Tuesday 8th April’s issue is presented by QA Wolf |
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If slow QA processes and flaky tests are a bottleneck for your engineering team, you need QA Wolf. |
Their AI-native service gets engineering teams to 80% automated E2E test coverage, helping them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes. |
With QA Wolf, you get: |
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Trusted by Drata, AutoTrader, Salesloft, and many more. |
⭐ Rated 4.8/5 on G2 |
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— Cory Miller |
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tl;dr: (1) Conversations i.e. communicating & collaborating. This generally happens in meetings and then Slack. (2) Doing the work i.e. execution & delivery. (3) Thinking about the work i.e. strategy & vision. Cory shares why breaking up his calendar like this helps him plan his work. |
Leadership Management |
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— Sean Goedecke |
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tl;dr: “I’m a big fan of “sharp tools”. These are tools that are powerful enough to be hugely helpful or harmful, depending on how they’re used. Most forms of direct production access are in this category: like ssh or kubectl access, a read-write prod SQL console. It’s also possible to give “dangerous advice”. Dangerous advice is dangerous because (like sharp tools) it takes competence and judgment to use well. Giving the wrong person dangerous advice is like giving the wrong person production SQL access - they might go off and do something enormously destructive with it.” |
CareerAdvice |
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— Jon Perl |
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tl;dr: "Traditional outsourced QA relies on inefficient, costly tech stacks that fall short of QA engineers' needs. QA Wolf took a smarter approach. They built proprietary technology that aligns with customers’ needs, enabling their QA engineers to deliver 80%+ automated test coverage for their clients in just 4 months. In this free webinar, CEO Jon Perl reveals how QA Wolf is redefining QA automation. " |
Promoted by QA Wolf |
Management Tests |
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— Lena Reinhard |
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tl;dr: “Your CV should tell a compelling story about your leadership journey, highlighting your ownership mindset, adaptability, and impact. Focus on quantifiable achievements rather than vague responsibilities. Include often-overlooked elements like detailed context about companies, team structure, cross-functional initiatives, and technical expertise. Avoid passive language that diminishes your sense of ownership. Structure matters: use clear formatting, include contact information on every page, and ensure your CV is ATS-friendly.” |
Leadership Management |
“We make, not to have, but to know.” | | | | — Alan Kay |
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— Manuel Kießling |
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tl;dr: “I’m now convinced that AI-assisted software development has the potential to elevate our craft to the next level in terms of productivity. This is why I believe our community should embrace it sooner rather than later — but like all tools and practices, with the right perspective and a measured approach. My motivation for sharing these experiences and the best practices I’ve identified is to help move the needle forward in terms of AI adoption within the broader software development community — even if realistically, it’s only by some micrometers.” |
Leadership Management |
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— Arjun Iyer |
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tl;dr: Staging environments create painful bottlenecks in microservices testing - one bug blocks everyone with untraceable failures. Instead of costly duplicate environments, "sandboxes" use smart traffic routing on shared infrastructure, letting teams test simultaneously without interference. Teams catch issues earlier, ship faster, and eliminate waiting - while drastically cutting infrastructure costs and improving developer experience. |
Promoted by Signadot |
Tests Microservices |
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— Matheus Lima |
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tl;dr: “Before we begin, let me be clear: yes, this is a subjective list. It’s not meant to end the debate — but to start it. These seven papers (sorted by date) stand out to me mostly because of their impact in today’s world. Honestly, each one deserves a blog post (or even a book!) of its own — but let’s keep it short for now. If your favorite doesn’t show up here, don’t worry, stick around for the bonus section at the end, where I’ll call out a few more that came this close to making the main list. So let’s dive in!” |
Books |
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— Laurence Tratt |
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tl;dr: “Parallelism has long held promise but for a long time we couldn’t rely on hardware or programming languages when it came to parallel programming. I hope I’ve explained explain why I – and, I think, many other programmers – have consequently been afraid of exploiting parallelisation.” |
Concurrency |
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tl;dr: “The challenges we face in understanding language models resemble those faced by biologists. Living organisms are complex systems which have been sculpted by billions of years of evolution. While the basic principles of evolution are straightforward, the biological mechanisms it produces are spectacularly intricate. Likewise, while language models are generated by simple, human-designed training algorithms, the mechanisms born of these algorithms appear to be quite complex.” |
LLM |
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Most Popular From Last Issue |
The Reality Of Tech Interviews in 2025 — Gergely Orosz, Stefan Mai, Evan King |
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Notable Links |
Anime: JS animation engine. |
Awesome MCP: Collection of MCP servers. |
Headlamp: Kubernetes web UI. |
MarkItDown: Python tool for converting files to Markdown. |
Sparks: Typeface for creating sparklines in text. |
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How did you like this issue of Pointer? 1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
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