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- Issue #650
Issue #650
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 16th September’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked turns scattered knowledge from GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Confluence into clear answers your team can trust.
The result: faster onboarding, fewer interruptions, and autonomous teams that stay focused.
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “Having the right words can be the difference between doubting whether to speak up at all, or voicing your point of view confidently. With that, here are 7 phrases I often use when sharing feedback that makes it easier for me to speak openly and quickly, and encourages my recipient to take action.“
Leadership Management
tl;dr: “People should be exposed to the right trauma. There are certain transformational experiences that are created by the outcomes of your failures. Ignoring them, hiding from them, or otherwise letting anything deflect them from you blocks a critical signal in your reward / accountability function.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: "Unblocked’s MCP server gives Claude and Cursor context from your GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Confluence so they iterate faster, hallucinate less, and understand your system instead of guessing. "
Promoted by Unblocked
Management Tools
— Matthew Hodgkins
tl;dr: “Nemawashi is deeply embedded in Japanese business culture. While it doesn’t fully translate into Western organizations, the principle of pre-alignment is powerful everywhere.”
Leadership Management
“Always remember, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.”
— Elliot Graebert
tl;dr: “Managers and directors: you can contribute to your team’s code far more than you think. The purpose of this blog post is to explain what vibe coding vs agentic AI is, and how I am applying it at Skydio.”
CareerAdvice AI
— Brock Janikowski
tl;dr: Teams at Duolingo, Groupon, Salesforce, and Noom use GPT Driver to speed up releases. Duolingo cut manual QA 70%. Groupon saves 8h per regression. Salesforce creates tests 50-60% faster with half the maintenance. Noom, after testing 14 AI tools, chose it as the only one with SDK + CI and prompt-based test creation inside their codebase. Now with accessibility and audio testing.
Promoted by GPT Driver
Productivity Tests
— Elizabeth Christensen
tl;dr: “Postgres 18 comes with a staggering 3,000 commits from more than 200 authors. While many of these are features, there are numerous additions and optimizations under the hood to the Postgres query planner and other parts of the system that are behind the scenes. Even if you don’t utilize optional features, there’s still performance benefits, bug fixes, and security patches that make upgrading on a regular cadence a good idea.”
PostgreSQL
— Lydia Hallie
tl;dr: “Bun is fast because it treats package installation as a systems programming problem, not a JavaScript problem. In this post we’ll explore what that means: from minimizing syscalls and caching manifests as binary, to optimizing tarball extraction, leveraging OS-native file copying, and scaling across CPU cores. But to understand why this matters, we first have to take a small step back in time.”
DeepDive
tl;dr: “Overall, I'm super excited about the language. I have enjoyed every minute that I have tinkered with it, and I'm excited to find reasons to use it... It won't replace Rust for everything I do, but it is a great compliment to Rust.”
LanguageDesign
Most Popular From Last Issue
On Good Software Engineers - Candost Dagdeviren
Notable Links
CK: Local first semantic grep / search tool.
Dotter: Dotfile manager & templater.
Ghidra: SRE framework created by the NSA.
Tilt: Define your dev environment as code.
Vibe Coding: Tips and tricks.
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