- Pointer
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- Issue #658
Issue #658
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 14th 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.
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “The speed-versus-stability trade-off is a myth. The best-performing teams - “Pragmatic performers” and “Harmonious high-achievers” - achieve both high throughput and high stability simultaneously, while struggling teams often fail at both dimensions.”
Leadership Management
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “Even when I’m quite confident in my understanding of the system, I still have a background level of internal paranoia. To provide technical clarity to the organization, I have to keep that paranoia to myself. There’s a careful balance to be struck between verbalizing all my worries - more on that later - and between being so overconfident that I fail to surface risks that I ought to have mentioned.”
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
— Andrew Bosworth
tl;dr: “That’s the quiet power of onboarding in a high-growth organization. You don’t just teach people how things work—you decide what kind of company they believe they’ve joined. And belief scales faster than behavior.”
Leadership Management
“Architecture is the tension between coupling and cohesion”
— Mitchell Hashimoto
tl;dr: “This post will share every single agentic coding session I had on the path to shipping this feature, unedited and in full. Alongside it, I'll provide some additional context about my process and reasoning. And yes, I'll also share the token cost for those curious about that, too.”
AI
The Enterprise Ready Conference is a one-day event in SF for product and engineering leaders shaping the future of Enterprise AI.
Hosted by WorkOS, the event features a curated lineup of speakers with hands-on experience building for the enterprise, including leaders from Postman, Webflow, Rippling, Render, Socket, Opal, and RunReveal.
You’ll hear how they’re driving Enterprise AI adoption in real-world environments — what’s working, what’s not, how they’re scaling securely, and where automation is making the biggest impact.
If you're a founder, exec, PM, or engineer responsible for the Enterprise AI roadmap, this conference is for you. Register Today —>
Promoted by WorkOS
AI Event
— Jack Vanlightly
tl;dr: “At its core, an index speeds up queries by reducing the amount of IO required to execute the query. If a query needs one row but has to scan the entire table, then that will be really slow if the table is large. An index in an RDBMS is a type of B-tree and provides two main access patterns: a seek which traverses the tree looking for a specific row or a scan which iterates over the whole tree, or a range of the tree.”
Database Performance
— Florian Zenker
tl;dr: “Every project I worked on professionally or privately eventually needed a diff to visualize a change or to apply a patch. However, I have never been satisfied with any of the freely available diff libraries. This was never really a problem professionally, but for private projects, I have copied and modified my own library from project to project until I mentioned this to a colleague who set me on the path to publish my Go library. Anyway, I did it and I learned a whole lot about diff algorithms.”
Algo
— Terence Eden
tl;dr: “If your software is designed for people who are experienced computer touchers, don't fall into the trap of thinking that they know everything you do. I find it best to assume people are intelligent but not experienced; it doesn't hurt to give slightly too much detail. The best way to do this is to record everything you do after logging into the blank VM.”
BestPractice
Most Popular From Last Issue
My Productivity Rules - Eliran Turgeman
Notable Links
Claude Templates: CLI tool for configuring & monitoring Claude Code.
Devpush: Like Vercel, but open source.
HumanLayer: IDE to orchestrate AI agents.
Magic Wormhole: Get things from one computer to another.
Spock: Logical multi-master PostgreSQL replication.
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