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Issue #645
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 29th August’s issue is presented by Augment Code
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— James Stanier
tl;dr: “I had a conversation with a colleague the other week who is interested in moving into management. It was during this conversation that I realized just how different my advice is now compared to even a few years ago, so I thought it would be worth writing down and sharing more broadly.”
Leadership Management
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “In reality, most of the features we launch are… meh. Harmless at best. Actively harmful at worst. From years of experience, I’d estimate that 85% of new features fall into the neutral-or-worse bucket. They either do nothing or degrade the experience... This doesn’t mean product teams are failing. It means the work is harder than it looks. User behavior is messy. Context changes quickly. Good intentions rarely survive first contact with reality. So if most of what we ship doesn’t work, what should we do? The answer isn’t to stop experimenting. It’s to change the size and structure of the bets we’re making.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Join Augment Code live as they unveil Auggie, their brand-new command line interface. In this special announcement livestream, the team shares live demos that show what makes Auggie unique. Don’t miss the Q&A session with Augment Code’s lead engineer, who will dive deep into the vision, technical details, and future roadmap of Auggie.
Promoted by Augment Code
Management AI Event
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “A lot of engineers design by trying to think of the “ideal” system: something well-factored, near-infinitely scalable, elegantly distributed, and so on. I think this is entirely the wrong way to go about software design. Instead, spend that time understanding the current system deeply, then do the simplest thing that could possibly work.”
CareerAdvice
"I hate to choose between elegance and efficiency"
— Will Larson
tl;dr: Will’s requirements are: (1) Has support for 2-3 Mac laptops. (2) Has support for a Windows gaming desktop with a dedicated GPU. (3) Has a dedicated microphone. (4) Has good enough lighting. (5) Is not too messy. (6) Can switch between any laptop and desktop with a single Thunderbolt cable.
Productivity
— 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
AI
— Ian Henry
tl;dr: “I want to tell you about an idea that has had a huge influence on the way that I write software. And I mean that in the literal sense: it’s changed the way that I write software; it’s re-shaped my development workflow. The idea is this: you can write programs that modify themselves.”
BestPractices
— Stefan Marr
tl;dr: “Most research on programming language performance asks a variation of a single question: how can we make some specific program faster? Sometimes we may even investigate how we can use less memory. This means a lot of research focuses solely on reducing the amount of resources needed to achieve some computational goal. So, why on earth might we be interested in slowing down programs then?”
Research
tl;dr: “This blog explores one of the particularly interesting problems we faced as continuous deployment was adopted across Uber. The problem is summarized as follows: When thousands of services can be changed with a single commit to one of our monorepos, for example, upgrading the RPC library used by virtually every Go service at Uber, how do we minimize the blast radius of a bad change?”
Architecture
Null Pointer
Life Review
Hand Drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
Everything I Know About Good API Design - Sean Goedecke
Notable Links
Build Your Own: Guides for creating technologies from scratch.
Bytebot: OS AI desktop agent.
Java: Algos implemented in Java.
Puck: The visual editor for React.
Skyramp: Your personal Quality Engineer.
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