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- Issue #622
Issue #622
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 6th June’s issue is presented by Anima
Join Anima (YC W21), where every line of code powers care for 3.5M+ patients.
🚀 0-to-$10M ARR in 23 months, cash flow positive
🧠 Team of ex-YC CTOs, robotics champs & top 0.1% global talent
🌍 Remote-first, fast-moving hacker culture - zero bureaucracy
🛠 Serverless TS/JS + frontier ML (MoEs, active learning, multimodal fusion)
We’re building the Care Enablement Platform for modern healthcare.
or chat to Anima's founder, Shun, to learn more.
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “As engineering teams spread across time zones, coordination becomes a balancing act between responsiveness and deep work. With Slack threads piling up and meetings crossing time zones, the real challenge isn’t communication - it’s coordination. This week we ask: What does effective coordination look like in globally distributed teams - and how should teams balance meetings and async tools like Slack?”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: “As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional. Your job is to get to the truth of a matter in a respectful way, not make your team feel good. You are largely stuck with your coworkers, and you need to get stuff done together or everyone suffers. If you break up with your girlfriend you get unconditional sympathy. But if you break up with your girlfriend, and the 3 of us were trying to climb Mt. Everest together, I’m going to be a lot more measured in how I communicate and balance your relationship so that we can all survive the next few days.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Join Anima (YC W21), where every line of code powers care for 3.5M+ patients. 0-to-$10M ARR in 23 months, cash flow positive. Team of ex-YC CTOs, robotics champs & top 0.1% global talent. Remote-first, fast-moving hacker culture — zero bureaucracy. Serverless TS/JS + frontier ML (MoEs, active learning, multimodal fusion). We’re building the Care Enablement Platform for modern healthcare. Share a few details here to apply or chat to Anima's founder, Shun, to learn more.
Promoted by Anima
Jobs
— Allen Cheung
tl;dr: “I started this ritual about 7–8 years ago when I first started managing managers and wanted a better format for bringing together the more senior, busier, more expensive people on my teams. Across teams and companies, I’ve iterated on the meeting, modifying the format to accommodate my team’s suggestions and what I saw were the gaps in our organization.”
Leadership Management
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
tl;dr: “We began exploring different approaches to enhance our documentation tools and processes, with a particular focus on the docs-as-code strategy. This initiative aimed to not only elevate the quality of our technical documentation but also to transform the culture of documentation at Pinterest. The result was PDocs, our internal documentation system.”
Documentation
— Maria Paktiti
tl;dr: AI agents are gaining autonomy - but also privileged access to tools, APIs, and data. Without scoped permissions, auditability, and role-based controls, they quickly become a security risk. This post explores how engineering teams are securing agent workflows with the WorkOS platform, applying least-privilege access and modern security patterns by default.
Promoted by WorkOS
Security AI
— Jimmy Miller
tl;dr: To understand the basics of machine code, you need three concepts: (1) Instructions. (2) Registers. (3) Memory. Jimmy guides us through the fundamentals of each.
Guide
— Jan Nidzwetzki
tl;dr: “In a few evenings of vibe coding, I implemented the plan explorer for PostgreSQL. It iterates over a search space and generates visualizations that show when the plan changes and how many tuples are expected versus the actual number returned. This blog post examines the “art” of query optimization. It discusses the plan explorer tool, the images the tool generates, and the insights the tool provides into the decisions made by the PostgreSQL query optimizer.”
PostgreSQL SQL
— Jeff Kaufman
tl;dr: “The idea is, if you had registered googlelogoligature.net then Chrome on Android (and possibly other Google products) would have displayed it as Google.net, potentially tricking users into thinking they were really interacting with Google.” Jeff shares how this works.
Security Google
Null Pointer
Productivity Gains
Most Popular From Last Issue
How Do Experienced Engineers Actually Review Code? — Lizzie Matusov
Notable Links
Anthropic Tutorial: Interactive prompt engineering tutorial.
DuckLake: Integrated data lake and catalog format.
LiveStore: NexGen state management framework.
Quarkdown: Markdown with superpowers.
SnapDOM: Captures HTML elements as images.
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