/Management

Senior Engineer Fatigue

- Kirill Bobrov tl;dr: “Senior Fatigue is characterized not by a decline in productivity but by a deliberate deceleration. The vibrant energy of younger engineers, bursting with rapid pull requests and overflowing with design documents, starts to give way to a more measured pace. At this stage, seniors might send fewer pull requests or be quieter in meetings, but this isn't an indicator of lost productivity. Quite the opposite — seniors are often finding more efficient, impactful ways to contribute, leveraging their vast experience.”

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The Documentation Tradeoff

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “In the end, write the docs you want to write. If no one reads them, or if readers find they are out of date, then consider not writing them next time. But don’t let anyone shame you into wasting time. The question is not, “Do you have documentation?” but rather, “Do you communicate clearly?””

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A Guide To Organization Modeling In Authentication

tl;dr: Organization modeling is a crucial part of building authentication and authorization into applications. However, once SSO and various user-organization relationships are thrown into the mix, the logic can become complex to manage. For developers building this in-house, there are important nuances and implementation details to consider.

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Why Data-Driven Product Decisions Are Hard (Sometimes Impossible)

- Andrew Chen tl;dr: “We strive to be data-driven in our decision making. And barring that, data-informed, overlaying our intuition and thoughts on top of the data. We certainly don’t want to be ignorant, and just make decisions with our gut. And yet sometimes that is exactly what happens — and some argue, better than being data-driven.” Andrew shares the limits of decision making with data. 

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Don't Try To Step-Function Everyone All At Once

tl;dr: Managers often try to step-function everyone's career growth at once, which is ineffective and usually impossible. A better approach is to intensely focus on 2-3 people at a time in 6-month cycles. Create specific goals, monitor progress monthly, and repeat with a new cohort. This targeted approach leads to meaningful growth. The same method applies for training - focus deeply on upleveling a few people vs. shallowly training everyone.

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The State Of DevSecOps

tl;dr: An analysis of tens of thousands of applications and container images across thousands of cloud environments. This report assesses the security posture of applications today and evaluates the adoption of best practices that are at the core of DevSecOps—infrastructure as code, automated cloud deployments, secure application development practices, and more.

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What Do GenZ Software Engineers Really Think?

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: “These days, most new grad software engineers belong to GenZ, having been born between 1997 and 2012... strap in as we dive into responses from the latest generation of tech talent, and find out what young professionals really think about modern workplaces and their more “experienced” colleagues!”

featured in #523

The State Of DevSecOps

tl;dr: An analysis of tens of thousands of applications and container images across thousands of cloud environments. This report assesses the security posture of applications today and evaluates the adoption of best practices that are at the core of DevSecOps—infrastructure as code, automated cloud deployments, secure application development practices, and more.

featured in #523

Know Yourself

- Murat Demirbas tl;dr: “MongoDB has a nice leadership development program internally. They suggested that filling / sharing this questionnaire would be useful to get you acquainted with the people you work with daily." Questions include: (1) What are you amazing at? Where do you want to improve? (2) What makes you most excited about your work / role? (3) Describe an ideal workday. (4) What is your meeting participation style? (5) What is something that people incorrectly assume about you?

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Managing A Bottleneck Team

- Jade Rubick tl;dr: “One of the harder situations you might find yourself in is managing a bottleneck team. What is a bottleneck team? When other teams can’t get their work done unless you do something for them, you’re a bottleneck team.” Jade discusses his approach to managing such teams. 

featured in #522