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- Issue #609
Issue #609
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 22nd April’s issue is presented by QA Wolf
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tl;dr: “Most people will not lead from the front. They won’t learn what’s needed to be useful when they get there. They won’t block the time to be able to show up. Or when they get there they’ll be a distraction. Or after being woken up twice at 3am in a month they’ll say “this really just isn’t for me. But those that do will earn the respect of their team. They’ll motivate their team to be better than the sum of their parts. And they’ll deliver outcomes that are outsized to their resourcing.”
Leadership Management
— Jack Danger
tl;dr: “There are two fully unrelated causes of underperformance: Refusal to Align and Failure to Execute. Underperformance is when a person or a team is not bearing their share of the organization’s load. Their colleagues are either relying on them and getting let down, or they’ve learned not to rely on them at all.”
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 improve our accuracy continuously?
Promoted by QA Wolf
Management AI
— Eliran Turgeman
tl;dr: "When your architecture grows beyond a single container, things you thought were simple can now break in a variety of ways. In this post I want to highlight different lessons I learned while developing and maintaining large distributed systems at scale."
Architecture
“Changing random stuff until your program works is bad coding practice, but if you do it fast enough it’s Machine Learning.”
— Thanh Tschoepe
tl;dr: “Error handling isn’t just a technical challenge - it’s a critical aspect of software safety and reliability. Yet in TypeScript and JavaScript, it remains something of a wild west. Today, I’ll share an overview of the current landscape and my preferred approaches.”
BestPractices
tl;dr: Stop wasting hours waiting to Preview your code changes in a realistic environment. Signadot’s intelligent sandboxes give you production-like testing in seconds during local and PR testing. Companies like DoorDash and Brex now test 10x faster with isolated environments. Join forward-thinking teams and try it for free today.
Promoted by Signadot
Microservices
— Shunyu Yao
tl;dr: Shunyu, a researched at OpenAI, claims we’re at AI’s halftime. The second half of AI — starting now — will shift focus from solving problems to defining problems. In this new era, evaluation becomes more important than training. Instead of just asking, “Can we train a model to solve X?”, we’re asking, “What should we be training AI to do, and how do we measure real progress?” To thrive in this second half, we’ll need a timely shift in mindset and skill set, ones perhaps closer to a product manager.
AI ThoughtPiece
— Boris Cherny
tl;dr: “This post outlines general patterns that have proven effective, both for Anthropic's internal teams and for external engineers using Claude Code across various codebases, languages, and environments. Nothing in this list is set in stone nor universally applicable; consider these suggestions as starting points.”
AI BestPractices
— Jacob Vesterlund
tl;dr: “Developing and releasing mobile apps at scale is a big challenge. With each weekly release of our mobile app for iOS and Android, hundreds of changes go out to more than 675 million users all over the world and on all kinds of mobile devices. A lot can go wrong, so discovering and mitigating potential and confirmed issues is critical to ensuring a smooth listening experience.”
Process Mobile
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
A2A: Open protocol enabling interoperability between agentic apps.
Actor-core: Stateful serverless that runs anywhere.
Folo: Follow everything in one place.
Plandex: OS agent for large projects and real world tasks.
Tweakcn: No-code theme editor for shadcn/ui.
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