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- Issue #711
Issue #711
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 27th April’s issue is presented by Teleport
Giving unknown agents access to your infrastructure? Probably not.
Running each agent in an isolated Firecracker VM with built-in identity? That’s the new model.
Beams connects to your infrastructure and inference services with zero secrets, zero IAM wrestling, zero standing privileges, and full auditability.
— Jason Cohen
tl;dr: “Great leaders don’t improve their silo only - they’re better at people issues, communication, decision-making, goal-setting, annual planning, org structure—things that are useful everywhere in the company, not just in their department.”
Management Hiring
— Yue Zhao
tl;dr: “There’s a framework I return to often in my coaching work, drawn from spiritual traditions and increasingly validated by neuroscience: humans have three centers of intelligence, not one.”
Leadership AI
tl;dr: Giving unknown agents access to your infrastructure? Probably not. Running each agent in an isolated Firecracker VM with built-in identity? That’s the new model. Beams connects to your infrastructure and inference services with zero secrets, zero IAM wrestling, zero standing privileges, and full auditability.
Promoted by Teleport
Infrastructure Security Agents
— Jake Mainwaring
tl;dr: “We were able to cut our default set of metrics from ~50 to ~15 by collapsing platform-level breakouts into parent metrics and removing engagement metrics that were largely measuring the same thing. This improved our ability to catch a real, moderate-sized effect by ~45%!”
Management Metrics
“Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.”
— Dr Milan Milanović
tl;dr: “Some of these laws are sixty years old. They still apply to software development in 2026, and they will still apply in 2036 because they are not really about software. They are about people working together to build things under time pressure (basically, a lot of them are just laws of human nature).”
BestPractices Guide
tl;dr: The average U.S. checking account pays ~0.07% APY. Most high-earning engineers leave their liquidity in low-yield legacy accounts. Optimize your finances with Wealthfront's Cash Account: 3.30% APY + an extra 0.75% boost on your uninvested cash for Pointer readers when you open your first Cash Account (total 4.05% variable APY). (1) Zero monthly fees and instant transfers to eligible accounts. (2) APY that is 10x the national average. (3) Checking features built-in. Base APY is 3.30% as of 1/30/26, is provided by program banks, and is subject to change. Promotional terms and conditions apply.
Promoted by Wealthfront
Compensation
— Arpit Bhayani
tl;dr: “Traditional database architecture rests on assumptions that agentic AI workloads systematically violate: deterministic callers, intentional writes, brief connections, loud failures, and schema as a developer contract. Each of these assumptions held because a human was always somewhere in the loop. Agents remove that guarantee.“
Databases Architecture Agents
— Boris Tane
tl;dr: “I’ve been using Claude Code as my primary development tool for approx 9 months, and the workflow I’ve settled into is radically different from what most people do with AI coding tools. Most developers type a prompt, sometimes use plan mode, fix the errors, repeat.“
AI BestPractices
— Dave Gauer
tl;dr: Dave reflects on how he finishes personal projects despite life getting in the way. He uses a physical Post-It stack to stay focused on one thing at a time, treat habits like spinning plates worth protecting, and argue that keeping projects barely alive through tiny daily progress beats letting them go cold and having to restart from scratch.
CareerGrowth Productivity
Editorial Note
Occasionally, I’ll come across a post that’s evergreen. It’s as relevant now as it will be in 10 years.
Mike Acton’s Expectations of Professional Software Engineers is a great talk. I’m linking to Adam Johnson’s transcription, which outlines 50 baseline skills and abilities software engineers should have.
While the way we write code is changing, soft skills and technical skills are more important than ever. I don’t care if machines will write the code, humans will always be a part of the process.
Also a hat tip to Thorsten Ball, who resurfaced the article in his excellent newsletter Joy & Curiosity, which I read every week and highly recommend.
Most Popular From Last Issue
Learnings From Conducting ~1,000 Interviews At Amazon - Steve Huynh, Gergely Orosz
Notable Links
APTS: Governance standard for autonomous penetration testing platforms.
Kumo: Cloudflare's component library for modern webapps.
OpenChronicle: OS local-first memory for any tool-capable LLM agent.
OpenSRE: OS framework for AI SRE agents.
Tolaria: Desktop app to manage markdown knowledge bases.
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