Issue #633

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

Friday 18th July’s issue is presented by Harness

Discover how AI is redefining software delivery at {unscripted} ’25, Harness’s flagship virtual event on September 30. Join industry leaders from Athenahealth, ServiceNow, and more to see how AI is accelerating innovation across the SDLC.

Why attend:

This is your front-row seat to the future of software delivery - save yours today!

— Lizzie Matusov

tl;dr: “Researchers conducted a 10-day field experiment with 260 elite software engineers. Participants were randomly assigned to 52 globally distributed five-person teams on a crowdsourcing platform. Each team collaborated asynchronously to solve a real-world software problem — designing an algorithm to optimize medical kits for spaceflight. The researchers analyzed communication patterns and outcomes to identify which behaviors predicted the most success outcomes.”

Leadership Management

— Gergely Orosz, Elin Nilsson

tl;dr: “Which tools do software engineers use for backend development, frontend, infrastructure, AI tooling, and more, today? Reader survey, with feedback and analysis, based on 3,000+ responses.”

Leadership Management

tl;dr: Discover how AI is redefining software delivery at {unscripted} ’25, Harness’s flagship virtual event on September 30. Join industry leaders from Athenahealth, ServiceNow, and more to see how AI is accelerating innovation across the SDLC. Why attend: (1) Get practical insights on using AI to streamline deployments and boost system reliability. (2) Hear from visionaries like Amit Zavery (ServiceNow), Daniel Gabriel (Athenahealth), and Jyoti Bansal (Harness). (3) Learn how top teams are embracing AI to stay ahead in DevOps.

Promoted by Harness

Management DevOps Event

— Nan Yu

tl;dr: A common route for companies to take when growing their product organization is to split into many durable teams. In this session, Nan Yu, head of product at Linear, will recommend a simpler approach that's better suited to help startups handle growth while maintaining a coherent product vision. He will also touch on how these concepts map to Linear's organizational structure, product, and growth.

Leadership Management

“It's easy to win forgiveness for being wrong; being right is what gets you into real trouble.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

— Michael Lynch

tl;dr: “For software developers, there’s tremendous value in writing effective emails. Good emails save time, reduce misunderstandings, and earn you recognition within your company. You can drastically improve your emails with a few simple techniques, but too few developers know about them.”

CareerAdvice

— Arjun Iyer

tl;dr: Developers need to test Kafka-based features before merging, but shared staging environments mean your test messages interfere with other teams. Spinning up dedicated Kafka clusters for every feature branch is prohibitively expensive. Application-layer isolation lets you validate event flows pre-merge while sharing underlying infrastructure.

Promoted by Signadot

Microservices Tests

— Andrew Chan

tl;dr: “The design I ended up with looked pretty different than the typical crawler solution for systems design interviews, which generally disaggregates the functions (parsing, fetching, datastore, crawl state) into totally separate machine pools. What I went with instead was a cluster of a dozen highly-optimized independent nodes, each of which contained all the crawler functionality and handled a shard of domains.”

WebScraping

— Avadhut Thakar

tl;dr: “Managing chargebacks effectively is essential for maintaining customer trust and minimizing financial losses. This blog describes how early chargeback signals are different compared to chargebacks, and how Uber leverages them to mitigate payment fraud.“

Architecture

— Daniel Stenberg

tl;dr: “I want us to use the rest of the year 2025 to evaluate and think. The curl bounty program continues to run and we deal with everything as before while we ponder about what we can and should do to improve the situation. For the sanity of the curl security team members. We need to reduce the amount of sand in the machine. We must do something to drastically reduce the temptation for users to submit low quality reports. Be it with AI or without AI.”

TDD” - hand drawn by Manu

Hard Things First — Subbu Allamaraju

GoogleTest: Google testing and mocking framework.

Rill: From data lake to dashboard.

Skyramp: Your personal Quality Engineer.

SnapQL: AI-powered Postgres client.

Uzu: Inference engine for AI models.


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