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Issue #618
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 23rd May’s issue is presented by QA Wolf
Automated test maintenance is both complicated and expensive, so QA Wolf built an AI agent to do the heavy lifting for them.
But the agent quickly got overwhelmed by all the different tasks it had to juggle, and it eventually became too slow and error-prone to be much help.
So QA Wolf rewrote their entire codebase from scratch, using a more sophisticated multi-agent approach that produced faster, more accurate results – and now they want to teach you how to do it.
This free panel discussion on the 3 Principles for Building Multi-Agent AI Systems goes into the technical details of why this approach is so powerful and how you can implement it in your projects.
Check It Out - And Learn How To Harness Multiple Agents At Once
tl;dr: “I’ll share my personal favorite reading materials that have helped me think about leadership, management, people and technology.” There were a few main themes that drove the authors interest notably books that display different examples of management, people working together and those that challenge the author’s current world view.
Leadership Management Books
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: "Aim small, miss small" is a phrase often used in marksmanship and sports. It means that by focusing on a small, specific target, your margin of error shrinks, if you miss, you still miss small. At its core, it’s a simple but powerful idea: the tighter you define your target, the more you minimize the consequences of a miss.
Leadership Management
— John Gluck
tl;dr: Android emulators are powerful, flexible, and essential for scaling mobile test automation — especially when you're running thousands of E2E tests across environments. But like any tool, they need the right setup.In this blog post, QA Wolf shares 5 key strategies that help you: Reduce flakiness, maximize emulator performance, keep tests running fast and reliably at scale. If you're running automated tests for Android, this is how to get the most out of your emulators.
Promoted by QA Wolf
Tests Management
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Software development is full of friction points—vague tickets, shifting priorities, and cognitively demanding tasks that are hard to start.But what causes those delays, and what can teams do to mitigate the impact without killing momentum? This week we ask: Why do developers procrastinate—and how can teams mitigate its negative impacts?”
Leadership Management
“Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.”
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: "Also unlike most popular advice, this post is for people who are already competent software engineers, not less-technical people looking to vibe code a working app. They’re techniques I use daily as a staff engineer at GitHub. I use Copilot for most of this stuff, but the techniques are tool-agnostic: you can use anything that exposes a chat interface."
AI
tl;dr: One way to ship quality fast is by perfecting features quickly. Start by flagging a new feature, releasing it early and gathering feedback. So you can shortcut finding the right scope by addressing any issues and requests raised, then tracking adoption. Once ready, release to everyone (and auto-cleanup the flag). At least, that’s how teams are using Bucket to build world-class products, faster.
Promoted by Bucket
Tools
— Max Bernstein
tl;dr: A guide to building a simple search engine from scratch using word embeddings (word2vec). It explains embedding words into vectors, computing cosine similarity to rank results, and includes implementations of terminal and web-based interfaces, along with thoughts on evaluation and improvements.
Guide Search
tl;dr: “In this post, we explore how Instagram has successfully scaled its algorithm to include over 1000 ML models without sacrificing recommendation quality or reliability. We delve into the intricacies of managing such a vast array of models, each with its own performance characteristics and product goals.”
ML RecSys
tl;dr: “I had a 2 week trip coming up where I'd need to work, and I got a little obsessed with the idea that I could somehow leave my laptop at home and just use my phone. So what if we add a folding keyboard and some AR glasses?”
Hardware
Null Pointer
If have you have ideas for future cartoons, hit reply and let us know!
Most Popular From Last Issue
Practical Advice For Engineers In These Troubled Times - Sean Goedecke
Notable Links
Lobster: The Lobster programming language
Rslib: Library development tool.
Scrapling: Python library to make web scraping easy.
Tilt: Define your dev environment as code.
Zen Browser: Welcome to a calmer internet.
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