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Issue #726
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 19th June’s issue is presented by Uplevel
StackUp is a 10-minute diagnostic that shows you where your AI investment is producing returns and where it's stalling — across the organizational dimensions that actually determine whether AI pays off.
No tool integration, no infosec review required. Qualified engineering leaders get a 30-minute session with an Uplevel transformation expert to discuss results.
— Will Larson
tl;dr: “This post documents the new rules I’ve revised my approach to engineering leadership around, and then talks through the specific projects I’ve worked on over the past year that caused me to believe in these rules.”
Leadership Management
— Yue Zhao
tl;dr: “The real damage happens when you stack weaknesses - when a leader is weak at something and their direct reports are weak at the same thing. This is a disaster, and it happens far more often than you’d think. Part of the reason for this is that leaders tend to hire people with the same skills they have. They’ll dress it up as hiring for “values” instead of “skills” so it doesn’t look like they’re cloning themselves - but people ultimately search for and evaluate the things they’re good at.”
Management Hiring
tl;dr: StackUp is a 10-minute diagnostic that shows you where your AI investment is producing returns and where it's stalling — across the organizational dimensions that actually determine whether AI pays off. No tool integration, no infosec review required. Qualified engineering leaders get a 30-minute session with an Uplevel transformation expert to discuss results.
Promoted by Uplevel
Leaderships AI Metrics
— Steve Huynh
tl;dr: “Every “yes” is a check written against the future that has to be cleared. And clearing checks written by “powerful Us” is especially tough. Why? Because, by definition, we are only average most of the time. This article provides a guide to recognizing overextension in ourselves, so that, before we commit to things, we can be sure that we are only taking on what we can hold.”
CareerGrowth DecisionMaking Wellbeing
“Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.”
— Scott Kennedy
tl;dr: “In this generation we call them “AI Natives”. The advantage is that there are no old habits to break or reframe. Many experienced folks are open minded and can do it, but many resist. New grads don’t know the difference, their learning came in parallel to having these tools. We see it in interviews regularly, new grads can use AI coding tools incredibly well.”
IndustryTrends AI Hiring
tl;dr: Most pull requests on your team no longer start with a human author - but the review bar was built for when they did. AgentField's engineering write-up lays out the four jobs code review has always done quietly, the three that get heavier the moment AI writes the first draft, and how to decide what blocks a merge vs. what ships. A read for eng leaders setting the standard, not rewriting the checklist line by line.
Promoted by AgentField
Management CodeReview AI
— Gergely Orosz
tl;dr: “In this article, we walk through what’s happened, and ask what’s going through the minds of leadership who are reducing software engineering there from the profit center that it was between 2004 until very recently, to the disdained cost center that it has become in just a few weeks.”
IndustryTrends Leadership
— Anders Murphy
tl;dr: “The defining characteristic of a B+ Tree is that it is ordered. Sequential writes are fast. Random data works against this thrashing pages, causing page splits and tree re-balancing. It's not a good time. But, we are batching the data already. So what if we sort it before we insert?”
Database DeepDive Performance
— Addy Osmani
tl;dr: “Stop reviewing everything to the same depth. Spend scarce human attention only where being wrong is costly, and let cheap deterministic gates and AI reviewers handle the rest. The organizing idea is to match review effort to the cost of being wrong, push the cheap deterministic work as early as possible, and reserve human attention for what only humans can do.”
CodeReview AI Agents
Null Pointer
No Belt
Hand-drawn by Manu. View the Null Pointer series.
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
Intro: Introduction to autonomous robots.
Meshery: OS cloud native manager.
Plane: OS project management platform.
Ponytail: Your agent thinks like the senior dev in the room.
TimesFM: Foundation model for time-series forecasting.
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