Friday 24th January’s issue is presented by Unblocked |
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Unblocked searches your team’s code, discussions, and docs to instantly answer questions about your application. Now everyone can get their work done – without having to dig for answers or interrupt their teammates. |
Teams like Drata say they save an hour or more a day per engineer with Unblocked. |
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— Will Larson |
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tl;dr: “Like almost all startups, the engineering team was scattered when I joined. Was our most important work creating more scalable infrastructure? Was our greatest risk the failure to adopt leading programming languages? How did we rescue the stuck service decomposition initiative? This strategy is where the engineering team and I aligned after numerous rounds of iteration, debate, and inevitably some disagreement. As a strategy, it’s both basic and also unambiguous about what we valued, and I believe it’s a reasonably good starting point for any low scalability-complexity consumer product.” |
Leadership Management |
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— Andy Cleff |
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tl;dr: “The guide provides a spectrum of common team patterns, starting with healthy ones, things you’ll likely observe with high-performing teams, and then progresses through muddy “not clear” territory, to various levels of not-so-good, and all the way to fully toxic.” |
Leadership Management |
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— Dennis Pilarinos |
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tl;dr: The biggest challenge in software development isn’t writing code. It’s having enough context to know what code to write. |
Promoted by Unblocked |
Productivity |
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— Sean Goedecke |
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tl;dr: “If you’re a competent software engineer at a large tech company, your time is in very high demand. Lots of people will want you to do things1. You should be very selective about how you handle these requests, and definitely avoid saying yes to everyone.” |
CareerAdvice |
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” | | | | — Henry Ford |
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— Mahdi Yusuf |
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tl;dr: Mahdi discusses when to use it, how it can be set up, why we shard data stores and various options you have before sharding. |
Scale Database |
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— Brian Morrison |
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tl;dr: Middleware enables developers to intercept requests and perform operations like session validation, logging, and caching. While it may be tempting to use middleware to process and apply logic to every request to the application, doing so improperly might lead to massive performance depredations for your application. In this guide, you'll learn what middleware is as it pertains to Next.js, how it works, and some of it's common use cases. |
Promoted by Clerk |
NextJS |
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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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— Deepak Gupta, Dmitry Kopytkov |
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tl;dr: “In this blog, we’ll introduce an open messaging system model, which played a key role in evolving our platform. It helped us build a unified event-driven system capable of orchestrating a wide range of asynchronous tasks and meeting future needs, especially as we focus on AI.” |
Infrastructure |
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— Russell Baylis |
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tl;dr: "(1) An even, diffused lighting environment is best for the eyes When it comes to light brightness, too much is just as problematic as too little. (2) Use natural light wherever possible. (3) Quality of artificial light matters. (4) The best lighting for camera, is not necessarily the best lighting for ergonomics. (5) Even the perfect lighting environment will fatigue you — take breaks, and take care of yourself. " |
Health |
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Most Popular From Last Issue |
Do Hard Things — Nikunj Kothari |
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Notable Links |
n8n: Secure workflow automation for technical teams. |
Payload: Build a modern backend + admin UI. |
Superfile: Modern terminal file manager. |
Storm: LLM-powered knowledge curation system. |
System Design Primer: Learn how to design large-scale systems. |
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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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