Friday 14th March’s issue is presented by QA Wolf

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If QA is a bottleneck on your software engineering team and you’re releasing slowly because of it, you need to check out QA Wolf.

Their AI-native service gets engineering teams to 80% automated E2E test coverage across mobile and web apps, helping them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.

With QA Wolf, Drata’s team of 80+ engineers achieved 4x more test cases and 86% faster QA cycles.

Schedule A Demo To Learn More

The 10 Biggest Leadership Blindspots Based On 10 Years of Research

— Claire Lew

tl;dr: Claire shares blindspots, self-assessment questions and actions to remedy each. Blindspots are:(1) What our team doesn't know doesn't hurt them. (2) Everyone should share my sense of urgency. (3) As long as my team likes me, they trust me. (4) I don't play favorites with my team. (5) I treat everyone the way that I want to be treated. And more.

Leadership Management

How Not To Disagree

— Andrew Bosworth

tl;dr: “Imagine a simple scenario. Your manager is proposing changes to your roadmap. Those changes would negate months of work by your team. You lead the team and don’t agree with the new direction. Following a robust discussion your manager makes the change over your objections. How do you proceed?”

Leadership Management

The QA Wolf Advantage: Vertical Integration For Superior QA

— Jon Perl

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

Tests Management

Setting Policy For Strategy

— Will Larson

tl;dr: Will explores setting policy as a critical step in engineering strategy, following exploration, diagnosis, and refinement. It defines policy as turning diagnosis into actionable decisions, covering coding practices, hiring mandates, and architectural choices. The chapter outlines structured steps for policy creation, types of policies, and criteria for effective policies. It also discusses handling uncertainty, recognizing constraints, and addressing missing strategies.

Leadership Management

Systems Ideas That Sound Good But Almost Never Work

— Steven Sinofsky

tl;dr: “I started my list with “let’s just” because 9 out of 10 times when someone says “let’s just” what follows is going to be ultimately way more complicated than anyone in the room thought it would be. I’m going to say “9 out of 10 times” a lot below on purpose because…experience. I offer an example of two below but for each there are probably a half dozen I lived through.”

Architecture

Warp: The Intelligent Terminal Now On Windows

— Abhishek Pandya

tl;dr: Warp is now officially available on Windows! Building for Windows was significantly more challenging than for Linux or the Web. In this post, the engineering team breaks down some of the complexities faced in supporting Windows, including supporting new shells and making ConPTY work with Warp’s shell integration.

Promoted by Warp

Windows Terminal

How Long Should Functions Be?

— Kent Beck

tl;dr: When someone says, “Functions should be X-ish lines long,” they miss this fundamental truth. Regardless of how long functions start out, they’re going to grow. That growth is subject to natural laws, chief of which is, “The long get longer.” Picking a number of lines ignores how functions actually grow. The question is not, “How long should functions be?”, it’s, “What is the distribution of function length?”

BestPractices

Here’s How I Use LLMs To Help Me Write Code

— Simon Willison

tl;dr: Using LLMs to write code is difficult and unintuitive. It takes significant effort to figure out the sharp and soft edges of using them in this way, and there’s precious little guidance to help people figure out how best to apply them. If someone tells you that coding with LLMs is easy they are misleading you. They may well have stumbled on to patterns that work, but those patterns do not come naturally to everyone. I’ve been getting great results out of LLMs for code for over two years now. Here’s my attempt at transferring some of that experience and intution to you.

CareerAdvice LLM

A 10x Faster TypeScript

— Anders Hejlsberg

tl;dr: “The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage. By porting the current codebase, we expect to be able to preview a native implementation of tsc capable of command-line typechecking by mid-2025, with a feature-complete solution for project builds and a language service by the end of the year.”

News Typescript

Most Popular From Last Issue

The 5 Most Difficult Employees (And How To Actually Handle Them) — Claire Lew

Notable Links

CodeTracer: Debugger that support range of programming languages.

Composio: Toolset for AI agents.

MetaGPT: Multi-agent framework.

Smallpond: Lightweight data processing framework.

Yaak: Desktop API client.