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Issue #627
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 24th June’s issue is presented by Dagster
Learn the fundamental concepts to build a data platform in your organization with Dagster's Data Platform Fundamentals Guide.
Tips and tricks for data modeling and data ingestion patterns
Explore the benefits of an observation layer across your data pipelines
Learn the key strategies for ensuring data quality for your organization
The guide also features real-world examples illustrating how different teams have built in-house data platforms for their businesses.
— Charity Majors
tl;dr: Charity shares her characteristics for high performing engineering teams.“ Individual engineers don’t own software, teams own software. The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team. It doesn’t matter how fast an individual engineer can write software, what matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, review, ship, maintain, refactor, extend, architect, and revise the software that they own.”
Leadership Management
— Lena Reinhard
tl;dr: Lena offers practical strategies for effectively managing your relationship with an imperfect boss, including clarifying expectations, enhancing communication, and demonstrating impact. The article also provides a downloadable cheat sheet to help readers apply these techniques directly.
Leadership Management
— Dennis Hume
tl;dr: AI enhances data engineering but requires cautious use. Start conversations clearly, build step-by-step, and test thoroughly. Specify preferred tools to generate simpler, maintainable code. Emphasize explicit data types and metadata tracking. Prioritize code quality, readability, and long-term maintainability.
Promoted by Dagster
BestPractices AI
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: Avoid weak or negative words to keep writing in communication positive. Swap "fine" for clear positivity ("good," "great"), replace "however" with simpler "but" or restructure positively, and drop "unfortunately" to avoid unnecessary negativity. Frame messages neutrally or optimistically to improve reader perception.
CareerAdvice
“Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.”
— Austin Henley
tl;dr: "Not only have they come up during job interviews, but learning them changed how I think about problems." Austin's explains the following algorithms and data structures: (1) Topological sort. (2) Recursive descent parsing. (3) Myers string difference. (4) Bloom filter. (5) Piece table. (6) Splay tree.
DataStructure Algo
— Jeff Escalante
tl;dr: A practical guide to OAuth Scoped Access that walks through the Authorization Code Flow with real code examples, security best practices, and clear explanations of how third-party app integrations actually work.
Promoted by Dagster
Guide
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “What is system design? In my view, if software design is how you assemble lines of code, system design is how you assemble services. The primitives of software design are variables, functions, classes, and so on. The primitives of system design are app servers, databases, caches, queues, event buses, proxies, and so on. This post is my attempt to write down, in broad strokes, everything I know about good system design. A lot of the concrete judgment calls do come down to experience, which I can’t convey in this post. But I’m trying to write down what I can.”
SystemDesign
— Jordan Cutler
tl;dr: “I’m here to tell you that you don’t need hundreds of tools. To be productive with AI, you only need to know your core workflows that you spend the most time on and ask if you can use AI there. For most people, this will result in fewer than 10 tools. In this article, I’ll walk you through the tools I use and explain how they help me with my core workflows.”
Tools AI
— Steve Yegge
tl;dr: “In this post you'll be treated to crazy news and crazier stories that touch on three themes: (1) Dev work is changing. (2) Knowledge work is changing. (3) Society is changing. We'll have more predictions, more facts, and more flatulence; I leave it to you to decide what's what.”
ThoughtPiece
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Last Six Months In LLMs, Illustrated By Pelicans On Bicycles — Simon Willison
Notable Links
Skyramp: Your personal Quality Engineer.
Agent Rules: Reusable rules & knowledge docs for AI coding assistants.
Motia: Backend framework for APIs, events, and AI agents.
Nxtscape: OS agentic browser.
Beachpatrol: CLI tool to automate your daily web browser.
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