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Issue #651
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 19th September’s issue is presented by Sonar
Ready to elevate your software security? With SonarQube Advanced Security from Sonar, developers can secure first-party, AI-generated, and open source code all in one place. Plus:
Proactive vulnerability identification and management across all code
Streamlined compliance with SBOM generation and license policy management
Integrated code quality and code security for comprehensive code health, eliminating tool sprawl
Stop juggling tools and start shipping secure, high-quality software, faster.
— Gergely Orosz, Laura Tacho
tl;dr: “AI coding tools are widespread across tech, with 85% of software engineers using them at work, according to our 2025 tooling survey. But things like tokens aren’t exactly cheap, and companies are spending more on AI tools. So, how do companies measure whether or not they are worth the money?”
Leadership Management
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “This article explores the uneven, nonlinear way culture scales, highlighting what tends to endure, what tends to break, and how leaders can evolve their culture without losing their soul.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Ready to elevate your software security? With SonarQube Advanced Security from Sonar, developers can secure first-party, AI-generated, and open source code all in one place. Plus: (1) Proactive vulnerability identification and management across all code: (2) Streamlined compliance with SBOM generation and license policy management. (3) Integrated code quality and code security for comprehensive code health, eliminating tool sprawl Stop juggling tools and start shipping secure, high-quality software, faster.
Promoted by Sonar
Management Security
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “I came up with this framework after learning the hard way. I’ve absolutely wasted 25 minutes out of 30 minute calls on backstory. Of course, I regretted it every time. Now, I ask myself, “How can I explain my situation in the briefest way possible, so I can give the other person more time to speak?””
CareerAdvice
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
— Brian Kihoon Lee
tl;dr: As individuals, how can we refine our tastes? Some general advice: (1) Great artists have great taste. Being able to recognize good work is a prerequisite to producing it. (2) You grow your taste by actively analyzing why one option is more tasteful than another. (3) You develop taste by exposing yourself to more tasteful content. Finding a community is a fast-track to finding tasteful content.
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: Manual web testing shouldn’t feel like juggling 6 extensions and 12 tabs. BrowserStack’s Testing Toolkit gives you 10+ tools in one Chrome extension - cross-browser testing across 3,500+ browsers, accessibility checks, AI-powered test case generation, one-click bug reporting with automated screenshots and logs, and more. Over 3,000 testers have already reclaimed their lost productivity hours.
Promoted by BrowserStack
Productivity Tests
tl;dr: “Architectural patterns provide proven solutions to common problems encountered in distributed systems, ensuring reliability, scalability, and maintainability. Among these patterns, some patterns stand out as fundamental for managing data and communication flow effectively, which we will see in this article.”
Architecture DistributedSystems
— Murat Demirbas
tl;dr: “Agentic speculation is positioned as both the problem and the opportunity. The problem is that traditional DBMSs are built for exact intermittent workloads and cannot handle the high-throughput redundant and inefficient querying of LLM agents. The opportunity also lies here. Agentic speculation has recognizable properties and features that invite new designs. Databases should adapt by offering approximate answers, sharing computation across repeated subplans, caching grounding information in an agentic memory store, and even steering agents with cost estimates or semantic hints.”
SystemDesign AI
— Kyle Freeman
tl;dr: Duplicate or conflicting config values can cause hidden bugs. Using the keep-sorted tool makes such issues obvious by alphabetizing lines in code, configs, and text files. Sorted sections are easier to read, maintain, and keep bug-free.
BestPractices Tests
Null Pointer
“Race Condition” hand-drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
Chronon: Data Platform for AI / ML.
Claude-Flow: AI orchestration platform.
MarkItDown: Python tool for converting files to Markdown.
Puck: The visual editor for React.
Ripple: TypeScript UI framework.
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