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- Issue #739
Issue #739
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 4th August’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.
— Lara Hogan
tl;dr: “Desk moves are my favorite example of why managers should understand the brain science behind why people react they way they do, in otherwise not-that-emotional circumstances.”
Management ChangeManagement
— Karim Jedda
tl;dr: “I still hear and read what I call the "old rules" repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus before you commit, etc...” Karim started checking each rule against the assumption underneath it after the introduction of LLMs in his org.
Management AI
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. Join live on Aug 19 (FREE) to learn how to track AI productivity, how context maturity affects where teams stall, and what it takes to get real value from your agents.
Promoted by Unblocked
AI Events Metrics
— Rachel Laycock
tl;dr: “A great conductor is first and foremost a great musician. They could play the instruments themselves. That’s not why they’re standing on the podium. Their value comes from understanding the whole score. The orchestra doesn’t need the conductor because the musicians aren’t talented enough. It needs the conductor because someone has to hold the whole system in their head. Increasingly, I think that’s what great software developers are doing.”
Leadership CareerGrowth
“No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”
— Domenic Denicola
tl;dr: “Things are changing very fast, and I have no illusions that this will be a timeless nugget of wisdom. But talking to some friends and scrolling through X posts, it does seem that I might have some techniques in play that are not widespread.”
DevEx AI Agents
tl;dr: Miro's AI team was building a new AI architecture across nearly 250 microservices, and one shared environment meant tests constantly collided. With Signadot, they moved to verifying changes in parallel with lightweight environments in the cluster. Agents drive full end-to-end tests against live services and iterate before a PR opens. Engineers get verified working code without waiting for slots.
Promoted by Signadot
CaseStudy Testing Agents
— Ben Balter
tl;dr: “In remote work, visibility isn't ambient anymore. If your work only shows up at the end - or only in your head and DMs—you make it harder for people to help, harder for managers to advocate for you, and easier for the org to miss your impact.” Ben shares his approach to working loudly.
Communication CareerGrowth Remote
— Alex Fedoseev
tl;dr: “Nothing has influenced the way I design software more than algebraic data types. It sounds overly academic—the kind of term that makes people roll their eyes or scares them away altogether. But honestly, it only sounds scary. The idea itself is quite simple, and learning it showed me a fundamentally better way to build software.”
DeepDive Architecture CodeQuality
— Farid Zakaria
tl;dr: Farid argues that classic analysis isn't enough. The size of your data matters as much as your algorithm. CPUs pull memory in 64-byte "cache lines," so how tightly your data packs into those lines impacts speed.
DeepDive Architecture Performance
Most Popular From Last Issue
How I Find Problems To Solve As A Staff Engineer - Lalit Maganti
Notable Links
Hallmark: Anti-AI Slop Design Skill For Claude Code.
Mouzi: Automatic file organizer.
Skills: To build better UI.
Stacked PRs: GitHub CLI extension.
OpenWork: OS alternative to Claude Cowork.
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