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Issue #638
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 5th August’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked’s MCP gives your AI-powered IDE’s the missing context from tools like Slack, Confluence, and Jira, so they generate usable code the first time.
tl;dr: “The golden rule of metrics is this: any metric you maintain should directly drive action if outside expected bounds. The reason this is an important rule is: (1) Metrics are expensive to set up, so if you don’t use them, you’re wasting effort. (2) Metrics are expensive to maintain, so if you don’t use them, you’re wasting effort. (3) A metric that doesn’t drive action is a waste of time.”
Leadership Management
— Cate Hall
tl;dr: “The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign.”
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: "With Claude Code + Unblocked MCP, 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 Tools
tl;dr: “You work at a tech company, and have an excellent project idea that you’d like to pursue. How do you convince those around you? The most important tactic: individually talk about it with many relevant people, before you finally pitch it to a decision-making group. Say, there’s going to be a meeting where you pitch your proposal. People in the meeting who are ranked #2-5 by seniority and relevance to this problem will weigh in on it. Your odds of success go up dramatically if you’ve talked to many or all of them in advance, and addressed their issues or incorporated their additions.“
Leadership Management
“Scope doesn’t creep, understanding grows”
— Joy Arulraj
tl;dr: “This paper proposes a preliminary taxonomy of system design principles distilled from several domains in computer systems. The goal is a shared, concise vocabulary that helps students, researchers, and practitioners reason about structure and trade-offs, compare designs across domains, and communicate choices more clearly.”
SystemDesign
— Arjun Iyer
tl;dr: Are your microservices still shipping like monoliths? This article explores why 90% of them are, leading to slow release cycles and decreased developer productivity. Discover how to break free from the bottleneck of batched pull requests and regain the agility that microservices promise.
Promoted by Signadot
Monolith Microservices
— Anna Shipman
tl;dr: “Becoming a successful technology leader requires skills in three core areas: people, process, and technology. Each leader has unique strengths in these areas, and rather than aiming to excel equally in all, focusing on your strongest areas will be far more effective.”
Leadership Management Video
— Wassim Alhajomar
tl;dr: “I've come to realize that the challenge of simulating vehicles in games lies in bridging two complex worlds: the experience and the machine. You need to understand both. Only then can you decide how and where to bend the rules; because game design isn't about simulating reality, it's about shaping it to fit your vision.”
DeepDive
— Salvatore Sanfilippo
tl;dr: “You will be able to do things that are otherwise at the borders of your knowledge / expertise while learning much in the process. Yet, everything produced will follow your idea of code and product, and will be of high quality and will not random fail because of errors and shortcomings introduced by the LLM. You will also retain a strong understanding of all the code written and its design.”
LLM AI
Most Popular From Last Issue
Leadership Co-Processing With LLMs - James Stanier
Notable Links
Dyad: OS AI app builder.
Es-Toolkit: Modern JS utility library.
Mathematics For CS: Elementary mathematics for science and engineering.
Remote Jobs: Semi to fully remote-friendly jobs.
Seed7: General purpose programming language.
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