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- Issue #668
Issue #668
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 18th November issue is presented by Unblocked
Your AI tools are only as good as the context they have.
Unblocked pieces together knowledge from your team's GitHub, Slack, Confluence, and Jira, so your AI tools generate production-ready code.
— Laura Tacho
tl;dr: A lot of research and “best practice” will tell us that metrics like lines of code, story points completed, or deployment frequency are not appropriate to measure individual performance. This is true. These metrics came out of research and studies to measure different things, like devops maturity, software delivery capability, and overall delivery performance. Applying them to individuals is unfair at best. But here’s the question we don’t talk about enough: “What data are you going to use to evaluate my performance?”
Leadership Management
— Ted Neward
tl;dr: “There's a whole host of mistakes that companies often fall prey to with respect to those they have leading teams, and I thought it a good idea to collect them into one place, under the umbrella heading of "manager antipatterns”.”
Leadership Management Antipattern
— 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. 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
— Phil Eaton
tl;dr: “I learned to put limited value in seniority. I learned that it's ok to debate. I learned to be prepared and to try to present the facts. I learned to be persistent when I wanted change. I learned that with these skills, it's possible for an individual to redirect the path of an organization.”
CareerAdvice
“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
— John Cutler
tl;dr: (1) PREP: Use Point, Reason, Example, Point to make convincing arguments in conversations, meetings, or proposals. (2) GROW: Use Goal, Reality, Options, Will to create structured plans for mentorship and strategy that bridge the gap from the current state to the future state. And more.
CareerAdvice
— Shrivu Shankar
tl;dr: “Having stuck to Claude Code for the last few months, this post is my set of reflections on Claude Code’s entire ecosystem. We’ll cover nearly every feature I use (and, just as importantly, the ones I don’t), from the foundational CLAUDE.md file and custom slash commands to the powerful world of Subagents, Hooks, and GitHub Actions.”
AI
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “This post is a deep dive into how we improved the P95 latency of an API endpoint from 5s to 0.3s using a niche little computer science trick called a bloom filter. We’ll cover why the endpoint was slow, the options we considered to make it fast and how we decided between them, and how it all works under the hood.”
BloomFilters API
— Ray Toal
tl;dr: Of course you want to design (and implement!) your own programming language! It’s fun. It’s creative. It’s empowering. How do we do it? In a nutshell, the process is iterative, cycling between four phases: Doing the phases over and over is important; for example, while writing the compiler, you may be like “woah this is impossible” and then realize “oh shoot this part of the language wasn’t designed right!”
LanguageDesign
Notable Event
In under an hour, you'll learn how to build immersive experiences within ChatGPT using the latest OpenAI app SDK and Render. Join 4+ million developers from companies such as Base 44, Twilio, Shopify, Groq, and Meter, who are already building AI apps and agents on Render.
When: Wednesday, December 10th, at 9am PT/ 12pm ET
Who it's for:
Developers curious about AI integrations and MCP protocol
Anyone interested in building custom ChatGPT experiences
Most Popular From Last Issue
How To Run Exceptional 1:1 For Engineers — Dr Milan Milanović
Notable Links
Advent Of Code: Small programming puzzles, 2025 edition.
Boa: Embeddable Javascript engine.
Homarr: Modern and easy to use dashboard.
Jsonrepair: Repair invalid JSON documents.
Supercookie: Browser fingerprinting via favicon.
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