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Issue #634
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 22nd July’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked's MCP server makes tools like Cursor even more powerful by giving them access to the context that lives outside the code - your historical Slack threads, Confluence pages, Google Docs, JIRA tickets and more.
tl;dr: “In the squishy realm of managing humans, the specific things you say have specific outcomes. Unfortunately, most managers are very bad at speaking precisely. Speaking precisely, especially about long-term, uncertain things, is not something many people do by nature. Let’s explore some common examples of imprecise language and how to fix them.”
Leadership Management
— Will Larson
tl;dr: Will discusses the common scenario of when managers grow up in an organization that operates from top‑down plans (“orchestration‑heavy roles”) and then find themselves in a sufficiently senior role, or in a bottom‑up organization, that expects them to lead rather than orchestrate (“leadership‑heavy roles”).
Leadership Management
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: "With Claude Code + Unblocked, I've finally found the holy grail of engineering productivity: context-aware coding. It's not hallucinating - it's pulling insight from everything I've ever worked on." – Staff Engineer @ Nava Benefits
Promoted by Unblocked
Management Documentation
— Utkarsh Kanwat
tl;dr: After building 12+ production systems, here's what I've learned: (1) Error rates compound exponentially in multi-step workflows. 95% reliability per step = 36% success over 20 steps. Production needs 99.9%+. (2) Context windows create quadratic token costs. Long conversations become prohibitively expensive at scale. (3) The real challenge isn't AI capabilities, it's designing tools and feedback systems that agents can actually use effectively.
ThoughtPiece Agents AI
"Without philosophy, language design becomes hacking"
— Jake Gold
tl;dr: Jake explores whether old-school CGI still holds up on modern hardware. Using a Go + SQLite guestbook app, he benchmarks 2.5K+ requests/sec and 200M+ requests/day on a modest server—proving CGI’s simplicity and process isolation still make it surprisingly viable today.
Scale
tl;dr: This guide shares practical best practices for securing Kubernetes workloads, managing resource costs, and improving reliability across clusters. Download the whitepaper to apply proven practices from hundreds of real-world production environments.
Promoted by Fairwinds
Kubernetes BestPractices
— Drew Silcock
tl;dr: “There’s no love and care put into crafting our git repositories nowadays. Let’s change that. I’m going to talk about how to handmake your git repositories without using these silly git commands. You might also learn a bit more about how git works under the hood during the process, or whatever. If you’re so inclined, you might also take it as an opportunity to appreciate how the power of git comes not from the complexity of its code but from the simplicity and elegance of its design. I mean, if that’s your thing.”
Git
— Loris Cro
tl;dr: “What if I told you we’re missing a term to describe another aspect of concurrent programming and, because of it, we’re all collectively missing a key piece of understanding that has shaped our software ecosystems for the worse? Well, I spoiled it in the title: the missing term is ‘asynchrony’, but why?”
Concurrency
— Dan Hollick
tl;dr: There isn't a more under appreciated technology in modern computing than digital displays. In fact, modern computing just isn't possible without them. If we developed the transistor before the CRT, I'm not sure you would even be reading this right now. The reason it's so under appreciated is because most people have no idea how a screen works. Any time you see a pixel light up, you are witnessing actual witchcraft before your eyes - light bending through electric crystals just so you can read a tweet in bed.
Hardware
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
Backlog: Manage project collaboration between humans and AI agents.
ConvertX: Self-hosted online file converter.
Kilo Code: OS AI coding assistant.
New Date("wtf"): The JavaScript Date Quiz
Remote Jobs: Semi to fully remote-friendly jobs.
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