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Issue #639
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 8th August’s issue is presented by FusionAuth
Tired of OAuth guides that skip the real-world parts?
Our Modern Guide to OAuth covers what actually matters: working code examples, production gotchas, and all the flows you'll actually use.
Written by the team behind FusionAuth (downloaded 1M+ times). GitHub repo included 📚
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “Yes, your team should be able to talk about problems at work and how it’s impacting them. At the same time, this is a matter of degrees. After a certain point, the more you only focus on what’s wrong, the more your team may feel angrier and more disempowered. Putting a limit on your team sharing their frustrations prevents you from feeling drained and emotionally dumped on. Setting that boundary is useful for both you and your team.” Wes shares how.
Leadership Management
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “Management has a wide range of viable styles. One manager might achieve incredible results by being hands-off and empowering their team to make decisions autonomously. Another might be highly detail-oriented and deeply involved in execution. A third might focus on emotional intelligence and team cohesion. All of these approaches can work, depending on the company, the moment, the team, and the individual. But if you only see one dominant archetype around you, or worse, if you're surrounded by many, all different, you may begin to question whether your own style is “wrong,” even when it's working.“
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Tired of OAuth guides that skip the real-world parts? Our Modern Guide to OAuth covers what actually matters: working code examples, production gotchas, and all the flows you'll actually use. Written by the team behind FusionAuth (downloaded 1M+ times). GitHub repo included.
Promoted by FusionAuth
Guide
— Seth Godin
tl;dr: (1) The system can be changed and normal is not permanent. (2) Find the smallest viable audience. (3) Pick your customers, pick your future. (4) Outdated maps might be worth less than no map at all. (5) Reliability is a superpower. (6) There are no side effects, merely effects. (7) There’s usually an opportunity to be of service. (8) Silence is an option, and so is leadership. (9) There is no perfect moment to begin. (10) Shame is a dream killer.
CareerAdvice
"I hate to choose between elegance and efficiency"
— Thomas Dohmke
tl;dr: “The software developer role is set on a path of significant change. Not everyone will want to make the change. Managing agents to achieve outcomes may sound unfulfilling to many, although we argue that’s what developers have been doing on a lower level of abstraction, managing their computers via programming languages to achieve outcomes. Still, as humans we are often reluctant to change, and that’s okay.”
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: Understand the true costs and challenges of in-house Kubernetes and compare them with Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service. Download the guide to get real-world cost and ROI data for both approaches.
Promoted by Fairwinds
Kubernetes Guide
— Alexis King
tl;dr: “Historically, I’ve struggled to find a concise, simple way to explain what it means to practice type-driven design. Too often, when someone asks me “How did you come up with this approach?” I find I can’t give them a satisfying answer. I know it didn’t just come to me in a vision - I have an iterative design process that doesn’t require plucking the “right” approach out of thin air - yet I haven’t been very successful in communicating that process to others.”
BestPractices
— Matt Holden
tl;dr: I used to put hundreds of lines of context in tool-specific formats, but lately I've been experimenting with a simpler approach: (1) Put context in READMEs (universal and tool-agnostic). (2) Put constraints in the environment via tools (type checkers, linters, formatters, tests). My CLAUDE.md went from hundreds of lines to just 13.
AI Agents
— Kristian Lassen
tl;dr: “With Uber Eats, you can get almost, almost anything. We support every type of store you can find in your local community, from restaurants to small convenience stores, giant supermarkets, pet stores, pharmacies, and so on. This blog introduces the backbone for managing the retailer product data and inventory at Uber: INCA (INventory and CAtalog).”
Architecture
Null Pointer
Hand drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
50 Things I Know And Wish I'd Known Sooner - Cate Hall
Notable Links
FossFLOW: Isometric diagramming tool.
GoogleTest: Google testing and mocking framework.
Jsonrepair: Repair invalid JSON documents.
MCP-Use: Build and deploy MCP agents.
Stagewise: Frontend coding agent for production.
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