An Introduction To Thinking About Risk
- Jacob Kaplan-Moss tl;dr: “How dangerous is it to launch this new feature if it hasn’t gotten a proper security review yet? How much risk is left after we do that review?” So welcome to a new series about how to think about risk. This series is a crash course, a high-level introduction to the most important concepts and risk frameworks. It’s intended for people who encounter risk from time to time and need some basic tools, but don’t want to make a deep study of it.featured in #572
The Developer's Guide To Notification System Tooling In 2025
- Chris Bell tl;dr: “If you opened this blog post, you’re probably about to wade into the complicated ecosystem of notification and customer engagement tooling. It can feel like a daunting task. Not to fear, in this post we’re here to walk you through the basics of notification systems and the ecosystem of tools, frameworks, and vendors that surround them.”featured in #572
Grifters, Believers, Grinders, And Coasters
- Sean Goedecke tl;dr: “Why do engineers get mad at each other so often? I think a lot of programmer arguments bottom out in a cultural clash between different kinds of engineers: believers vs grifters, or coasters vs grinders. I’m going to argue that good companies actually have a healthy mix of all four types of engineer, so it’s probably sensible to figure out how to work with them.”featured in #572
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4 Ways To Lead Meetings That Work
- Dan Rockwell tl;dr: (1) Seek feedback. (2) Eliminate the word “discuss” from agendas. (3) Expect people to state their point before they explain it. (4) Shorten one-hour meetings by 16.67%.featured in #571
Why Cohere Chose Fern To Auto-Generate And Maintain Its SDKs
tl;dr: Prior to using Fern, Cohere dealt with a classic SDK challenge. Like most dev-products, their users utilized a variety of languages. This created a design problem: each language had different type systems, primitives, and concurrency models. Read more about how Cohere was able to solve this by leveraging Fern's generators to build and maintain type-safe, idiomatic SDKs across multiple languages.featured in #571
Staff Engineer vs Engineering Manager
- Alex Ewerlöf tl;dr: Staff Engineers sit at the intersection of technical leadership and organizational impact, but their role is often misunderstood. While they share technical accountability with Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers are uniquely positioned to work across multiple teams, focusing on complex systems and technical strategy rather than people management. Alex elaborates in this post.featured in #571
Are You Shipping More With GitHub Copilot? Is More Roadmap Work Being Done?
tl;dr: Engineering leaders are trying to figure out if their team is using GitHub Copilot, how much they're using it, and its impact on their work. Download this slide deck from Jellyfish, analyzing data from 4,200+ developers at 200+ companies, and start understanding whether you're getting adequate return on your AI investments.featured in #571
Fast-Forwarding Decision Making
- James Stanier tl;dr: “I’ll pitch the takeaway up front, and it’s this: hold yourself accountable for making decisions and progressing discussions as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary. Be restless while a decision hasn’t been made. Dead time is your enemy. Be creative about ways of shaving minutes, hours and days from a decision point.” James gives several examples of how to approach this.featured in #570
The Core Challenges of Principal Engineering
- Will Larson tl;dr: In this 20 minute video presentation, Will discusses the under-defined and ambiguous role of Principal Engineers. He defines them as engineers who solve ambiguous, company-wide problems that would otherwise block engineering executives.featured in #570