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Issue #654
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 30th September’s issue is presented by ScyllaDB
P99 CONF is a free + virtual conference on low-latency engineering. AI/ML, Rust, Zig, Go, eBPF, distributed databases… it’s all on the agenda.
Learn from experts at NVIDIA, Disney, Uber, Pinterest, Prime Video, Rivian, PayPal, Gemini & more at this highly technical (and highly interactive) conference.
Discover optimization strategies and debate what’s next for performance.
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “Discovering places where you can add constraints to your projects is a superpower: it unlocks unconventional thinking, forces people to prioritize ruthlessly, and leads to unexpected and surprising results. Let’s go on a journey together to explore the beauty of constraints. We’ll start by examining their paradoxical nature.”
Leadership Management
— Dr Milan Milanović
tl;dr: “In this issue, we aim to explore how the most successful people in the world possess a strong sense of agency, and also how you can develop this trait.”
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: P99 CONF is a free + virtual conference on low-latency engineering. AI/ML, Rust, Zig, Go, eBPF, distributed databases… it’s all on the agenda. Learn from experts at NVIDIA, Disney, Uber, Pinterest, Prime Video, Rivian, PayPal, Gemini & more at this highly technical (and highly interactive) conference. Discover optimization strategies and debate what’s next for performance.
Promoted by ScyllaDB
Management Event
— Andi Roberts
tl;dr: “This article invites you to consider five doors of influence: Rationalising, Asserting, Negotiating, Inspiring, and Bridging. Each opens a different path into relationship and commitment. Each has its gifts. Each, when overused, can become a wall instead of a door.”
Leadership Management
“Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.”
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general, technical taste sometimes runs ahead of your ability: just like you can tell good food from bad without being able to cook, you can know what kind of software you like before you’ve got the ability to build it. You can develop technical ability by study and repetition, but good taste is developed in a more mysterious way.”
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: When your project grows to millions of lines, many AI assistants falter. Augment Code’s context engine is built for scale—indexing dependencies, reducing latency, and surfacing relevant code—even across large, modular systems. Find out more in this guide to AI in large codebases.
Promoted by Augment Code
Guide AI
— Armin Ronacher
tl;dr: “For the infrastructure component I started at my new company, I’m probably north of 90% AI-written code. I don’t want to convince you — just share what I learned. In parts, because I approached this project differently from my first experiments with AI-assisted coding.”
AI
tl;dr: “Our Write-Ahead Log (WAL) is a distributed system that captures data changes, provides strong durability guarantees, and reliably delivers these changes to downstream consumers. This blog post dives into how Netflix is building a generic WAL solution to address common data challenges, enhance developer efficiency, and power high-leverage capabilities like secondary indices, enable cross-region replication for non-replicated storage engines, and support widely used patterns like delayed queues.”
Architecture
tl;dr: “PostgreSQL 18 improves performance for workloads of all sizes through a new I/O subsystem that has demonstrated up to 3× performance improvements when reading from storage, and also increases the number of queries that can use indexes. This release makes major-version upgrades less disruptive, accelerating upgrade times and reducing the time required to reach expected performance after an upgrade completes.”
PostgreSQL
Most Popular From Last Issue
Things I Believe - Lee Robinson
Notable Links
Dayflow: Generate a timeline of your day, automatically.
Gin: High-performance HTTP web framework.
HumanLayer: IDE to orchestrate AI agents.
Snappy: Compression / decompression library.
SSH3: Secure shell using HTTP/3.
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