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Issue #675
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 16th December issue is presented by Astronomer
Data teams rely on observability to deliver accurate and reliable data. But should you build your own custom tool or invest in a platform? This guide cuts through the noise and helps you decide.
You’ll learn:
The pros and cons of homegrown versus vendor solutions
Must-have capabilities for modern data observability
A clear 10-point checklist to guide your decision-making
— Kent Beck
tl;dr: "The standard model says junior developers are expensive. You pay senior salaries for negative productivity while they learn. They ask questions. They break things. They need code review. In an augmented development world, the difference between juniors & seniors is just too large & the cost of the juniors just too high. Wrongo. That’s backwards. Here’s why."
Leadership Management
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “The tenet of use it or lose it is best summarized by the quote from the Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski: “If I miss one day’s practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.”
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: Data teams rely on observability to deliver accurate and reliable data. But should you build your own custom tool or invest in a platform? This guide cuts through the noise and helps you decide. You’ll learn: (1) The pros and cons of homegrown versus vendor solutions. (2) Must-have capabilities for modern data observability. (3) A clear 10-point checklist to guide your decision-making.
Promoted by Astronomer
Leadership Management Observability
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Daily stand-ups have become ubiquitous in software teams, with 87% of agile teams holding these 15-minute check-ins every day. Yet despite their widespread adoption, we have surprisingly little quantitative evidence about whether they actually work—and if so, how. This week we ask: Do daily stand-up meetings improve team performance, and what psychological mechanisms make them effective?”
Leadership Management
“Simplicity is the soul of efficiency.”
— Peter Gillard-Moss
tl;dr: “This triangle visualises the tension and relationship between these three things. What caused us to make the decision, the future we desired and the action we took. Every single decision includes these three things. Because every decision is based on our desire to action a future and is either triggered reactively in defense or opportunistically, or preemptive to avoid probable risks or exploit them.”
Leadership Management
— Jeff Escalante
tl;dr: Embeddable Is let you add pre-built sign-in, profile, and account management components directly into your app without building from scratch. This guide covers implementation patterns, customization options, security considerations, and when embedded components make sense versus building custom flows. Useful for shipping faster while maintaining control over user experience and branding.
Promoted by Clerk
Guide
tl;dr: “At Reddit, we have four Core Models that power pretty much all use cases: Comments, Accounts, Posts and Subreddits. These four models were being served out of a legacy Python service, with ownership split across different teams. By 2024, the legacy Python service had a history of reliability and performance issues. Ownership and maintenance of this service had become more cumbersome for all involved teams. Due to this, we decided to move forward into modern and domain-specific Go microservices.“
Architecture
tl;dr: “At Uber, scale and reliability define our infrastructure. Every new server type, kernel upgrade, and configuration change must be rigorously vetted before it touches production. Historically, this qualification process was manual and time-consuming, forcing engineers to stitch together ad hoc benchmarks with limited ability to measure efficiency or ROI. This created delays, added risk, and slowed the adoption of new technologies. To close this gap, we built Ceilometer—an adaptive benchmarking framework that delivers fast, production-like signals on system performance.”
Architecture Tests
— Simon Willison
tl;dr: “I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past two years, almost all of them written by LLMs. This article presents a collection of useful patterns I’ve discovered along the way.”
Tools AI
Most Popular From Last Issue
Mechanical Habits — Alex Kladov
Notable Links
Flowglad: OS zero webhooks payment provider.
Server Survival: Tower defense game that teaches cloud architecture.
Sim: Build and deploy AI agent workflows in minutes.
Stakpak: OS AI devops agent in your terminal.
Turso: In-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite.
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