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- Issue #681
Issue #681
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 13th January issue is presented by Wing
Wing gives you a dedicated, trained assistant who handles scheduling, follow-ups, and daily coordination. Reclaim 20-25 hours a week and keep your team focused on momentum, not inbox management.
— Nick Zylkowski
tl;dr: “I was recently asked: “What’s the difference between a manager and a director?” I answered back then, focusing on the business orientation of the role, operating at a higher level, and redefining how you know if your team is operating well. But the question stayed with me. It’s a good one. The more I thought about it, the more I clarified the mental model I’ve been operating with for years now. One that helped me to grow into the current role and grow a successor who replaced me as a director when I was leaving the organisation.”
Leadership Management
— AbdulFattah Popoola
tl;dr: “Engineering fundamentals are the systems and disciplines that make performance predictable: uptime, security, compliance, performance, and quality. They’re not temporary initiatives or quarterly projects; they’re ongoing practices that prevent drift. Strong fundamentals bring peace of mind. They give you confidence that your systems are healthy, and you will detect issues before customers do.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Wing gives you a dedicated, trained assistant who handles scheduling, follow-ups, and daily coordination. Reclaim 20-25 hours a week and keep your team focused on momentum, not inbox management.
Promoted by Wing
Leadership Management Productivity
— Marc Gauthier
tl;dr: “I love the concept of a daily standup meeting. That’s even usually the first thing I setup when joining a team if it’s not there already. However I don’t really run standups like daily scrums, so I figured it’d be interesting to share.”
Leadership Management
“You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.”
— Daniil Bastrich
tl;dr: “I’ve distilled a healthy, sustainable review process into an acronym: PERFECT. It prioritizes what truly matters - from business logic and edge cases to reliability and readability - while keeping subjective opinions in check. Here is how you can apply these principles to bring structure, clarity, and consistency to your code reviews.”
CodeReview
tl;dr: Integrations with services like GitHub, Slack, Google, or Salesforce all require the same plumbing, including OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider quirks. WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect accounts through a simple widget, and your app makes one API call to retrieve a fresh, valid access token. Pipes handles OAuth, secure credential storage, and refreshes for you.
Promoted by WorkOS
Guide
— Alex Ewerlöf
tl;dr: “My goal is to break the barrier for senior engineers and technical leaders (CTO, Principal, Staff) to show you that “AI” is in fact our home turf where our hard gained experience still applies slightly different perspectives and nuances.”
AI
— Tomasz Tunguz
tl;dr: “Every year I make a list of predictions & score last year’s predictions. 2025 was a good year : I scored 7.85 out of 10. I will release the scoring tomorrow. For today, here are my predictions for 2026.”
Thoughtpiece
— 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.”
AI
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Next Two Years Of Software Engineering - Addy Osmani
Notable Links
Agent Scripts: Scripts for agents, shared between repos.
Art of CL: Master the command line, in one page.
CallMe: Plugin that lets Claude Code call you on the phone.
Mole: Deep clean and optimize your Mac.
QMD: Quick markdown search.
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