- Pointer
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- Issue #693
Issue #693
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 24th February issue is presented by Unblocked
Give your agents the understanding they need to generate reliable code, reviews, and answers.
Unblocked builds context from your team’s code, PR history, conversations, documentation, planning tools, and runtime signals.
It surfaces the insights that matter so AI outputs reflect how your system actually works.
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “Most of the time, the question behind the question is subconscious - the person might not even know why your answer doesn't seem good enough. They’re not intentionally being coy, and they're not asking one thing secretly wanting to know something else. Give them the benefit of the doubt and treat their questions as valid.”
Leadership Management
— Marc Gauthier
tl;dr: “From what I’ve seen, many people with years in the field can easily give an acceptable answers to most interview questions. They all know the “textbook answers” and have the communication skills to sell them. Because of this, I walked out of quite a few interviews feeling like a CTO, Director or VP candidate answered everything correctly, but I still didn’t know if I should hire them or not.”
Leadership Hiring
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: Developer tools promise "context-aware" AI, but more data access isn't context. The AI development stack needs a new layer –a context engine – to turn information into understanding. Here’s what that really means.
Promoted by Unblocked
Management AI
— Addy Osmani
tl;dr: “These lessons are what I wish I’d known earlier. Some would have saved me months of frustration. Others took years to fully understand. None of them are about specific technologies - those change too fast to matter. They’re about the patterns that keep showing up, project after project, team after team.”
CareerAdvice
“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
— Chris Roth
tl;dr: “The gap between elite and average teams is widening, not closing. And the practices that separate them aren't about tool selection — they're about taste, discipline, ownership, and organizational design.”
Leadership Management AI
tl;dr: Join Alex Casalboni (Developer Advocate @ Unleash) for a deep dive on how to design resilient AI workflows to make reversibility a foundational mechanism and release AI-generated code with confidence. AI writes code in seconds, but reviews take hours. Don't let this gap slow you down. Join our webinar or watch on demand to learn how FeatureOps helps you manage risk, contain blast radius, and maintain control over fast-moving agentic workflows.
Promoted by Unleash
Event AI
— Birgitta Böckeler
tl;dr: “The harness described suggests that increasing trust and reliability required constraining the solution space: specific architectural patterns, enforced boundaries, standardized structures. That means giving up some “generate anything” flexibility for prompts, rules, and harnesses full of technical specifics.”
AI
— Alex Kladov
tl;dr: “I was today years old when I realized that: (1) Code and code comments ideally should be wrapped to a different column. (2) For comments, the width should be relative to the start of the comment.”
BestPractices
tl;dr: “Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!”
OnlineCourse
Most Popular From Last Issue
Principles - Nabeel Qureshi
Notable Links
Cmux: Ghostty-based macOS terminal.
Intent: Developer workspace for agent orchestration.
Microgpt: Neural network that generates text one character at a time.
Rowboat: OS AI coworker, with memory.
Superpowers: Agentic skills framework & software development methodology.
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