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Issue #661
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 24st October issue is presented by Sonar
AI writes code in seconds. But who verifies it? Manually reviewing all that AI-generated code is where the bottleneck is.
SonarQube solves this engineering paradox, so your team can:
Embrace AI with confidence: ‘Vibe’ with AI coding assistants, and automatically verify it for quality.
Prevent tech debt: Automatically detect and fix issues before they're merged.
Maintain quality at scale: Ensure every line of code meets your standards, every time.
— Can Duruk
tl;dr: “People repeatedly asked me how I measured productivity at Felt. Over the course of 4.5 years, I arrived at a system that seemed to work. It encouraged and motivated the team to release products at an incredible pace. It allowed me to see where everyone stood and helped make adjustments where needed.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: “You should always spend some amount of time debugging your weakest team, and bringing them back up to at least the median of the rest of your teams. Over time, this will gradually improve your organization – and more importantly, it will do it in a way that is highly stable, as this evolution doesn’t require massive changes or sudden changes to multiple teams at once. At any given point in time as a manager, you have a weakest team: Some percentage of your efforts should simply go towards fixing them.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: AI writes code in seconds. But who verifies it? Manually reviewing all that AI-generated code is where the bottleneck is. SonarQube solves this engineering paradox, so your team can: Embrace AI with confidence: (1) ‘Vibe’ with AI coding assistants, and automatically verify it for quality. (2) Prevent tech debt: Automatically detect and fix issues before they're merged. (3) Maintain quality at scale: Ensure every line of code meets your standards, every time.
Promoted by Sonar
Management AI
— Yew Jin Lim
tl;dr: “How do you move from being good at your job to actually leading? How do you balance ambition with the creeping realization that you can’t do it all? Welcome to mid-career - where the rules change and nobody sends you a memo about it. Here’s my six rules: (1) Lead with vision, not tasks. (2) Do the next job now. (3) Own failures publicly. (4) You’re your own safety net. (5) One miracle per project. (6) Define success yourself.”
CareerAdvice
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
— Evan Hahn
tl;dr: “In my decade-plus of maintaining my dotfiles, I’ve written a lot of little shell scripts. Here’s a big list of my personal favorites.”
ThoughtPiece
— Ankit Jain
Building AI agents that actually scale starts with clear specs, not clever prompts. “Spec-driven development” turns messy AI projects into structured, repeatable systems—making teams faster, outputs more reliable, and collaboration seamless.
Promoted by Aviator Runbooks
Scripts
— Gergely Orosz
tl;dr: “Monday was an interesting day: Signal stopped working, Slack and Zoom had issues, and most Amazon services were also down, together with thousands of websites and apps, across the globe. The cause was a 14-hour-long AWS outage in the us-east-1 region — which outage even disrupted a Premier League soccer game. Today, we look into what caused this outage.”
AWS
— Jordan Goodman
tl;dr: “Today, I will be talking about some of the common and high impact SQL anti-patterns I have seen from experience that can make queries and pipelines difficult to maintain, or have slower than expected performance. These issues can compound, causing erosion in trust in data, and slower query development in general.”
Antipattern SQL
— Nanda Syahrasyad
tl;dr: “If you were to build your own database today, not knowing that databases exist already, how would you do it? In this post, we'll explore how to build a key-value database from the ground up.”
Database
Null Pointer
Performance Preview
Hand drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
How Do Experienced Engineers Actually Review Code? - Lizzie Matusov
Notable Links
Awesome Math: Curated list of awesome mathematics resources.
Claude Templates: CLI tool for configuring & monitoring Claude Code.
Ghidra: SRE framework created by the NSA.
Open Notebook: OS implementation of Notebook LM.
Yaak: Desktop API client.
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