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- Issue #617
Issue #617
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 20th 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.
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “It’s harder to be a software engineer now than at any time in the last decade. The good times in tech are over, at least for now. It’s not just a tough job market, but a tough environment for already-employed software engineers. What can we do about it?”
CareerAdvice
— Abi Noda
tl;dr: “While migrations are one of the most necessary parts of software maintenance, they can be time-intensive, costly, error-prone, and unrewarding for developers, making them a great candidate for using AI. Google's system solves this by identifying code that needs changing, using an LLM to generate updates, validating the changes through several checkpoints, and routing successful modifications for human review. Today the system runs nightly, continually chipping away at the migration task until complete. In this paper, the authors describe how the system works, its results, and its benefits and challenges.”
Leadership Management
— 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 It’s that the context developers need is scattered, outdated, or missing entirely.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
Documentation Management
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “When we want to impress, we often feel the urge to name every single thing we’ve done. Every skill we have. Every client we’ve ever worked with. Anything we’ve attempted. We think the more we add to the list, the greater our accomplishments will seem. But more isn’t always better. Sometimes it’s actually worse. Why? People judge us based on the average of our accomplishments, not the cumulative. With averages, adding items can actually reduce your overall perceived value.”
CareerAdvice
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
— Patrick Roos
tl;dr: “The Architecture Decision Canvas (ADC) is a visual and structured approach to guide teams through the critical decision-making process in a collaborative way. It provides a comprehensive template for discussing, communicating and determining specific architectural decisions.”
Architecture
— Gibbs Cullen
tl;dr: Vibe coding tools like Lovable, Bolt, and Replit promise speed - but often lead to shadow IT, tech debt, and security risks. As AI accelerates business demands, brittle DIY foundations can’t keep up. The answer? A modular, centrally governed approach built for scale, extensibility, and enterprise-grade AI. Superblocks has collected insights from engineering leaders at top enterprises into this blog to help you understand the risks - and how companies are preparing for the future of internal tooling. Read more to find out how you can too.
Promoted by Superblocks
Leadership Management
tl;dr: “Inspired by multiple frameworks, including SPACE and DevEx, DX Core 4, and DORA, our playbook offers a balanced and comprehensive approach, helping you assign metrics to each “zone” that you can track over time and iterate as needed.”
Leadership Management
— Falk Hüffner
tl;dr: A new approach to checking leap years uses just 3 CPU instructions with magic constants. This is 3.8x faster than traditional methods for random inputs. The algorithm was derived using brute force and the Z3 solver, analyzing binary bit patterns to replicate traditional leap year logic.
TimeData Guide
— Sam Rose
tl;dr: “Reservoir sampling is a technique for selecting a fair random sample when you don't know the size of the set you're sampling from. By the end of this essay you will know: (1) When you would need reservoir sampling. (2) The mathematics behind how it works, using only basic operations: subtraction, multiplication, and division. (3) A simple way to implement reservoir sampling if you want to use it.”
Data
Most Popular From Last Issue
What Makes Strong Engineers Strong? — Sean Goedecke
Notable Links
BrowserBee: AI-powered browser assistant.
Fina: Modular finance tracker.
Manifest: The 1-file micro-backend.
Unpkg: The CDN for everything on npm.
Void: OS Cursor alternative.
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