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- Issue #631
Issue #631
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 11th July’s issue is presented by Augment Code
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— Wes Kao
tl;dr: Wes covers the following: (1) Delegating is not binary. (2) Identify your direct report’s task relevant maturity. (3) Resist the urge to “hide” behind doing stuff you’re already good at. (4) Take the time upfront to explain a project thoughtfully. (5) Avoid owning IC work.
Leadership Management
tl;dr: People in large organizations burn thousands of hours just finding the right Slack channel to get answers they need. Asking questions to the proper team, finding the right people for projects and incidents, and all other routing activities are a massively expensive set of endeavors when compounded over hundreds or thousands of people. If a team is named properly, you can create major efficiency every time someone needs to figure out who owns what.
Leadership Management
— Molisha Shah
tl;dr: How Drata's CTO rolled out AI coding assistants to 200+ engineers without compromising security or quality. Inside: their 7-vendor bake-off process, mandated daily usage pilots, and the OKRs that drove 5-10x speed-ups. Plus the evaluation checklist you can steal.
Promoted by Augment Code
Management AI Guide
— Gergely Orosz
tl;dr: How are devs at AI startups and in Big Tech using AI tools, and what do they think of them? A broad overview of the state of play in tooling, with Anthropic, Google, Amazon, and others.
Leadership Management
“All models are wrong but some models are useful”
— Evan Hahn
tl;dr: “This post focuses on being a developer on a small team, maintaining software over multiple years. It doesn’t focus on creating quick prototypes. And this is only based on my own experience!”
CareerAdvice Productivity
— Michael Hadley
tl;dr: Securely authorizing access to an MCP server used to be an open question. Now there's a clear answer: OAuth. This guide breaks down the five specs that make it work in practice, covering delegation, token exchange, and scoped access. WorkOS packages everything into one API so you can skip building your own OAuth stack.
Promoted by WorkOS
AI Guide
— Hochuen Wong
tl;dr: DoorDash has significantly evolved its traffic platform in recent years, transitioning to a service mesh architecture that now supports more than 80 million requests per second during peak hours. This post is the first in a series that will cover the early phase of that journey. We’ll share the initial motivations behind the shift, the architecture we established in the early days, how we migrated more than 1,000 microservices to the new platform, issues we encountered along the way, and some of the key lessons learned.
Architecture
— Rohit Krishnan
tl;dr: Just think about how LLMs see the world. They just sit, weights akimbo, and along comes a bunch of information that creates a scenario you’re meant to respond to. And you do! Because that’s what you do. No LLM has the choice to NOT process the prompt.
AI LLM
— Shan Rauf
tl;dr: “Time handling is everywhere in software, but many programmers talk about the topic with dread and fear. Some warn about how difficult the topic is to understand, listing bizarre timezone edge cases as evidence of complexity. Others repeat advice like "just use UTC" as if it were an unconditional rule - if your program needs precise timekeeping or has user-facing datetime interactions, this advice will almost certainly cause bugs or confusing behavior. Here's a conceptual model for thinking about time in programming that encapsulates the complexity that many programmers cite online.”
TimeData
Null Pointer
No Fun
Most Popular From Last Issue
Why Engineers Hate Their Managers (And What To Do About It) — Matheus Lima
Notable Links
Backlog: Manage project collaboration between humans and AI agents.
Claude Code Router: Route requests to different models.
Genai Toolbox: MCP toolbox for databases.
Instant: Modern Firebase.
Jsonrepair: Repair invalid JSON documents.
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