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- Issue #615
Issue #615
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 13th May’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked finds the context you need from your team’s code, discussions, docs, issue trackers and more.
Now everyone gets expert-level answers, without having to interrupt a teammate.
— Laura Tacho
tl;dr: (1) Dismissing intuition. (2) Data-driven theater. (3) Trying to be smart instead of making other people smart. (4) Not utilizing experts soon enough. (5) Not realizing that I’m not an engineering leader.
Leadership Management
— Busra Koken
tl;dr: In this blog post, I’ll share a few examples and practical insights that might help you, as a report, build a more supportive and clear relationship with your manager - whether you’re an IC, or an EM just starting out, or already deep into your career.
CareerAdvice
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: Docs get written, but answers stay hard to find. The problem isn’t the docs themselves. It’s that the context developers need is scattered, outdated, or missing entirely. Why does this keep happening? And what’s the alternative?
Promoted by Unblocked
Management Document
— Will Larson
tl;dr: At Carta, the following approach helped reduce resistance to cross-team document sharing.(1) When providing document feedback, prioritize helping the author over other concerns. (2) Skim the document to learn its structure. (3) Leave focused comments with the following structure: the concern, its importance, and why it matters. (4) Limit to 3-4. If it’s over 3-4 comments, schedule a conversation or increase your threshold for a comment.
Leadership Management
"Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders"
— Rohit Krishnan
tl;dr: “An interesting part of working with LLMs is that you get to see a lot of people trying to work with them, inside companies both small and large, and fall prey to entirely new sets of problems. Turns out using them well isn’t just a matter of knowhow or even interest, but requires unlearning some tough lessons. So I figured I’d jot down a few observations.”
LLM
— Gibbs Cullen
tl;dr: While "vibe coding" accelerates prototyping, without centralized governance it introduces security gaps, tech debt, and fragile deployments. Our buyer’s guide explains why unmanaged AI code generation falls short for enterprises, and what it takes to adopt a governed approach for secure, scalable, production-ready apps.
Promoted by Superblocks
Guide AI
— Hillel Wayne
tl;dr: “How do we make something utterly mundane? By using it and working at the boundaries of our skills. Almost everything I'm "good at" comes from banging my head against it more than is healthy. That suggests a really good reason to write clever code: it's an excellent form of purposeful practice. Writing clever code forces us to code outside of our comfort zone, developing our skills as software engineers.”
CareerAdvice
— Alex Molas
tl;dr: “Semantic unit testing is a testing approach that evaluates whether a function’s implementation aligns with its documented behavior. The code is analyzed using LLMs to assess if the implementation matches the expected behavior described in the docstring. It’s basically having an AI review your code and documentation together to spot discrepancies or bugs, without running the code.”
Tests
— Paul Bakker
tl;dr: “In this talk, you’ll learn how Netflix is using Java in 2025 and what benefits and possible issues we’re seeing running most of our services on the latest Java releases. You’ll learn about how we build our services with Spring Boot, DGS/GraphQL, and gRPC. We’ll go into dependency management and how we keep over 3000 Java services on the latest versions of frameworks and libraries, as well as the JDK itself.”
Java Video
Most Popular From Last Issue
Concurrency Diagrams — Phil Booth
Notable Links
Feather: Web framework for Rust.
Manifest: The 1-file micro-backend.
System Prompts: Collection of leaked system prompts.
Ty: Fast Python type checker & language server.
Void: OS Cursor alternative.
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