- Pointer
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- Issue #626
Issue #626
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 20th June’s issue is presented by WorkOS
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Device fingerprinting to detect suspicious behavior
Controls to stop fake signups and trial farming
Brute force attack prevention and more
— Martin Fowler, Gitanjali Venkatraman, Unmesh Joshi
tl;dr: The authors share how a new type of skill set they find valuable as a response to the ongoing wave of LLMs and AI tools. “This echoes a long debate about the relative value of specialists and generalists. Specialists are seen as people with a deep skill in a specific subject, while generalists have broad but shallow skills. A dissatisfaction with that dichotomy led to the idea of “T-shaped people”: folks that combine deep knowledge in one topic, with a broad but shallow knowledge of many other topics. We've seen many such people quickly grow other deep legs leads to success.“ The authors share the traits of this persona.
Leadership Management
— Alex Ewerlöf
tl;dr: As an engineering leader, you're thinking about architecture, tech bets, team direction, influencing product roadmaps, and ensuring your technical initiatives deliver real strategic value for the business. Alex discusses Wardley Maps and Pace Layering as practical tools to help answer questions like: How can we make smarter bets on our technological investments? How to make compelling cases for architectural changes, refactoring, or technology choices?
Leadership Management
— Maria Paktiti
tl;dr: AI agents can invoke APIs, automate workflows, and access sensitive data. Without scoped tokens, defined roles, and audit logs, even helpful agents can trigger unintended changes or expose user data. Learn how engineers are enforcing least privilege, tracking agent actions, and preventing overreach without slowing development.
Promoted by WorkOS
Management AI Security
— Chantal Kapani
tl;dr: 6% of the 617 engineering leaders surveyed reported a significant boost in productivity due to AI tooling. However, AI tooling has primarily come in the form of code generative tools that embed into existing workflows. “Too many AI tools are brought in through top-down enthusiasm rather than bottom-up validation. If the people writing the code aren’t part of the decision, you risk solving for the wrong problem or introducing new ones.”
Leadership Management News
“If you can get today’s work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can’t possibly get tomorrow’s work done tomorrow, then you lose.”
— Dr. Fatih Hattatoglu
tl;dr: “The choice of data architecture is not just a technical decision; it is also a strategic and organizational one. In this blog post, different architectural approaches such as Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh have been discussed in detail, explaining the scenarios in which each stands out, their advantages, challenges, and the platforms that can be used to implement them, with examples.”
Architecture
— Hrishikesh Premkumar
tl;dr: Anthropic just rewrote the rules: MCP servers must now offload all authentication and token issuance to a dedicated authorization server. That means no more static API keys. No more embedded OAuth hacks. Scalekit gives you a drop-in, OAuth compliant authorization server out of the box — complete with dynamic client registration, PKCE, token introspection, and org-level scoping, so your MCP server stays focused, secure, and spec-aligned.
Promoted by Scalekit
AI Tools
— Mat Duggan
tl;dr: Ten years in, Kubernetes has transformed how Mat works - declarative, scalable, self-healing infrastructure everywhere. But its steep learning curve and lack of opinions in key areas still create common pitfalls. Mat shares what he could change to make Kubernetes “more applicable to more people and problems?”
Kubernetes
— Simon Willison
tl;dr: Each month for 6 months, Simon asked the latest LLM to generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle. It’s an unreasonably difficult test for them. Both bicycles and pelicans are difficult to draw, and pelicans can’t ride bicycles as they’re the wrong shape. Simon shares the evolved output.
Trends AI LLM
— Armin Ronacher
tl;dr: “I disable all permission checks. Which basically means I run claude --dangerously-skip-permissions. More specifically I have an alias called claude-yolo set up. Now you can call that irresponsible and there are definitely risks with it, but you can manage those risks with moving your dev env into docker. I will however say that if you can watch it do its thing a bit, it even works surprisingly well without dockerizing.”
AI
Null Pointer
People Problems
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
Canine: OS alternative to Heroku.
Fang: The CLI starter kit.
Lstr: Minimalist directory tree viewer.
Steve's Drafts: Notes from Steve Jobs to himself.
Zev: CLI tool to help remember terminal commands.
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