Tuesday 28th January’s issue is presented by WorkOS

Start Selling To Enterprises With Just A Few Lines Of Code

WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS.

With modular and easy-to-use APIs, integrate complex features like SSO, SCIM, and FGA in minutes of months.

High-quality documentation and seamless onboarding for your users eliminate unnecessary complexity for your engineers.

User Management is also free up to 1 million MAUs and includes MFA, bot protection, RBAC, and more.

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Management Mantras

tl;dr: (1) Avoid framing work as "favors" - tasks should align with business priorities and responsibilities. (2) Employee benefits aren't charity but earned rewards. (3) Take ownership of problems rather than placing blame. (4) Effective management requires daily engagement through feedback, conflict resolution, and behavioral guidance, not just quarterly interventions.

Leadership Management

Working Fast And Slow

— Sean Goedecke

tl;dr: “Some engineers work very consistently, putting in the same hours every day and getting out the same amount of work. I don’t. Some days I only have a few hours of focused work in me, while on other days I feel like I can go on almost indefinitely. I used to feel like this was a problem - that I was either overworking or slacking off - but now I lean into it. Instead of trying to push harder on slack days and pull back on focus days, I accept that I’ll be much more productive on some days than others. There are serious advantages to this working style.”

CareerAdvice

The Guide To Becoming Enterprise Ready For SaaS Businesses

tl;dr: "Crossing the Enterprise Chasm" is an inevitable transition every B2B SaaS company has to make when they start selling to enterprises. Although it's a necessary step, moving upmarket is fraught with challenges — building enterprise features takes a ton of capital, it requires aggressive prioritizations, and engineers generally don't like building enterprise features. Here's a guide for product and engineering leaders on making their SaaS apps Enterprise Ready.

Promoted by WorkOS

Management Guide

Distributed Systems And Organization Design

— Ted Neward

tl;dr: Engineers (and their managers) have spent much of the last forty years learning the various repercussions and implications of distributed systems. As an engineering manager, I've discovered that there is a remarkable similarity between distributed systems design and engineering organization design.

Leadership Management OrgDesign

Build It Yourself

— Armin Ronacher

tl;dr: “But there is a simpler path. You write code yourself. Sure, it's more work up front, but once it's written, it's done. No new crates, no waiting for upsteam authors to fix that edge case. If it's broken for you, you fix it yourself. Code that works doesn't necessarily need the maintenance treadmill. Your code has a corner case? Who cares. This is that vibe shift we need in the Rust world: celebrating fewer dependencies rather than more.”

BestPractices

Monolith To Microservices Migration — What To Expect (10 Challenges + Frameworks To Overcome Them)

tl;dr: Transitioning to microservices is tough. It’s not just a technical shift but an organizational one too. From defining service boundaries, to managing decentralized data and handling interservice communication, there’s a lot that can go sideways. This 80+ page ebook breaks down common migration challenges with examples from dev teams at Uber, Spotify & Netflix, helping you understand the obstacles before you hit them.

Promoted by Cerbos

Migration

Judging Code

— Thorsten Ball

tl;dr: Thorsten creates a simple system where an LLM evaluates website code based on must-have and nice-to-have requirements, scoring it from 0-5. He demonstrates its reliability and consistency, suggesting that LLMs could replace traditional code-based approaches for certain evaluations.

AI

Serving A Billion Web Requests With Boring Code

— Bill Mill

tl;dr: “I worked on this system for about two and a half years, from the very first commit through two open enrollment periods. The API system served about 5 million requests on a normal weekday, with < 10 millisecond average request latency and a 95th percentile latency of less than 100 milliseconds.”

Scale

My Failed Attempt To Shrink All Npm Packages By 5%

— Evan Hahn

tl;dr: “In 2022, I had an idea that could decrease the size of all newly-published npm packages by about 5%, and it was completely backwards compatible. This would have improved performance and reduced storage costs. I eagerly pitched this idea to the npm maintainers, convinced it was a clear win. But after a few months, my proposal was rejected. To be clear: I think this was the right call! Here’s what happened. I hope this story will be useful to others.”

JavaScript

Most Popular From Last Issue

The 7 Most Influential Papers In Computer Science History — Matheus Lima

Notable Links

Awesome CTO: Curated and opinionated list of resources for CTOs.

FortuneSheet: Drop-in JS spreadsheet library.

Lightpanda Browser: Headless browser designed for AI and automation.

OpenHaystack: Framework for tracking personal bluetooth devices.

Payload: Build a modern backend + admin UI.