if LLMs/AI are a new kind of computer, it's not the biggest leap to think that they could also have an enormous impact on the world. I should be clear on my stance here. I'm with Bill Gates when he says that people tend to overestimate what's possible in the short-term and underestimate what's possible in ten years.”
LLM ThoughtPiece
— Arjun Iyer
tl;dr: When integration tests run after code merges, fixing failures becomes costly and time-consuming. Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb tackled this with an innovative approach to ephemeral environments that avoids infrastructure duplication, enabling pre-merge testing for every change. Discover how this "shift-left" strategy catches integration issues early and saves millions in engineering productivity.
Promoted by Signadot
Management Microservices
— 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
tl;dr: “The Goal: Make things faster and reduce load on primary data stores. Caches offer quicker access and shield your backend from repetitive requests.” The author outlines (1) Cache-Aside (Lazy Loading). (2) Read-Through. (3) Write-Through. (4) Write-Behind (Write-Back). (5) Write-Around.
Guide Cache
— Suren Enfiajyan
tl;dr: Iterator helpers enable memory-efficient transformations without temporary arrays. Array.at() for negative indexing, Promise.withResolvers() for cleaner async code, destructuring for variable swapping, structuredClone() for deep copying, tagged templates for string processing, WeakMap/Set for garbage collection, and new Set operations for boolean logic.
JavaScript
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Best Programmers I Know — Matthias Endler
Notable Links
Anime: JS animation engine.
Cookbook: Examples for using the Gemini API.
Datastar: The hypermedia framework.
LightRAG: Simple and fast retrieval-augmented generation.
SpacetimeDB: Multiplayer at the speed of light.
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