- Pointer
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- Issue #666
Issue #666
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 11th November issue is presented by WorkOS
Securely authorizing access to an MCP server is complex. You need PKCE, scopes, consent flows, and a way to revoke access when needed.
Learn from WorkOS how to implement OAuth 2.1 for MCP in a production-ready setup, with clear steps and examples.
— Will Larson
tl;dr: “If you accept the argument that the specifically desired leadership skills of today are the result of fads that frequently shift, then it leads to an important followup question: what are the right skills to develop in to be effective today and to be impactful across fads?”
Leadership Management
— Andrew Bosworth
tl;dr: “When you’re building a team for something you care about, it’s tempting to hire only people who already agree with you, not just on the goal but on the current approach. It feels efficient. Frictionless. But that kind of alignment can be too smooth.”
Leadership Management
— Maria Paktiti
tl;dr: Securely authorizing access to an MCP server is complex. You need PKCE, scopes, consent flows, and a way to revoke access when needed. Learn from WorkOS how to implement OAuth 2.1 for MCP in a production-ready setup, with clear steps and examples.
Promoted by WorkOS
Guide AI
— Can Duruk
tl;dr: “Take-home exercises are one of the most valuable tools in a hiring manager’s toolkit. However, you need to do them right; you need to be true to your reasons for why you do them, be clear about what you are trying to assess, and be open with your expectations. I want to share how I think about them.”
Leadership Management Hiring
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
— Ben Stolovitz
tl;dr: “I believe I use AI fairly typically for a software engineer, if slightly more than average. I’ve been working in the AI space since slightly before the announcement of GPT-3 in 2020. I use AI in a few particular ways: Coding, research & search, summarization & transcription, writing, and art & music.”
AI
tl;dr: As your product scales, so do the expectations: SSO, SCIM, uptime SLAs, audit trails. The Enterprise Readiness Checklist breaks down the engineering standards top SaaS teams meet before closing enterprise deals. Evaluate your readiness and uncover gaps before buyers do. Get your free checklist →.
Promoted by Descope
Guide
— David Reed
tl;dr: “A year ago, we were chasing exciting ideas to help engineers ship better code, faster. But we had one huge problem: builds took 60 minutes. With a build that slow, the whole pipeline gets less agile, and feedback doesn’t come to engineers until far too late. We fixed this problem by combining modern, high-performance build tooling with classic software engineering principles. Here’s how we did it.”
Architecture
— Anton Medvedev
tl;dr: Anton critiques configuration and markup languages like YAML, TOML, and HCL for being overly complex or inconsistent. Preferring JSON’s simplicity, he introduces MAML, a minimal, readable configuration language with strict specification, comments, multiline strings, and a JSON-based structure.
LanguageDesign
— Thomas Ptacek
tl;dr: “Agents are the most surprising programming experience I’ve had in my career. Not because I’m awed by the magnitude of their powers — I like them, but I don’t like-like them. It’s because of how easy it was to get one up on its legs, and how much I learned doing that.”
Agents AI
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Silent Career Killer Most Engineers Miss - Hemant Pandey
Notable Links
Call Center AI: AI-powered call center solution.
Dexto: Intelligence layer for AI agents.
Homarr: Modern and easy to use dashboard.
Marko: Declarative, HTML-based language.
OpenTUI: Library for building terminal user interfaces.
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