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Issue #690
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 13th 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.
— Addy Osmani
tl;dr: “Some of the hardest lessons I’ve learned aren’t about how you work. They’re about how teams work: how decisions actually get made, where coordination breaks down, what separates the groups that ship from the ones that spin. These lessons pick up where the first left off. They’re less about being a better individual engineer and more about the systems around the engineering.”
CareerAdvice
— Michał Poczwardowski
tl;dr: “I’ve witnessed teams hiding real deadlines from each other. Afraid that if developers knew the real date, work would expand to fill it (Parkinson), while still taking longer than expected (Hofstadter). Some teams added multipliers to estimates, turning a 3-day estimate into 6 days automatically. This blurred what was being estimated in the first place.”
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
Tools AI
— Matheus Lima
tl;dr: “That sounds harsh, but it’s true. When you ask someone “what do you think?” without sharing what you think, you’re not collaborating, but more like outsourcing? You’re taking all the work you should have done (reading and understanding the doc, weighing the trade-offs, forming an opinion) and dumping it on someone else’s lap. It looks like a question, but it’s more like a task assignment.”
CareerAdvice
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
— Alex Kladov
tl;dr: “A meta programming post - looking at my thought process when coding and trying to pin down what is programming “knowledge”. Turns out, a significant fraction of that is just reducing new problems to a vocabulary of known tricks. This is a personal, descriptive post, not a prescriptive post for you.”
ThoughtPiece
— 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
Search API AI
— Lukas Niessen
tl;dr: “The thing is, architecture decisions are different from regular code decisions. They’re harder to reverse, they affect more people, and they often involve trade-offs that aren’t purely technical. You need buy-in. You need the right people in the room. And you need a process that doesn’t turn into endless meetings or bikeshedding. Here’s the approach I’ve found works well, both in my consulting work and in teams I’ve led.”
Architecture
— Martin Alderson
tl;dr: “It still shocks me how much difference there is between AI users. I think it explains a lot about the often confusing (to me) coverage in the media about AI and its productivity impact. I think it's clear there are two types of users to me now, and by extension, the organisations they work for.”
Management Leadership AI
— Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya
tl;dr: “One of my core software engineering practices is writing, by hand, in a physical notebook. It's one of the most important things I do to remain productive and effective. Maybe the single most important. And it's a practice that I see very few others using!”
CareerAdvice
Null Pointer
Uber-legacy
Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know
Most Popular From Last Issue
Running 1:1s For Engineers - Can Duruk
Notable Links
Homarr: Modern and easy to use dashboard.
Gh-aw: GitHub agentic workflows.
LangExtract: Structured information from unstructured text.
QMD: CLI search engine for your docs.
Swark: Create architecture diagrams from code automatically using LLMs.
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