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Issue #635
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 25th July’s issue is presented by Signadot
Struggling with staging chaos or endless mocks? Signadot gives teams request-level isolation to test microservices with real dependencies - without spinning up entire environments.
✅ Cut feedback loops from 30 mins to 1 min
✅ Trusted by teams like DoorDash
👉 Start testing with zero infra hassle
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “You have to get the people right first. Then you decide on the principles that you are going to follow, i.e. what is your team’s culture. Once those are established, you fix the processes. Then finally, once all of that groundwork is laid, you can get down to fixing the product. Today, I want to walk through why I think this order is the correct way to approach situations, especially when we start new roles, start new initiatives, or need to pivot to something new.”
Leadership Management
— Pete Hodgson
tl;dr: “In this post we’ll build out a strategy for adopting AI-assisted engineering - something that will drive meaningful improvements for your engineers and give your boss confidence that you have everything in hand during this tumultuous period.”
Leadership Management
— Arjun Iyer
tl;dr: Duplicating entire environments for microservices testing is slow and expensive. This deep-dive explores how request-level isolation can replace expensive environment duplication. "Signadot fit what we were trying to do better than anything else... it saves us about $2 million annually"- Phil Burrows, Head of Platform Engineering at Brex.
Promoted by Signadot
Management Microservices
— Gergely Orosz, Laura Tacho
tl;dr: Laura shares findings from 180+ companies on how AI is really impacting dev productivity, what most teams get wrong, and why measuring dev experience first is critical.
Leadership Management AI
“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”
— Alex Kladov
tl;dr: “Simplicity is hard, but it gets you all the nice things - performance, correctness, maintainability. In this talk, we'll uncover fundamental simplicity in how software is built, tested, documented, and released - seemingly "boring" aspects, which nontheless are a foundation for everything else.”
SystemDesign Video
tl;dr: “I recently used agentic coding to build a system to crawl a billion web pages in around 24 hours. Here’s what’s different: (1) The core concept is simple, but at scale, the design space is large. (2) There are parts where bugs could be really bad, like politeness. (3) The goal was to achieve a new level of an objective metric (throughput). I wrote <4% of the code by hand. This post is all about how it helped and how it fell short.”
Productivity AI
— Grant Slatton
tl;dr: “Think of a design document like a proof in mathematics. The goal of a proof is to convince the reader that the theorem is true. The goal of a design document is to convince the reader the design is optimal given the situation. The most important person to convince is the author. The act of writing a design document helps to add rigor to what are otherwise vague intuitions. Writing reveals how sloppy your thinking was.”
BestPractices Design
— Werner Vogels
tl;dr: The CTO at Amazon provides us with reading list to help envision what the future might hold. The ancient Greek poet Archilochus wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Because the fox roams widely, it accumulates insights and adapts quickly to changing circumstances. While there are moments that call for unwavering focus, the challenges that lie ahead demand the fox’s curiosity, flexibility, and openness to possibility.
Books
Notable Event
Join a community of software engineering leaders this October 15–17 in New York. Three events, one week:
🤝 LeadDev - for new and seasoned engineering managers
💡 StaffPlus - for senior ICs
🚀 LeadingEng - for director-level leaders and above
Null Pointer
Debugging Biz
Hand drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
Gitleaks: Detect secrets like passwords, API keys, and tokens.
Hyper Fetch: Fetching and realtime data exchange framework.
Mathematics For CS: Elementary mathematics for science and engineering.
Pogocache: Caching software with focus on latency and cpu efficiency.
TrackWeight: Mac trackpad as a weighing scale.
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