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- Issue #642
Issue #642
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 19th August’s issue is presented by WorkOS
If you're still hard-coding roles or managing access ad hoc, you're creating technical debt and pulling your team away from core product work.
WorkOS RBAC gives you an enterprise ready foundation for per-org access control, with developer-friendly APIs and a powerful dashboard to manage roles, permissions, and SSO or SCIM-based access syncing.
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Code reviews are foundational to modern software development—but how do experienced developers actually read, understand, and evaluate changes? What mental models do they use, and how can we better support those strategies across teams and tools? This week we ask: How do experienced engineers comprehend code during review, and what can leaders do to support more effective, scalable review practices?”
Leadership Management
— Kent Beck
tl;dr: “We’re all trying lots of new things these days. Even avoiding trying new tools has become its own skill. So, new is the new black. I’m also working with a variety of people. When I think about their approaches to situations they don’t understand, & when I think back on the best people I’ve ever worked with, common patterns emerge. There are better & worse ways to not understand.”
CareerAdvice
— Zack Proser
tl;dr: Most AI apps never make it past the prototype phase. The teams that succeed follow clear patterns: invest early in access control, auditability, and identity integration. This guide shows how they move fast without cutting corners, using enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and Audit Logs enabled by WorkOS APIs and tools.
Promoted by WorkOS
Management AI
— Suresh Choudhary
tl;dr: I’ve noticed four archetypes of senior engineers who need more intentional management. If 45% of all engineers are seniors, chances are you’re managing one (or more) of them already: (1) The Over-Engineer. (2) The Builder-First. (3) The Ambiguity-Freezer. (4) The Soloist.
Leadership Management
“The optimum committee has no members.”
tl;dr: “A summarization of some traps to developers. There traps are unintuitive things that are easily misunderstood and cause bugs.” Broken down across front and backend, by language and technology.
Guide
tl;dr: Struggling with microservices testing? Staging slows you down, mocks drift, and full-stack clones burn time and budget. Our guide on Signadot covers the entire lifecycle—from local dev to production—showing how ephemeral environments and request-level isolation give developers faster, production-like feedback to ship with confidence.
Promoted by Signadot
Microservices Guide
— Wilson Lin
tl;dr: “A while back, I decided to undertake a project to challenge myself: build a web search engine from scratch. Aside from the fun deep dive opportunity, there were two motivators: (1) Search engines seemed to be getting worse, with more SEO spam and less relevant quality content. (2) Transformer-based text embedding models were taking off and showing amazing natural comprehension of language.”
Search AI
— Eliot Jones
tl;dr: “A PDF file is effectively a graph of objects that may reference each other. Objects reference other objects by use of indirect references. These have the format "16 0 R" which indicates that the content should be found in object 16 (generation number 0). In this case that would point to the object 16 containing the number 620. It is up to producer applications to split file content into objects as they wish, though the specification requires that certain object types be indirect.”
PDF Parse
tl;dr: “Teams spend a lot of time manually reviewing every shot to identify any issues that could cause problems down the line. One of the problems they look for is tiny bright spots caused by malfunctioning camera sensors. Flagging those issues is a painstaking and error-prone process. They can be hard to catch even when every single frame in a shot is manually inspected. And if left undetected, they can surface unexpectedly later in production, leading to labor-intensive and costly fixes. By automating these QC checks, we help production teams spot and address issues sooner, reduce tedious manual searches, and address issues before they accumulate.”
Vide
Most Popular From Last Issue
Everything I Know About Good System Design - Sean Goedecke
Notable Links
Email.wtf: Decide if each email address is valid or not.
Embedding Atlas: Interactive visualizations for large embeddings.
Magic: First OS all-in-one AI productivity platform.
Motia: Unified backend framework.
Remote Jobs: Semi to fully remote-friendly jobs.
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