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Issue #673
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 9th December issue is presented by Cloudflare
Cap’n Web is Cloudflare’s new open-source TypeScript RPC layer built for real-time, bidirectional apps.
Learn how it simplifies client–server APIs, enables function and object references, and removes schema overhead. Explore how modern teams can ship faster with fewer moving parts.
Read the full breakdown, RPC examples, or capability model guide.
tl;dr: (1) Don't swerve around a debate. (2) Be generous with your ideas. (3) Think of yourself as the team captain, not the head coach. (4) Set the tone with cross-functional partners. (5) Write down what makes you tick. (6) Shine a light on failure. (7) Pull back the curtain. And more.
Leadership Management
— Lalit Maganti
tl;dr: “Treating engineers as fungible assets destroys context. You might gain fresh eyes, but you lose the implicit knowledge of how systems actually break. Stewardship, staying with a system long-term, unlocks compounding returns that are impossible to achieve on a short rotation.”
Leadership Management
— Steve Faulkner, Kenton Varda
tl;dr: Cap’n Web is a compact TypeScript RPC system built for browsers, Node, and edge runtimes. It supports callback passing, remote object references, and pipelined calls, cutting down API surface and coordination overhead. The post shows how these patterns simplify real-time, distributed JavaScript applications.
Promoted by Cloudflare
JS Tools
— Murat Demirbas
tl;dr: “This is where I find LLMs help tremendously. When you face a large messy problem, ask the model to break it into a sequence of concrete subtasks: "List the next ten actions for the experiment" or "Suggest a structure for this section". Then ask the LLM to do one of the easiest tasks in this list. The mediocrity will annoy you just enough to fix it. And now you are moving. We are getting somewhere.”
Leadership Management
"Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs."
— Dr Milan Milanović
tl;dr: “In this newsletter issue, I want to share five books that influenced my journey from engineer to CTO the most. Each of these books contributed beyond just technical knowledge; they challenged my assumptions, introduced new mental models, and ultimately changed how I work and lead teams.”
Books
— Rishi Bhargava
tl;dr: Growth-stage SaaS teams often hit a wall when larger customers start asking for controls that were never built: SSO, RBAC and fine-grained access, audit logs, delegated admin, reliability guarantees, etc. In this article, we'll lay out the engineering groundwork required to clear your next enterprise review and avoid last-minute deal blockers. Read the guide now→
Promoted by Descope
Guide
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “Every couple of years somebody notices that large tech companies sometimes produce surprisingly sloppy code. If you haven’t worked at a big company, it might be hard to understand how this happens. Big tech companies pay well enough to attract many competent engineers. They move slowly enough that it looks like they’re able to take their time and do solid work. How does bad code happen?”
Leadership Management
— Jimmy Miller
tl;dr: “Type checkers are a piece of software that feel incredibly simple, yet incredibly complex...I have discovered a setup for type checking that is so conceptually simple it demystified the whole thing for me. It goes by the name Bidirectional Type Checking.”
Guide
— Dominic Marks
tl;dr: “We’re going to show you how we’re using AI agents to optimize our working efficiency and strengthen Slack’s security defenses. This post is the first in a series that will unpack some of the design choices we’ve made and the many things we’ve learnt along the way.”
Security Agents
Most Popular From Last Issue
21 Lessons From 14 Years At Google — Addy Osmani
Notable Links
Fresh: Text editor for your terminal.
MemMachine: Universal memory layer for AI Agents.
Mux: Coding agent multiplexer.
Walrus: Distributed message streaming engine.
VibeVoice: OS frontier voice AI.
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