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Issue #676
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 19th December issue is presented by Shopify
Shopify just launched its Winter ‘26 Edition, with over 150 product updates and enhancements. AI is now embedded as a fundamental part of the Shopify platform.
These updates include a Dev Dashboard for Agents to build agentic commerce flows with Shopify Catalog, and checkout to enable agents to search products, and render checkouts, AI native dev platform and Shopify Catalog MCP or REST API that enable AI agents to search across billions of products.
— Frederick Vanbrabant
tl;dr: Frederick shares how he converges strategy into projects. “I like to use a bastardization of Teresa Torres’s opportunity solution tree. It’s a startup thing, but it works just fine in the grand halls of enterprise.” He illustrates this with a visual example.
Leadership Management
tl;dr: “Compensation is difficult. Even more than that, it is sensitive, business critical, and often has almost nothing to do with the rest of your job as a leader. Here are some rules for making compensation decisions effectively and efficiently.”
Leadership Management Compensation
tl;dr: Shopify just launched its Winter ‘26 Edition, with over 150 product updates and enhancements. AI is now embedded as a fundamental part of the Shopify platform. These updates include a Dev Dashboard for Agents to build agentic commerce flows with Shopify Catalog, and checkout to enable agents to search products, and render checkouts, AI native dev platform and Shopify Catalog MCP or REST API that enable AI agents to search across billions of products.
Promoted by Shopify
Tools AI
— Andrew Warfield
tl;dr: “As we move on in our careers and into leadership roles, our relationship with fear shifts. It’s no longer just about your own bravery, but also helping others take risks. If you think back on those anxious moments that have shaped you, I’m sure you can agree that they’ve also helped you grow. This is an observation that I find really helpful in managing and mentoring. Even asking simple questions, like “What scares you right now?” or “How are you stretching yourself?” can be a great starting point to encourage the people you are invested in to push themselves.”
CareerAdvice
“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”
tl;dr: “The 2025 Developer Survey is the definitive report on the state of software development. In its fifteenth year, Stack Overflow received over 49,000+ responses from 177 countries across 62 questions focused on 314 different technologies, including new focus on AI agent tools, LLMs and community platforms. This annual Developer Survey provides a crucial snapshot into the needs of the global developer community, focusing on the tools and technologies they use or want to learn more about.”
Survey
— Alex Rapp
tl;dr: Choosing between multi-tenant and single-tenant architecture impacts everything from infrastructure costs to customer isolation and compliance requirements. This guide compares both models across key dimensions: scalability, cost efficiency, data isolation, customization flexibility, and operational complexity. It covers when each approach makes sense based on your customer profile, regulatory requirements, and growth stage. Includes hybrid approaches and migration considerations. Critical reading for eng leaders planning SaaS infrastructure or evaluating architecture changes as you scale.
Promoted by Clerk
Architecture
tl;dr: Survey covers: (1) Engineering Team Velocity: Measuring productivity gains across development workflows. (2) AI Tool Adoption: Tracking the rise of AI-powered development tools. (3) Model Growth Trends: How AI models have scaled and evolved. (4) Model Snapshot: Performance benchmarks across latency, cost, and tokenization. (5) Research & Content: Recent papers on foundational models and applications.
Survey
tl;dr: “With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we stand at a crossroads. This technology holds genuine promise. It could just as easily pour gasoline on existing problems. If we continue to sleepwalk down the path of hyper-scale and centralization, future generations are sure to inherit a world far more dystopian than our own. But there is another path opening before us.”
Trends AI
— Andrew Reece
tl;dr: “You use arrays all the time. The number of elements they need is often determined at runtime. There many different alternatives for representing these, with different characteristics. Let's discuss these.”
DataStructure
Null Pointer
Code Freeze
Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better — Kent Beck
Notable Links
AgentFS: The filesystem for agents.
Claude Quickstarts: Projects to help developers build apps.
Mole: Deep clean and optimize your Mac.
PinMe: Deploy your frontend in a single command.
Sqlit: The lazygit of SQL databases.
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