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- Issue #612
Issue #612
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 2nd May’s issue is presented by QA Wolf
Bugs sneak out when less than 80% of user flows are tested before shipping. However, getting that kind of coverage — and staying there — is hard and pricey for any team.
QA Wolf gets your organization to 80% automated E2E test coverage in less than 4 months.
They create and maintain your test suite in open-source Playwright. Plus, they provide unlimited parallel test runs on their infrastructure (24-hour maintenance included).
The results? 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
— James Stanier
tl;dr: James shares how he executes weekly updates as CTO. “Since starting my new CTO role, I've been sharing a weekly update with my team. It's how I continually open up my thoughts to the team with a long-term goal to reduce any mental alignment gap between us. I like to think that the more I share, the more they can understand what I believe is important and why, and the more that my style of working and thinking can propagate through the team.”
Leadership Management
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “Insights are a dime a dozen. Suggestions are a bit better, but still let you off the hook. Assertions are the realm of professionals who navigate ambiguity and rigorous thinking. Assertions make an idea real. The sooner the ball gets rolling, the sooner you can iterate to make the idea better.”
CareerAdvice
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
— Michael Lopp
tl;dr: “Lopp begins by offering tactical advice on creating durable, effective engineering orgs and discusses the pivotal relationship between product and engineering. He then charges leaders to ask themselves if they possess some of the people-centered skills he’s seen of successful leaders over his career.”
Leadership Management
"Leadership is an action, not a position."
— Steven Sinofsky
tl;dr: “I started my list with “let’s just” because 9 out of 10 times when someone says “let’s just” what follows is going to be ultimately way more complicated than anyone in the room thought it would be. I’m going to say “9 out of 10 times” a lot below on purpose because…experience. I offer an example of two below but for each there are probably a half dozen I lived through.”
Architecture
tl;dr: Knock enables AI agents to send messaging (Email, Push, SMS, In-app, and Slack) and powers human-in-the-loop workflows with deferred tool calls. You design the templates, and your agent sends on-brand messages. Works seamlessly with frameworks like LangChain and Vercel’s AI SDK.
Promoted by Knock
Tools AI
— Alisa Sireneva
tl;dr: “I’m not talking about skill, knowledge, or convincing a world focused on radical acceleration that optimization is necessary. Performance optimization is hard because it’s fundamentally a brute-force task, and there’s nothing you can do about it. This post is a bit of a rant on my frustrations with code optimization. I’ll also try to give actionable advice, which I hope enchants your experience.”
Performance
— Alex Kladov
tl;dr: Alex explains how to use compile-time reflection to automatically extract a data structure's public API for comprehensive testing. He introduces "swarm testing" - randomly selecting subsets of features to test intensively rather than testing uniformly. This approach ensures complete API coverage and fails when new methods are added, prompting developers to add corresponding tests.
Tests
— Emil Kowalski
tl;dr: “We all want our UIs to feel great and animations can definitely help with that. But how do you actually create a great animation? This article is a collection of practical tips to help you go from good to great animations.”
FrontEnd
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Staff Meeting Ritual — Allen Cheung
Notable Links
12 Factor Agents: Principles for building reliable LLM apps.
Cocoindex: ETL framework to turn your data AI-ready.
Hyperswitch: OS payments orchestration.
Suna: OS generalist AI agent.
Tilt: Define your dev environment as code.
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