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Issue #630
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 8th July’s issue is presented by Harness
Unlock smarter cloud spending strategies at the free virtual FinOps Excellence Summit, hosted by Harness. This free virtual event is your chance to hear from leaders at The FinOps Foundation, United, Google Cloud, and more.
Why attend:
Learn proven strategies to cut cloud costs and optimize resources
Get insights you can use immediately from real-world experts
See how leading teams are staying ahead in a fast-changing cloud landscape
This is an event you don't want to miss, register now!
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: (1) 60% of engineering leaders said AI has not significantly boosted team productivity so far. (2) 54% of respondents said AI will not impact headcount in 2025. Despite media narratives around job displacement, most leaders do not expect AI to reduce team size this year. (3) Coding assistants are the most common use case for AI: 47% use AI for code generation, 45% for refactoring, and 44% for documentation. And more.
Leadership Management
— Matheus Lima
tl;dr: “Let me walk you through the most common management anti-patterns that make engineers want to flip tables — and stick around, because I’ll also share what the best managers do differently to actually earn their engineers’ respect.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Unlock smarter cloud spending strategies at the free virtual FinOps Excellence Summit, hosted by Harness. This free virtual event is your chance to hear from leaders at The FinOps Foundation, United, Google Cloud, and more. Why attend: (1) Learn proven strategies to cut cloud costs and optimize resources. (2) Get insights you can use immediately from real-world experts. (3) See how leading teams are staying ahead in a fast-changing cloud landscape. This is an event you don't want to miss, register now!
Promoted by Harness
Management Event
— Subbu Allamaraju
tl;dr: What is framing the problem? Subbu offers 3 characteristics of how leaders frame problems effectively: (1) Framing a problem is like taking a picture with a narrow depth of field, which brings the subject into sharp focus while blurring the rest of the scene. (2) Due to its narrow depth of focus, a well-framed problem is not open-ended, but constrained. People involved in the project would immediately understand what not to prioritize. (3) A well-framed problem also includes conflicting key results. Subbu shares examples.
Leadership Management
“Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction.”
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: The two current paradigms of AI app development are agentic coding and building AI apps for mass consumption. There’s no shortage of useful things written about either of those tasks. However, there’s a third way to work with AI that I think is underrated: building tiny AI-driven programs. Sean shares how we uses AI for standups and weekly rollups.
AI Productivity
— Ravi Madabhushi
tl;dr: MCP isn't just a spec anymore — it's a movement. In just six months, we've seen the rise of 5000+ community-built MCP servers, AI-native dev tools, and new infrastructure primitives across hosting, auth, testing, and discovery. It's like the early days of the API economy — only faster, and with AI agents at the center. We mapped the ecosystem: from OpenAPI-to-MCP generators to hosted auth, serverless deployment, testing inspectors, marketplaces, and proxy managers. If you're building AI workflows or planning your first MCP server, this is your cheat sheet.
Promoted by Scalekit
AI Guide
tl;dr: “In this blog, we take you through the evolution of Uber’s Search platform - from its early days of rapidly scaling to meet the demands of hyper-growth, to building bespoke in-house solutions tailored to Uber’s unique business challenges, and finally to our current strategy: embracing open standards and collaborating with the broader tech community to build sustainable, future-ready systems.”
Search
— Martin Heinz
tl;dr: “Most people only ever touch the most basic of commands, such as add, commit, push or pull, like it's still 2005. Git however, introduced many features since then, and using them can make your life so much easier, so let's explore some of the recently added, modern git commands, that you should know about.” Martin presents Switch, Restore, Sparse Checkout, Worktree and Bisect.
Git
— André Arko
tl;dr: “That consensus seems to boil down to simple but mostly helpful axioms, like “include tests for your changes” and “write a new test when you fix a bug to prevent regressions”. Unfortunately, one of those consensus beliefs seems to be “it is blasphemy to delete a test”, and that belief is not just wrong but actively harmful. Let’s talk about why you should delete tests.”
Tests
Most Popular From Last Issue
New Advice For Aspiring Managers — James Stanier
Notable Links
FossFLOW: Isometric diagramming tool.
OpenCode: AI coding agent, built for the terminal.
MacOS: OSX inside a Docker container.
Makefiletutorial: Learn make by example.
SnapQL: AI-powered Postgres client.
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