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Issue #641
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 15th August’s issue is presented by UnblockedeadDev
LeadDev brings together the brightest minds in engineering leadership in New York this October 15–17. That’s three days of talks, case studies and connections across three events.
🤝 LeadDev: for line managers & early leaders
💡 StaffPlus: for senior ICs
🚀 LeadingEng: for senior leaders & execs
Get the strategies and real-world insights you need to drive change. Use code POINTER for 15% off.
— Paulo Caroli
tl;dr: “OKRs have become a popular way to connect strategy with execution in large organizations. But when they are set in a top‑down cascade, they often lose their meaning. Teams receive objectives they didn’t help create, and the result is weak commitment and little real change. High‑performing teams work in another way.”
Leadership Management
— Kent Beck
tl;dr: “One benefit of an executive position is that you can see the whole process, in ways those at the coalface cannot. Product → Design → Engineering → Operations & Sales & Marketing is exactly one of these multi-pipe situations. Each department’s incentives align with improving their own capacity. You are uniquely positioned to look across the whole chain.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: LeadDev brings together the brightest minds in engineering leadership in New York this October 15–17. That’s three days of talks, case studies and connections across three events: (1) LeadDev: for line managers & early leaders. (2) StaffPlus: for senior ICs. (3) LeadingEng: for senior leaders & execs. Get the strategies and real-world insights you need to drive change. Use code POINTER for 15% off.
Promoted by LeadDev
Leadership Management Events
— Steph Ango
tl;dr: “We started experimenting with ramblings at Obsidian two years ago, and they’ve been surprisingly sticky. We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk. We want as much deep focus time as possible, so ramblings help us stay connected while minimizing interruptions.”
Leadership Management
“Programming is not about typing, it’s about thinking.”
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “What is system design? In my view, if software design is how you assemble lines of code, system design is how you assemble services. The primitives of software design are variables, functions, classes, and so on. The primitives of system design are app servers, databases, caches, queues, event buses, proxies, and so on. This post is my attempt to write down, in broad strokes, everything I know about good system design. A lot of the concrete judgment calls do come down to experience, which I can’t convey in this post. But I’m trying to write down what I can.”
SystemDesign
— Chris Kelly
tl;dr: Agents won’t replace engineers - but they will mean new tools and surfaces. Learn why the future goes beyond the IDE: trigger agents from Linear or production alerts to triage CI failures, open PRs, and update docs / tests while you stay in flow as the architect.
Promoted by Augment Code
ThoughtPiece AI
tl;dr: "At the core of this system is Commenter, a modular, multi-stage GenAI system review system to identify functional bugs, error handling issues, security vulnerabilities, and adherence to internal coding standards. Building on this, Fixer proposes actual code changes in response to comments, whether those comments come from humans or AI. In this blog, we’ll focus on Commenter and refer to it simply as uReview.” "
Scale CodeReview
— Mitendra Mahto
tl;dr: "While HTTP parsing might seem like a simple, “solved” problem, it’s actually where performance, security, correctness, and compatibility often collide. A reverse proxy acts as both a vigilant guard and a skilled translator, responsible for gracefully handling messy, unpredictable input. Understanding these complexities is essential for anyone building or operating scalable web services.”
HTTP
tl;dr: “LLMs unlock rich, narrative-style profiles written in natural language. These profiles preserve semantic nuance such as “prefers spicy Sichuan dishes, avoids dairy” for intuitive understanding, while remaining fully interpretable by humans. This not only allows us to build more intuitive, human-facing product features - for example, explaining why a dish is recommended - but also serves as powerful, structured input for next-generation LLM applications. It's how we're building a more explainable and semantically aware platform.”
LLM
Null Pointer
Hand-drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
5 Books That Changed My Engineering Career Forever - Dr Milan Milanović
Notable Links
Backlog: Manage project collaboration between humans and AI agents.
Build Your Own: Guides for creating technologies from scratch.
Omnara: Talk to your AI Agents from anywhere.
Panda: Build time, type safe, scalable CSS-in-JS.
Tilt: Define your dev environment as code.
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