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Issue #628
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 27th June’s issue is presented by Bucket
What makes Bucket different?
Company-level controls
AI flag cleanup
Beta release workflow
Feature flags, built differently.
— Frederick Vanbrabant
tl;dr: Frederick shares how he converges strategy into projects. “I like to use a bastardization of Teresa Torres’s opportunity solution tree. It’s a startup thing, but it works just fine in the grand halls of enterprise.” He illustrates this with a visual example.
Leadership Management
— Jason Cohen
tl;dr: Being “in control” is impossible, perhaps not even desirable. Being “in command” is ideal: honest, introspective, agile, aware, and proactive. Jason shares the difference between the two, for leaders.
Leadership Management
— Rasmus Makwarth
tl;dr: If you’re ever flagged a feature for a SaaS product you might have noticed things feel… awkward. Here’s why and what you can do about it.
Promoted by Bucket
Management Tools
— Alex MacCaw
tl;dr: (1) Set up strong scaffolding and type-safe context. (2) Codify conventions in .cursor/rules. (3) Load all relevant files—including types—into Cursor’s context. (4) Use planning mode on top-tier models (o3‑pro, Claude Opus 4, etc.) (5) Lint, typecheck, and test after each plan execution. (6) Embrace audio-first prompting. (7) Enjoy these last few years of human-led coding magic.
Leadership Management
“Remember, code is your house, and you have to live in it.”
— Jynn Nelson
tl;dr: Jyn shares an advanced terminal workflow - opening remote files, fuzzy-searching terminal output, and scripting tmux and nvim for instant editing. The custom setup was due to frustration of laggy editors and keybind chaos.
Terminal
— Zack Proser
tl;dr: Free trials help apps grow but also attract bad actors. Fake accounts steal tokens, burn compute, skew metrics, and impact real users. Learn how developers are catching suspicious behavior early and using tools like WorkOS Radar to stop fraud without blocking legitimate signups.
Promoted by WorkOS
Tools Security
— Birgitta Böckeler
tl;dr: “I gave a task to OpenAI Codex and some other agents to see what I can learn. The following is a record of one particular Codex run, to help you look behind the scenes and draw your own conclusions, followed by some of my own observations.”
Agent AI
— Austin Henley
tl;dr: “I talk to a lot of students and professional developers that often want to start a side project, but aren't sure what to build. Below is a handful of software projects that taught me a lot. In fact, they're great because you could build them multiple times and learn new things each time. So whenever I don't know what to build or I want to learn a new programming language or framework, I start with one these.”
CareerAdvice
— Armin Ronacher
tl;dr: “Using agents to measure code quality is great because agents don't judge me, but they do judge the code they are writing. Not all agents will swear, but they will express frustration with libraries when loops don't go well or give up. That opens up an opportunity to bring some measurements into not agent performance, but the health of a project.”
AI BestPractice
Null Pointer
Hand-drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
Autumn: OS pricing & billing platform.
Gemini CLI: OS Gemini agent in your terminal.
Iroh: Library for direct connections between devices.
LogTape: Logging library for JS and TypeScript.
SnapQL: AI-powered Postgres client.
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