Issue #688

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

February 6th, 2026

Friday 6th February issue is presented by WorkOS

Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks.

WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your backend requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh.

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: “As a manager, I only see a slice of who you are. I don’t presume to know who you are at your core - I only know how you show up at work, and how you come across based on how you behave and what you say. So my feedback will be rooted in that.”

Leadership Management

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “Over time, I’ve come to believe that leadership is as much about managing the mental models through which leaders interpret people as it is about managing people directly. Those models determine how leaders respond to underperformance, how much autonomy they allow, how they react to failure, and ultimately whether their organizations learn or calcify.”

Leadership Management

tl;dr: Most AI apps fail to reach production not because of models, but because they lack enterprise infrastructure. This article breaks down the foundations teams need to scale AI responsibly, including identity, access control, auditability, and compliance. It shows how leading teams are building for production from day one.

Promoted by WorkOS

AI Tools

— Jade Rubick

tl;dr: “You might call this a “reality-first” approach. You get people to align on the tradeoffs as a way of making sure we’re all seeing the same problem. But you’re also engaging in divergent thinking, coming up with a couple of approaches. Then you use the structure of “tradeoffs” to see how the solutions you’ve come up with map against the constraints you care about. Then you make a decision.”

Leadership Management

“Simple rules guide innovative, intelligent responses. Comprehensive rules guide rote, routine responses.”

— Jim Highsmith

— Patrick Dubroy

tl;dr: “Almost any time you get serious critical feedback, it will feel unfair. There will be things your critic got wrong, or important context that they didn’t mention. Your instinct will be to focus on those aspects, to find as many reasons as possible to dismiss or minimize the feedback. Instead of focusing on what’s wrong with the feedback, ask yourself what’s right. Sure, your critic is totally off base, but is there a kernel of truth there?”

CareerAdvice

— Hilman Ramadhan

tl;dr: Build AI apps without scraping headaches. Learn how a Web Search API extends model knowledge, delivers real-time data, and gives you full control and flexibility.

Promoted by SerpApi

— Grady Booch, Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: “Every few decades, software engineering is declared “dead” or on the verge of being automated away. We’ve heard versions of this story before. But what if it’s just the start of a new “golden age” of a different type of software engineering, like it has been many times before?”

AI

— Simon Willison

tl;dr: “The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw. It’s an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger to integrate with the messaging system of your choice. It’s two months old, has over 114,000 stars on GitHub and is seeing incredible adoption, especially given the friction involved in setting it up.”

— Sushant Dhiman

tl;dr: “I’ve a deep interest in learning how computers work; that’s why in my 2026 books collection I’ve added books that cover computer science, not any particular language or technology.”

Books

Null Pointer

AI Sandwich

Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know

Best Reads Of 2025 - JLeonardo Borges

Homarr: Modern and easy to use dashboard.

Mindwtr: Productivity system for desktop and mobile.

Maestro: Agent orchestration command center.

Napkin Math: Techniques for estimating system's performance.

Oxdraw: Diagram as code tool.


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