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Issue #682
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 16th January issue is presented by Upsun
Most teams don’t need “multi-cloud.” They need freedom to move without rewriting everything. This article explains:
What multi-cloud actually means in practice
When it’s worth the complexity (and when it’s not)
How engineering teams keep portability without slowing delivery
No buzzwords. Just tradeoffs.
— Andrew Bosworth
tl;dr: “Too often, people debate new work in absolute terms. They describe how good an idea is. How exciting. How valuable it could be. That framing is almost always unproductive.”
Leadership Management
— Anna Shipman
tl;dr: “As a CTO, I know that engineers on my team have had that experience; and as a member of the executive team I also know that there can be multiple challenges that get in the way of requests, suggestions or ideas from engineering. Today I’d like to demystify this and give you some practical steps you can take to get your ideas across.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Most teams don’t need “multi-cloud.” They need freedom to move without rewriting everything. This article explains: (1) What multi-cloud actually means in practice. (2) When it’s worth the complexity (and when it’s not). (3) How engineering teams keep portability without slowing delivery. No buzzwords. Just tradeoffs.
Promoted by Upsun
Management Cloud
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “Most leaders spread their effort across many initiatives simultaneously, making partial progress on everything and completing nothing. The insight we’ll explore is that systems don’t work that way: there’s always one constraint that matters most, and focusing elsewhere is, at best, wasted effort.”
Leadership Management
"Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan."
— Addy Osmani
tl;dr: “Aim for a clear spec covering just enough nuance (this may include structure, style, testing, boundaries) to guide the AI without overwhelming it. Break large tasks into smaller ones vs. keeping everything in one large prompt. Plan first in read-only mode, then execute and iterate continuously.”
Guide AI
tl;dr: Buf Schema Registry brings type safety to data pipelines with Protobuf. Manage schemas centrally, validate changes, and generate Python code automatically. Plus: Buf is giving away an O'Reilly Media book, Data Engineering Design Patterns with proven solutions to idempotency, error handling, observability challenges and more.
Promoted by Buf
Guide Designs
— Antoine Boulanger
tl;dr: “This article is for early-stage (Seed, Series A) founders who think they have engineering management problems - building eng teams, motivating and performance-managing engineers, structuring work/projects, prioritizing, shipping on time.”
Leadership Management Antipatterns
tl;dr: “The cost of getting overload protection wrong is steep. This blog shares how we built an intelligent load manager that detects overload from multiple signals to keep our databases stable and fair under pressure.”
Architecture
— Artem Nabirkin, Jason Shang
tl;dr: “In this post, we’ll walk through how we built the feature store behind Dash’s ranking system, why off-the-shelf solutions didn’t fit, how we designed for speed and scale, and what it takes to keep features fresh as user behavior changes. Along the way, we’ll share the tradeoffs we made and the lessons that shaped our approach.”
Architecture AI
Null Pointer
Grok My Beer
Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Way I Run Standup Meetings - Marc Gauthier
Notable Links
Agent-Browser: Headless browser automation CLI for AI agents.
Art of CL: Master the command line, in one page.
Eigent: OS cowork desktop application.
Runme: DevOps notebooks built with markdown.
Swark: Create architecture diagrams from code automatically using LLMs.
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