- Pointer
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- Issue #672
Issue #672
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 5th December issue is presented by Augment Code
You ship to production; vibes won’t cut it. Augment Code's powerful AI coding agent meets professional developers exactly where they are, delivering deep context into even the gnarliest codebases and learning how you work.
Augment Code lets you:
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Build with the AI agent that gets you, your team, and your code
— Addy Osmani
tl;dr: “These lessons are what I wish I’d known earlier. Some would have saved me months of frustration. Others took years to fully understand. None of them are about specific technologies - those change too fast to matter. They’re about the patterns that keep showing up, project after project, team after team.”
CareerAdvice
— Abi Noda
tl;dr: “Leaders want to integrate AI where developers need it, and this has been an ongoing area of research. However, while recent studies have explored which tasks developers want automated, the authors of this paper saw an opportunity to dig deeper into questions of where in their workflow developers actually turn to AI, why they want help there, and how they decide when to use or avoid it.”
Leadership Management AI
tl;dr: Augment Code's The Engineering Leader AI Imperative features real frameworks to lead your engineering team to systematic transformation, including 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.
Promoted by Augment Code
Leadership Management AI
— Marc Gauthier
tl;dr: “Note that there is no perfect organisation that will work for all situations… only tradeoffs and choices you’ll have to make depending on your circumstances. I’m not showcasing the logical progression. Instead I want to highlight how a team organisation can progress over time when facing limitations of each step.”
Leadership Management
"The first solution that's good enough is rarely the best solution"
— Can Duruk
tl;dr: “In this post, I’ll show you what interruption-driven work looks like when you model it with math. Three simple parameters determine whether your day is productive or a write-off. We’ll simulate hundreds of days and build a map of the entire parameter space so you can see exactly where you are and what happens when you change.”
Productivity
— Andrew Israel
tl;dr: When an attacker steals a session token, they can take actions as if they are your user. This post walks through the details of DPoP which can make those stolen tokens useless without wrecking your user’s experience.
Promoted by PropelAuth
Security Tools
tl;dr: “There are many SQL JOINs guides and tutorials, but this one takes a different approach. We try to avoid misleading wording and imagery, and we structure the material in a different way. The goal of this article is to clarify your mental model.”
SQL Guide
— Ian Duncan
tl;dr: “Punycode has turned out to be one of the cleverest algorithms I’ve encountered in a while. As an implementor it’s deceptively simple on the surface, but there’s real sophistication in how it manages to work around the constraints and optimization problems inherent in encoding arbitrary Unicode within DNS’s ASCII-only infrastructure.”
Algo
tl;dr: “Establishing semantic search at scale for industry applications is more than training a model, but instead a whole tech stack including model deployment, ANN (Approximate Nearest Neighbor) index serving at scale, monitoring, version control, and so on. This blog walks you through how Uber Eats built this system, reviewing challenges in this process and the solutions we took.”
Architecture Search
Null Pointer
Strategic Pivot
Hand drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
What Actually Makes You Senior — Matheus Lima
Notable Links
Acontext: Context data platform for AI Agents.
Dembrandt: Extract a website’s design system into design tokens.
Dingo: Meta-language for Go.
Kit: For AI devtools context engineering.
SeekDB: AI-Native search DB.
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