Issue #728

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

Friday 26th June’s issue is presented by Fidelity Careers

At Fidelity, curiosity is a cornerstone of our culture. Our technologists are constantly sharpening their skills, learning new systems, reinventing themselves, and finding the next great discovery.

Learn more about how Fidelity supports our technologists:

tl;dr: “A lot of senior leaders, even “leaders” at tech companies, are fundamentally insecure about technology. They’re either not technical by training or so out of practice that they don’t know how their products work. This is especially true in fields where projecting confidence is a key part of the job: Sales, Marketing, Human Resources, and arguably even Security are all examples.”

Leadership CareerGrowth

— James Stanier

tl;dr: “We’ll start by looking at the pipeline we used to have: how senior engineers traditionally emerged through years of mistakes, mentorship, and low-stakes learning. Then we’ll examine what’s replacing it, and hypothesise whether AI will actually fill the gap. We’ll explore three possible scenarios for 2035, and finish with what this means depending on where you sit in the industry.”

Leadership Management CareerGrowth

tl;dr: Tech moves fast, but we ensure you stay ahead. At Fidelity, we don't just use the latest tech - we give our technologists the dedicated time, backing, and platforms to explore and adopt it at scale. Want to champion new stacks and grow your career with our support? See how we invest in you at Tech.FidelityCareers.com

Promoted by Fidelity Careers

CareerGrowth

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: “Being inspiring is not about how passionate your delivery is. You don’t have to get up in front of everyone, or try to cosplay what a bold leader sounds like. You can sound like yourself. Perhaps the most articulate and clear-eyed version of yourself, but still yourself.”

Leadership Communication

“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way, but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

- Albert Einstein

— Murat Demirbas

tl;dr: (1) Caution is warranted. (2) Realism helps you understand how the world runs (3) Competence is bliss (4) Do what you like (5). Your attitude determines your success.

CareerGrowth Wellbeing

— Kaia Colban

tl;dr: Most people treat a Claude skill like a solid thing that lives somewhere obvious and does what it says. It isn't, and misunderstanding how they work screwed me over a few too many times. Here's what I learned: how a skill's description alone decides whether it fires, how two of my skills quietly cancelled each other out, and how I lost half of them. They say a skill takes 100 hours to master. Save 99 and read this instead.

Promoted by Lore

Guide AI

— Lara Hogan

tl;dr: Lara built a worksheet to help you identify: what do I want in a new role? How can I make sure I find the right place? Where do I even start?

CareerGrowth Guide

— Addy Osmani

tl;dr: “Loop engineering is replacing yourself as the person who prompts the agent. You design the system that does it instead. A loop here can be thought of a recursive goal where you define a purpose and the AI iterates until complete. It’s roughly five building blocks and Claude Code and Codex both have all five now.”

AI Architecture Agents

— Tim Wehrle

tl;dr: “Every website has a favicon. It's that little icon in your browser tab. Usually you upload it once and then never think about it again. But. A favicon is just an image. An image is just pixels. And pixels are just bytes. So of course I wondered if I could store something inside one.”

Entertaining

The Plan

Hand-drawn by Manu. View the Null Pointer series.

Design.md: A format specification for describing a visual identity to coding agents.

Flue: Agent harness framework.

Hunk: Review-first terminal diff viewer for agentic coders.

Loop Engineering: Practical patterns, starters & CLI tool.

OpenSpec: Lightweight framework for spec-driven development.

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