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- Issue #625
Issue #625
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 17th June’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.
— Subbu Allamaraju
tl;dr: “Diagnosis is often an overlooked step in goal setting, project planning, and execution. I have come across many projects where a senior leader proclaims a worthy goal, some get excited, and most nod — after all, the goal sounds right. The leader then delegates the goal down the hierarchy, and six months later, little progress is made. Eventually, the following year’s planning cycle arrives, and old goals are replaced with new ones, repeating the drill. It’s a symptom of a slowly decaying organization with low performance and little accountability.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: (1) Don't swerve around a debate. (2) Be generous with your ideas. (3) Think of yourself as the team captain, not the head coach. (4) Set the tone with cross-functional partners. (5) Write down what makes you tick. (6) Shine a light on failure. (7) Pull back the curtain. And more.
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 It’s that the context developers need is scattered, outdated, or missing entirely.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
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “When you’re agreeing with someone but you have a caveat, don’t say “yes, but”. Instead, say “but yes”. For instance, if you’re happy with a suggested approach so long as it’s only short term, don’t say “sounds good, but we’ll have to change it in a month”. Say “we’ll have to change it in a month, but sounds good”. This seems like a trivial difference. Aren’t those two sentences equivalent? In my experience, it’s surprising how non-equivalent they are.”
CareerAdvice
“Later Equals Never.”
— Henrik Warne
tl;dr: “Since 2002, I have been keeping track of all the tricky bugs I have come across. Nine years ago, I wrote a blog post with the lessons learned from the bugs up till then. Now I have reviewed all the bugs I have tracked since then. I wanted to see if I have learnt the lessons I listed in the first review. I also wanted to see what kind of bugs I have encountered since then. Like before, I have divided the lessons into the categories of coding, testing and debugging.”
Debugging
tl;dr: Clerk’s latest OAuth release adds token revocation, consent screens, dynamic client registration, public client support, and full MCP compatibility. Built for modern apps and secure by default, this update makes Clerk a powerful drop-in auth solution for any OAuth use case. See what’s new and how to get started.
Promoted by Clerk
AI Tools
— Diwank Tomer
tl;dr: “First, we’ll explore how to genuinely achieve a 10x productivity boost - not through magic, but through deliberate practices that amplify AI’s strengths while compensating for its weaknesses.” Diwank also walks us through the infrastructure at his company to ship production code daily with Claude’s help, and the importance of writing your own tests.
Guide AI
— Joshua Barretto
tl;dr: “Here is a list of toy programs I’ve attempted over the past 15 years, rated by difficulty and time required. These ratings are estimates and assume that you’re already comfortable with at least one-general purpose programming language and that, like me, you tend to only have an hour or two per day free to write code. Also included are some suggested resources that I found useful.”
CareerAdvice
— Austin Henley
tl;dr: “I challenged myself to come up with as many ways to detect a vowel as possible. I even asked a few friends to give it a go. Which is the fastest? Which should never be used? Which is the most clever? Which is the most readable? This post involves 11 different methods of detecting a vowel, algorithmic analysis, dissembling Python bytecode, inspecting the CPython implementation, and even looking at compiled regex opcodes. Let's go.”
Python
Most Popular From Last Issue
My Desk Setup In 2025 — Will Larson
Notable Links
Agent Rules: Rules and knowledge docs for AI coding assistants.
Anthropic Tutorial: Interactive prompt engineering tutorial.
Beachpatrol: CLI tool to automate your daily web browser.
Build Your Own: Guides for creating technologies from scratch.
Mosh: Mobile shell.
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