Issue #683

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

Tuesday 20th January issue is presented by Resolve AI

Brittle infra, legacy apps, org changes, and an emphasis on shipping faster with lower change risk: The challenge for financial services’ engineering teams is the same challenge for most engineering teams, regardless of industry.

With coding tools that enable orgs to rapidly deploy tens to hundreds more applications, ROI is won in production, not the IDE. AI for prod is a major focus at Coinbase, DoorDash, MSCI, and Zscaler so they can safely run what they ship and build new apps with production context.

To hear how Jeremy Rishel, CTO at SoFi, Nitesh Kumar, VP of Engineering at Affirm, and Sandeep Contractor, Managing Director of Infra at MSCI are deploying AI to help run production, join our fireside chat on Jan 22.

— Andrew Bosworth

tl;dr: “Every interaction is training the people around you. After it’s over, they’ll like you a little more or a little less. They’ll be more or less likely to bring you problems. They’ll be more or less likely to recommend you or avoid you. And just as important, you’re training them on the type of problems to bring you.”

Leadership Management

— Jim Highsmith

tl;dr: “Many teams have turned into tribes wedded to exclusively adaptation or optimization. But this misses the point that both of these are important, and we need to manage the tension between them. We can do this by thinking of two operating modes: explore (adaptation-dominant) and exploit (optimization dominant).”

Leadership Management

tl;dr: Resolve AI works across your observability tools, infra, and code to provide real-time root cause analysis, prescriptive remediation, and continuous learning from every incident. Try it out for yourself in the Resolve AI playground. Ask Resolve AI to do things like: “Find traces where latency was longer than 5 seconds” and “Draw a mermaid diagram of the most important applications and their dependencies.” Got feedback? We’re here for it.

Promoted by Resolve AI

Management Tools

— Lalit Maganti

tl;dr: “So if you cannot stop all the bad projects, what do you do? You get strategic. Instead of trying to fix everything, view your influence as a bank account. You have a certain amount of “influence” coming in every month as you do your job, help people, ship successful projects, and generally remain low friction.”

Leadership Management

"People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it."

—Simon Sinek

— Andreas Fragner

tl;dr: One of my favorite definitions of a problem comes from the late Gerald Weinberg: “A problem is the difference between things as perceived and desired.” This definition is great because it’s actionable. It tells you that there are three ways to approach a problem.

CareerAdvice

— Andrew Israel

tl;dr: OAuth 2.1 is used in everything from Sign in with Google to integrating with third parties to MCP server authentication. Learn how it works with this article.

Promoted by PropelAuth

Guide

— Simon Willison

tl;dr: “Bryan Cantrill started the episode by declaring that he’s never been so unsure about what’s coming in the next year. I share that uncertainty — the significant advances in coding agents just in the last two months have left me certain that things will change significantly, but unclear as to what those changes will be. Here are the predictions I shared.”

AI LLM

— Raymond Xu

tl;dr: “Last August, we announced that users could create, edit, and view Notion pages without an internet connection. "Offline Mode" was our #1 requested feature for many years, but Notion's unique block architecture meant we had to solve several challenging problems around reference tracking, background syncing, and rich-text conflict resolution. This post explores the architecture and data model that took Offline Mode from just an idea to a production-ready feature.”

Architecture

tl;dr: “The guide is for engineers and curious people who use the web every day, but never built a mental model of how browsers work. I find most guides too technical, too detailed, or too shallow, so I have decided to take a different approach. I built the guide with many tiny interactive examples you can play with to help you go get through the technical details and build an intuition of how browsers work.”

Browser Guide

AionUi: Cowork with your CLI AI agent.

Json-render: Dashboards, apps, & visualizations from prompts.

Puck: The visual editor for React.

Snitch: A prettier way to inspect network connections.

Textarea: Minimalist text editor that lives in URL.


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