Issue #750

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

Friday 11th September issue is presented by WorkOS

Every enterprise deal arrives with the same checklist: SAML and OIDC SSO, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, RBAC. They land one at a time, each holding up the process.

WorkOS handles all of it. Add SSO for the first deal, Directory Sync when SCIM comes up, audit logs and RBAC when a customer needs them. Over 2,000 companies run on WorkOS, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor.

— Gregor Ojstersek

tl;dr: In this article, you can expect 4 actionable pieces of advice on making a move to your next step and make a convincing proposal to increase your chances. I’ll cover: (1) Talking to your manager. (2) Keeping a brag list of all the wins that you achieve. (3) Become the go-to person for a specific project, specific technology, or specific domain. (4) Propose an impactful improvement to the codebase and own the implementation.

CareerGrowth Staff+

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “This week, think back to the last time a report, a survey, a customer complaint or a colleague’s warning challenged one of your own decisions. Yours, not the organization’s. Ask what you did with it, and then ask what happened to the person who carried it in. Did the evidence get a fair hearing, or did a reasonable-sounding explanation make it easier to set aside?“

Leadership DecisionMaking Feedback

— Maria Paktiti

tl;dr: WorkOS Emulate is an open source, in-memory WorkOS API that runs on localhost. Point your test suite at it, seed users, organizations, RBAC, and SSO connections, drive full login flows, and inject failures with error hooks. Event names and payloads come from the WorkOS API spec, so your tests see exactly what production sends.

Promoted by WorkOS

Testing Auth

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: “After participating in many such conversations, both through my podcast and during my time at Amazon, I have recognized a handful of patterns that have held over the decades and across different companies. What follows is my running list of those patterns, the ones that keep surfacing whenever I sit down with someone elite. There are five of them, and I explain the gap between what they do and where most other people stop.”

CareerGrowth

“What you stay focused on will grow.”

― Roy T. Bennett

— Yew Jin Lim

tl;dr: "Wisdom is the ability to act on a truth before experience makes it obvious. That’s different from intelligence. Intelligence helps you figure things out for yourself while wisdom tells you which lessons you don’t need to insist on learning yourself.”

Leadership CareerGrowth

— Paul Vatterott

tl;dr: Your internal MCP server can give LLMs access to everything by default, with no auth layer to stop them. This post shows how to lock it down with roles, granular scopes, and Enterprise SSO so employees and their AI assistants only reach the data they're cleared for.

Promoted by PropelAuth

Agents Auth Security

— Christian Kästner

tl;dr: “Implicit in this discussion is often the assumption that our prior code review practices were a gold standard, something to save or something to mourn. But is that really the case?”

— Simeon Griggs

tl;dr: “Years ago at GitHub, this was a question Sam Lambert would ask in interviews. The solution involved a downed database that started with a MySQL schema change needing an exclusive lock on a table, but it couldn't get one. Another session had already touched that table and never committed. That open transaction blocked the schema change.”

CaseStudy Debugging Database

— Shrivu Shankar

tl;dr: “I figured this would be a useful exercise to see where the models are at and how vulnerable I am before these kinds of attacks become more common.”

CaseStudy Agents Security

Human Approved

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

Archify: Turn a codebase into a system map.

FMT: Modern formatting library.

God's Eye View: Live OS spatial intelligence on a 3D globe.

Humanizer: Removes signs of AI-generated writing.

Spec Kit: OS toolkit for building software with any agent.

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