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Issue #669
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 21st November issue is presented by Augment Code
Get results with Augment Code's new playbook, AI-Powered Engineering at Scale, featuring real frameworks to lead your engineering teams to systematic transformation: 30% faster PR velocity, 40% reduction in merge times, and 10x task speed-ups across teams.
Learn from CTOs at Drata, Webflow, and Tilt who've scaled AI across 100+ developer teams.
— Subbu Allamaraju
tl;dr: “Most leadership learning is experiential. We observe, learn, and emulate from others, often subconsciously. Yet, the core of such learning starts shallow, leading to behavioral and decision-making mistakes, learned and uncorrected bad behaviors, and dysfunction. Some get better with experience and scope, but more often than not, we wing it, frequently repeating the same behaviors and mistakes for years.” Recognizing this, Subbu enrolled in the Psychology of Leadership at Penn State University. He shares the top twenty from those studies.
Leadership Management
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Process Unsuitability showed the strongest negative impact on job satisfaction: When processes don’t align with organizational needs or force teams to follow outdated methodologies, this explained the largest portion of satisfaction variance (0.566). Misaligned processes that create overhead and delays emerged as the most damaging form of process debt.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Learn from MoneyGram, a leading global payments network, how integrating Augment Code into their workflows delivered productivity and quality gains across the SDLC: migration time reduced from weeks to hours; unit-test coverage exceeding internal targets; less context switching and better flow; and accelerated development cycles.
Promoted by Augment Code
Productivity Tools
— Kent Beck
tl;dr: “Why does software development start out fast, then slow to a crawl? Why does this happen faster when coding with a genie? What can we do about it? We’re going to play with graphs here for a second. The simplest way to look at our conundrum is to watch the features over time.”
Leadership Management
"When the best leader's work is done the people say, 'We did it ourselves'"
— Patrick Roos
tl;dr: “The Architecture Decision Canvas (ADC) is a visual and structured approach to guide teams through the critical decision-making process in a collaborative way. It provides a comprehensive template for discussing, communicating and determining specific architectural decisions.”
Architecture
tl;dr: Most visual testing tools flood teams with irrelevant alerts, such as timestamps, dynamic content and pixel shifts. BrowserStack's new Visual Review Agent uses AI to explain only meaningful changes in natural language. Teams report 3x faster reviews with custom rules and build-level metrics that make visual testing actually scalable.
Management CodeReview
— Matthew Prince
tl;dr: “The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.”
Postmortem
tl;dr: “The share of respondents saying their organizations are using AI in at least one business function has increased since our research last year: 88 percent report regular AI use in at least one business function, compared with 78 percent a year ago. But at the enterprise level, the majority are still in the experimenting or piloting stages, with approximately one-third reporting that their companies have begun to scale their AI programs.”
AI Trends
tl;dr: “This is the first entry of a multi-part blog series describing how we built a Real-Time Distributed Graph (RDG). In Part 1, we will discuss the motivation for creating the RDG and the architecture of the data processing pipeline that populates it.”
Architecture
Null Pointer
Asking For A Prompt
Hand-drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
Manager Antipatterns — Ted Neward
Notable Links
Continuous Claude: Run Claude Code in a continuous loop.
Pyrefly: Fast type checker and language server for Python.
Runme: DevOps notebooks built with markdown.
Vision Agents: Multi-modal agents that watch, listen, and understand video.
Zerobyte: Backup automation for self-hosters.
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