- Pointer
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- Issue #664
Issue #664
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 4th November issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked connects your code, docs, and conversations so Cursor, Claude and Copilot finally understand your system like your best engineer.
— Can Duruk
tl;dr: “Here’s what works for me: a simple, repeatable structure that I use every single week. It’s based on the popular People, Product, Process format. I’m going to give you the exact script I use, the Notion setup, and some ideas for how to handle each section.”
Leadership Management
— Aviv Ben-Yosef
tl;dr: “Yeah, I said it. Stop caring so much about your people. Not stop caring. Stop over-caring. Stop acting like your team’s happiness is the company’s primary KPI. Because it’s not. You’ve been told for years that “people are your most important asset.” True. But lately, leaders are twisting that into something absurd: You’re optimizing for everyone’s comfort instead of the company’s health. And when you do that, you’re not being kind. You’re being weak.”
Leadership Management
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: AI coding agents can’t solve real engineering problems with prompts alone — it needs institutional knowledge. Context engineering puts together the right mix of your code, docs, tickets, and conversations so AI generates code that works in your system.
Promoted by Unblocked
LLM
— Gergely Orosz, Puneet Patwari
tl;dr: “Puneet Patwari recently accepted an offer to join Atlassian as a Principal Software Engineer. In three months, he did more than 60 interviews at 11 companies, he told me – while dropping out of 3 more interview processes after accepting the Atlassian offer, including that of Meta. Following that endeavour, he has compared the interview processes of the largest companies.”
InterviewAdvice
“Make sure you know what's inside the box before trying to think outside of it.”
— Patrick Roos
tl;dr: “In this blog post, I present you a list of the best software architecture books you should read in 2026, and what interesting software architecture books will be published in 2026.”
Books
tl;dr: Stop compromising between velocity and governance: Join Shashank Awasthi (Postman) and Allen Helton (Momento) for an exclusive fireside chat on Thursday, Nov 6, 2025 (10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT), to get strategic guidance on structuring your SDLC to deliver APIs that are consistent, compliant, and enterprise-ready.
Promoted by Postman
API Event
— Addy Osmani
tl;dr: “As many of us have learned, the quality of the AI’s output depends largely on the quality of the prompt you provide. In other words, prompt engineering has become an essential skill. A poorly phrased request can yield irrelevant or generic answers, while a well-crafted prompt can produce thoughtful, accurate, and even creative code solutions. This write-up takes a practical look at how to systematically craft effective prompts for common development tasks.”
Guide AI
— Ahmad Alfy
tl;dr: “How often do we, as frontend engineers, overlook the URL as a state management tool? We reach for all sorts of abstractions to manage state such as global stores, contexts, and caches while ignoring one of the web’s most elegant and oldest features: the humble URL.”
FrontEnd URL
tl;dr: “And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else. Question the status quo, experiment, break things, do this several times, do this everyday and keep doing it.”
CareerAdvice
Most Popular From Last Issue
50 Things I Know And Wish I'd Known Sooner - Cate Hall
Notable Links
Fang: The CLI starter kit.
Glow: Render markdown on the CLI.
Inkeep Agents: AI agents with a no-code builder or TypeScript SDK.
Pipelex: OS language for AI agents.
SeaweedFS: Distributed storage system.
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