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- Issue #656
Issue #656
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 7th October issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked pulls together context from GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Confluence so engineers make faster, better decisions.
The result: faster onboarding, fewer interruptions, and autonomous teams that stay focused.
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “It is simply a fact that software engineers are tools in the political game being played at large companies, not players in their own right. However, there are many ways to get involved in politics without scheming.”
Leadership Management
— Ido Green
tl;dr: “Let me share some lessons I learned from scaling teams at Google, Facebook, and Netflix. Here are a few frameworks, metrics, and tools that actually work when you’re trying to scale from 10 to 100 to 1,000+ engineers—without losing your mind or your best people.”
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
— Simon Sinek
tl;dr: “It’s a pattern at so many organizations: when the heat is on, people either retreat into management mode or step up into leadership. The difference isn’t about job titles or org charts - it’s about fundamental choices in how we treat people when it matters most.”
Leadership Management
“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”
— Joy Arulraj
tl;dr: “This paper proposes a preliminary taxonomy of system design principles distilled from several domains in computer systems. The goal is a shared, concise vocabulary that helps students, researchers, and practitioners reason about structure and trade-offs, compare designs across domains, and communicate choices more clearly.”
SystemDesign
tl;dr: Autoscaling is essential, but it isn’t foolproof. This post explains three common failure modes during peak traffic: lagging response to sudden spikes, the difficulties of scaling stacks uniformly, and runaway cloud costs. It also covers how engineering teams can complement autoscaling with proactive traffic management to keep systems operational during peak load.
Promoted by Queue-it
Architecture Scale
— Rakhim Davletkaliyev
tl;dr: “It seems that by default formal technical documentation is targeted towards someone who's deeply immersed in the ecosystem. But many developers have to juggle a lot of "worlds" in their heads daily. When jumping between projects, languages and frameworks, it takes a considerable amount of mental energy to restore the context and understand what is going on.”
Documentation
— Werner Vogels
tl;dr: “The thing about getting older as a developer, is that you have seen a lot and encountered many of the problems younger developers are facing. If you’ve been around the block as many times as some of us have, you’ll have earned battle scars along the way. There are days in war rooms you will never forget. You have experimented a lot, and you have failed more times than you care to remember. You have half-a-head full of what is practical and works. And a quarter of that space has been trained to look for red flags, scanning for things that you know will go wrong.”
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: “We captured these lessons in a playbook that covers the full arc of datasets, metrics, tooling, and workflows. And because people don’t just work in text, evaluation must ultimately extend to images, video, and audio to reflect how work really happens. We’re sharing those findings here so that anyone working with LLMs today can replicate our evaluation-first approach for themselves.”
Guide AI
Most Popular From Last Issue
Stop Avoiding Politics - Matheus Lima
Notable Event
Join People Function and Runtime Revolution for an intimate breakfast event in New York City to explore how AI is reshaping engineering, business strategy, and the future of work.
Over coffee and conversation, you’ll hear from leaders who are putting AI into practice across technical, operational, and people functions.
Notable Links
Backlog: Manage project collaboration between humans and AI agents.
BitNet: Inference framework for 1-bit LLMs.
Mathematics For CS: Elementary mathematics for science and engineering.
Nextcloud Server: Safe home for your data.
Tinker: Training API for developers.
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