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Issue #674
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 12th December issue is presented by PropelAuth
PropelAuth has everything you need to make your developers happy: easy-to-understand docs, a straightforward integration process, and all the features you need to pass any security review.
Stop auth pain.
— Will Larson
tl;dr: “I’ve been working on internal “AI” adoption, which is really LLM-tooling and agent adoption, for the past 18 months or so. This is a problem that I think is, at minimum, a side-quest for every engineering leader in the current era. Given the sheer number of folks working on this problem within their own company, I wanted to write up my “working notes” of what I’ve learned.”
Leadership Management
— Alex Kladov
tl;dr: “My schtick as a software engineer is establishing automated processes — mechanically enforced patterns of behavior. I have collected a Santa Claus bag of specific tricks I’ve learned from different people, and want to share them in turn.”
CareerAdvice 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
— Ken Struys
tl;dr: “If you’re considering adding surveys to your engineering team that’s around our size and want to do something lightweight, we’ve learned a lot of best practices over the last 3 years running the survey and wanted to share them.”
Leadership Management Survey
“I never lose. I either win or learn.”
— Evan Hahn
tl;dr: “In my decade-plus of maintaining my dotfiles, I’ve written a lot of little shell scripts. Here’s a big list of my personal favorites.”
Scripts
— Jeff Escalante
tl;dr: This guide covers the core user management features every startup needs: authentication methods (passwords, social logins, passwordless), authorization and role-based access control, profile management, and security essentials like MFA and session handling. It explains why these features matter for growth, compliance, and user trust, then outlines when to build versus buy based on your team size and priorities.
Promoted by Clerk
Guide
— Bryan Cantrill
tl;dr: “Large language models (LLMs) are an indisputable breakthrough of the last five years, potentially profoundly changing the way that we work. As with any extraordinarily powerful tool, LLM use has both promise and peril — and that they are so general-purpose leaves real questions about how and when they should be used. The landscape is shifting so rapidly that static prescription is unlikely — but that LLMs are evolving so quickly also gives urgency to the question: how should LLMs be used at Oxide?”
Leadership Management
— Lauren Leek
tl;dr: “It started as a very reasonable problem. I was tired of doom-scrolling Google Maps, trying to disentangle genuinely good food from whatever the algorithm had decided to push at me that day. Somewhere along the way, the project stopped being about dinner and became about something slightly more unhinged: how digital platforms quietly redistribute economic survival across cities.”
Data
— Michał Poczwardowski
tl;dr: “This is the Pareto Principle, known as the 80/20 rule. Where 80% of results come from 20% of inputs. Understanding which 20% matters can change how you work. This simple rule can help you tremendously with planning, prioritising, and focusing.”
CareerAdvice
Null Pointer
Holiday Break
Hand-drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
5 Books That Changed My Engineering Career Forever — Dr Milan Milanović
Notable Links
Claude Quickstarts: Projects to help developers build apps.
Claude-mem: Persistent memory compression system for Claude.
Dembrandt: Extract a website’s design system into design tokens.
Gitlogue: Cinematic Git commit replay tool for the terminal.
Mgrep: CLI-native way to semantically grep everything.
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