Friday 1st November’s issue is presented by QA Wolf

👋 Goodbye Low Test Coverage And Slow QA Cycles

Bugs sneak out when less than 80% of user flows are tested before shipping. However, getting that kind of coverage — and staying there — is hard and pricey for any team.

QA Wolf's AI-native approach gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and helps them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.

🛒 Available on AWS, GCP, and Azure marketplaces.

Schedule A Demo To Learn More

To Build A Meritocracy

— Max Levchin

tl;dr: “High-performance culture is pretty easy to define: a culture of individuals doing productive work for the company in the most efficient way possible and helping others do the same, while generally having a good time. But what do you actually do to have such a culture? And what do you not do?” Max jotted down a few incomplete one-liners of what that means to me him as a founder and CEO. 

Leadership Management

The Measurement Trap

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “Nike’s story serves as a powerful example of how an overreliance on measurable outcomes can lead to the erosion of the very elements that once made a company great. While the road to recovery for Nike may be long and costly, the lesson for leaders is clear: not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters.”

Leadership Management

Innovations In Evaluating AI Agent Performance

tl;dr: Just like athletes need more than one drill to win a competition, AI agents require consistent training based on real-world performance metrics to excel in their role. At QA Wolf, we’ve developed weighted “gym scenarios” to simulate real-world challenges and track their progress over time. How does our AI use these metrics to continuously improve our accuracy? Watch our latest webinar to learn more.

Promoted by QA Wolf

Performance AI

Solving Staffing Challenges With Concentric Circles

— James Stanier

tl;dr: “When you are faced with no obvious way to solve a staffing challenge, it can be helpful to think about the problem differently. One way to do this is to think about the situation in terms of concentric circles. What I mean by concentric circles is imagining that the team asking for more people is at the center of a series of circles.”

Leadership Management

Make It Ephemeral: Software Should Decay And Lose Data

— Armin Ronacher

tl;dr: “Most software that exists today does not forget. Creating software that remembers is easy, but designing software that deliberately “forgets” is a bit more complex. By “forgetting,” I don't mean losing data because it wasn’t saved or losing it randomly due to bugs. I'm referring to making a deliberate design decision to discard data at a later time. This ability to forget can be an incredibly benefitial property for many applications. Most importantly software that forgets enables different user experiences.”

Design

Introducing @clerk / nextjs v6, With Support For Next.js 15

— Alex Booker

tl;dr: The Next.js team has announced the stable release of Next.js 15, and Clerk is continuing the tradition of (nearly) same-day support for new major Next.js releases with the release of @clerk/nextjs v6. With v6, the auth() helper is now asynchronous, <ClerkProvider> defaults to static rendering instead of dynamic, and support for partial pre-rendering has been introduced.

Promoted by Clerk

NextJS

A Netflix Web Performance Case Study

— Addy Osmani

tl;dr: By refining the JavaScript used for Netflix.com’s sign-up process and using prefetching techniques, the developer team was able to provide a better user experience for both mobile and desktop users and offer several improvements. (1) Loading and Time-to-Interactive decreased by 50% (for the logged-out desktop homepage at Netflix.com). (2) JavaScript bundle size reduced by 200kB by switching from React and other client-side libraries to vanilla JavaScript. React was still used server-side. (3) Prefetching HTML, CSS and JavaScript (React) reduced Time-to-Interactive by 30% for future navigations.

FrontEnd Performance

Australia / Lord_Howe Is The Weirdest Timezone

— Ulysse Carion

tl;dr: “The standard trope when talking about timezones is to rattle off falsehoods programmers believe about them. These lists are only somewhat enlightening – it’s really hard to figure out what truth is just from the contours of falsehood. So here’s an alternative approach. I’m gonna show you some weird timezones. In fact, the weirdest timezones. They’re each about as weird as timezones are allowed to get in some way.”

TimeData

One Weird Trick To Get The Whole Planet To Send Abuse Complaints To Your Best Friend(s)

— Pierre Bourdon

tl;dr: “One of my servers suddenly deciding to start sending SSH connections to the wider internet. This is usually a pretty strong indicator of malware compromise, and I had to act quickly if that was the case. Luckily, I’ve worked in infosec for a while, and some years ago I even did some freelance work doing forensics and cleanup of infected servers.”

Security

Most Popular From Last Issue

Decision-Making Pitfalls For Technical Leaders — Chelsea Troy

Notable Links

Anthropic Courses: Educational courses.

Memos: OS lightweight note-taking solution.

ML: Machine learning tools in JS. 

Outlines: Structured text generation.

Trench: OS analytics infrastructure.