Friday 21st March’s issue is presented by WorkOS |
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Today’s bots can easily bypass traditional detection — executing JavaScript, storing cookies, rotating IPs, and even solving advanced CAPTCHAs. |
Their attacks are advanced by the day, fueled by growth in AI agents. So how do you block these bad actors? The answer is WorkOS Radar. |
A single JS script is all it takes to instantly protect your signup flow. Whether it’s brute force attacks, leaked passwords, or throwaway emails, WorkOS Radar can catch it all, keeping your real users safe from abuse. |
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— Ben Kuhn |
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tl;dr: “In a company like Anthropic, excellent project management is an extremely high-leverage skill, and not just during crises: our work has tons of moving parts with complex, non-obvious interdependencies and hard schedule constraints, which means organizing them is a huge job, and can save weeks of delays if done right. Although a lot of the examples here come from crisis projects, most of the principles here are also the way I try to run any project, just more-so.” Ben describes his playbook. |
Leadership Management |
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— Péter Szász |
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tl;dr: “Construct your positive feedback the same way as you would a negative one. Ensure the situation where the action you want to comment on was well understood; focus on the actions of the person you’re giving a feedback to; and show the impact these behaviors had on you and others. This approach will help your team members recognize and build on their strengths.” Peter shares his framework for doing so. |
Leadership Management |
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— Zack Proser |
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tl;dr: “Every time a device connects to your server, it broadcasts a wealth of information through its browser. Some of these signals are obvious, while others are subtle technical artifacts of how browsers and hardware work together.” Zack breaks down what servers can see and how to mitigate bad actors. |
Promoted by WorkOS |
BestPractices Security Management |
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— Addy Osmani |
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tl;dr: “Google's software engineering practices have evolved to manage our large scale. However, the underlying principles driving these practices are valuable and transferable to organizations of any size. This isn't about blindly copying Google, but about understanding the why behind their methods and adapting the what to your context.” |
Leadership Management |
“Make it correct, make it clear, make it concise, make it fast. In that order.” | | | | — Wes Dyer |
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tl;dr: “A few weeks ago at work we had a talk where senior developers were invited to spend around five minutes each talking about our personal software development philosophies. The idea was for us to share our years of experience with our more junior developers. After the session, I felt that it might be valuable to write my own thoughts up, and add a little more detail. So here we are.” |
CareerAdvice |
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— Nikos Douvlis |
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tl;dr: "Our new experimental package for using Clerk in your AI agent workflows. Manage users, orgs, and more with Vercel AI SDK + LangChain support. Try it now: npm install @clerk/agent-toolkit" |
Promoted by Clerk |
Tools |
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— Ethan McCue |
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tl;dr: “There is a set of things that you can do when working with a Postgres database which I have found made my and my coworker's lives much more pleasant. Each one is by itself small, but in aggregate have a noticeable effect.” |
PostgreSQL |
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— Michael Lynch |
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tl;dr: Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a detailed commit message. I enjoyed the post at the time and have sent it to several teammates as a model for good commit messages. I recently revisited Thompson’s article as I was creating my own guide to writing commit messages. When pressed to explain what made Thompson’s post such an effective example, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t. I couldn’t justify it as a model of good software engineering. |
Git |
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— Amelia Wattenberger |
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tl;dr: “All day, we poke, swipe, and scroll through flat, silent screens. But we're more than just eyes and a pointer finger. We think with our hands, our ears, our bodies. The future of computing is being designed right now. Can we build something richer—something that moves with us, speaks our language, and molds to our bodies?” |
ThoughtPiece |
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Most Popular From Last Issue |
Career Advice In 2025 — Will Larson |
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Notable Links |
Carbon: OS design system. |
Chat2DBL: SQL client & reporting tool with AI capabilities. |
Data Formulator: Create rich visualizations with AI. |
Git-who: Git blame for file trees. |
Rhombus: Programming language that’s uniquely customizable. |
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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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