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Issue #670
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 25th 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.
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “Why is it that we make the same mistakes over and over again? I’ve come to think that it’s because we apply mental models that are far too optimistic to our planning. As a result, because we typically rely on an optimistic outlook, we fail to consider what could go wrong.”
Leadership Management
— Subbu Allamaraju
tl;dr: “A common response is to stay silent and hide behind prepared remarks. You might think, after all, that you are not the one who caused the low trust situation, so you would let “them,” the executive leadership, the board, the investors, or some similar group, figure it out and fix it. Or you might act like a victim, vent to your team and peers, and blame the “people upstairs.” Your team may sympathize with you and see you as a buddy on their side, but such behavior won’t help you lead or be an effective manager. These passive leadership behaviors lack humility, courage, and authenticity and keep fueling cynicism.”
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. 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
— Marc Gauthier
tl;dr: “I love the concept of a daily standup meeting. That’s even usually the first thing I setup when joining a team if it’s not there already. However I don’t really run standups like daily scrums, so I figured it’d be interesting to share.”
Leadership Management
“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.”
— Gergely Orosz, Martin Fowler
tl;dr: “Martin Fowler breaks down how AI is transforming software architecture and development, from refactoring and deterministic techniques to the timeless principles that still anchor great engineering.”
CareerAdvice Podcast
tl;dr: Most A11y tools catch the obvious. The tricky, contextual stuff? Still manual. BrowserStack's A11y Issue Detection Agent mimics human intelligence to bridge that gap, identifying decorative versus functional images, checking logical focus order, and more. It’s like a WCAG expert built into your workflow. Run a free scan to see what automated tools miss!
Tools Tests
— Matt Nigh
tl;dr: “I analyzed over 2,500 agents.md files across public repos to understand how developers were using agents.md files. The analysis showed a clear pattern of what works: provide your agent a specific job or persona, exact commands to run, well-defined boundaries to follow, and clear examples of good output for the agent to follow. Here’s what the successful ones do differently.”
AI Agents
— Matthew Frail, Kyle Petroski
tl;dr: “Bimonthly fire drills all year, simulating 150% of last year's BFCM load. Tests so massive we ran them at night and coordinated with YouTube. Each test exposed bottlenecks—Kafka, memory, timeouts—that we fixed and revalidated. We didn't stop until the infrastructure performed under extreme load.“
Tests
— Moncef Abboud
tl;dr: “What is TCP? This post is an exploration of TCP, the workhorse of the internet. This deep dive includes detailed examples and a step-by-step walkthrough. A simple TCP explanation.”
DeepDive
Most Popular From Last Issue
Twenty Tiny Leadership Lessons — Subbu Allamaraju
Notable Links
Basic Memory: AI memory system you can use across LLMs.
Gitlogue: Cinematic Git commit replay tool for the terminal.
Google Antigravity: NextGen IDE.
Parqeye: Peek inside Parquet files from your terminal.
Strix: OS AI Hackers to secure your apps.
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