Issue #735

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

July 21st, 2026

Tuesday 21st July’s issue is presented by Unblocked

Unblocked turns code, docs, tickets, and conversations into actionable context, so engineers move faster and agents stay on track.

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “In an organization you are always broadcasting on more than one channel at once, whether you intend to or not. Your exec team needs the unvarnished situation. The wider company needs enough to stay oriented without spinning out. Customers need a different message again. The failure mode is not the absence of a calm voice. It is using one voice for everyone: either feeding the cockpit a soothing story or dumping the cockpit’s panic straight into the cabin. Calm is contagious, and so is fear. Whichever one you transmit is the one that spreads.”

Leadership Management Communication

— Lucas Costa

tl;dr: (1) A project succeeds when it solves the problem. Compliance with the original specification is merely one possible way to get there. (2) Scope cannot be known before the work begins. It can only become less wrong as the work proceeds. (3) A fixed date requires variable scope. A fixed scope requires a variable date. Pretending both variables are fixed does not make it so. And more.

Management Tips

tl;dr: AI is in your engineering workflow. While the token spend shows it, the throughput doesn't. The human is very much still in the loop, and that's a context problem. This free webinar maps the 8 levels of context maturity: where most teams are stuck, what the ceiling looks like at each stage, and what it actually takes to make the most out of your agents. Join live July 23 (FREE).

Promoted by Unblocked

Events AI Agents

— Ian Reppel

tl;dr: “Companies who have forgotten what it took to become successful are similar: they stop recognizing competence, because the environment has stopped expressing the trait in anyone the company hires. Call it competence blindness, which is different from incumbents who fail because they cling to the customers and margins of yesterday’s market. Firms with competence blindness do not disappear. In fact, they can survive for decades.”

Leadership Culture Strategy

"The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said."

– Peter Drucker

— Sean Goedeckey

tl;dr: “These are two largely different ways of programming with different methods, practices and cultures. However, the first group is over-represented in online discussion about software engineering. I want to defend the second group against the first. In many software engineering environments, there’s nothing wrong with being in a state of partial understanding. In fact, in large systems a partial understanding is the best you can do.”

CareerGrowth CodeQuality

tl;dr: Bitso's 250+ engineers and their coding agents push changes across 200+ microservices, and shared staging was always broken. They replaced full-stack preview environments with Signadot sandboxes that fork only the changed services per PR. The result: 83% lower change failure rate, 2.1x deploy frequency, and open-to-deploy down from 12.1 days to 4.6 days.

Promoted by Signadot

CaseStudy Agents

Don't Ask What You Want. Ask Who You Want To Be

— Doug Turnbull

tl;dr: In almost any large dataset drawn from the real world — populations of cities, lengths of rivers, prices, earthquake depths, company revenues — the leading digit is not uniformly distributed. The digit 1 appears as the first digit about 30% of the time. Not 11%. Nearly three times the naive expectation. The digit 9 appears less than 5% of the time.

— Gabor Koos

tl;dr: “This series is about making your programs more resilient. Each post looks at one part of the system we take for granted: networks, time, databases, storage, users, dependencies, deployments, queues, and concurrency. The question is always the same: what assumptions are we making here, and what should we do when they stop being true?”

DeepDive DistributedSystems

— Franco Fernando

tl;dr: “DFS is the pattern you reach for when you need to find a path, check if something is reachable, or explore all possible paths through a structure. It works on trees, graphs, and many problems that can be represented as graphs, even if they don’t look like one at first glance.”

DeepDive Algo

I'll be in New York on September 15–16 for LeadDev’s LDX3. I would love to meet any readers in person who are planning on attending this year. Please hit reply and let me know!

Databasement: Self-hosted database backup manager with a web UI.

Flint: Visualization language that lets AI agents create charts.

Mouzi: Automatic file organizer.

Neko Master: Dashboard for network traffic visualization & analysis.

Wigolo: Go-to web for your agent.

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