/Management

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 #587


This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineering Leaders Back Into Frontline Developers

- David Loftesness tl;dr: David Loftesness - engineering leader at Amazon, Twitter and Eero - wants to remind managers itching to get back to the technical trenches that this option is on the table — and it’s not a step backward. But there will be organizational, communication, and even psychological hurdles ahead, from navigating resistance from your manager to dusting off the cobwebs on your coding skills, especially with how rapidly the tech landscape is changing lately.

featured in #587


Gather, Decide, Execute

- James Stanier tl;dr: “This article will be about more than just the software tool that I use, even though it is central to it. Instead, I'll focus on the way using this tool allows me to categorize the way that I work into tight loops of gathering, deciding, and executing. This is a mental model that I've found to be very effective in managing my day-to-day work, and enables me to keep the pace high for myself and my team.”

featured in #586


Is Engineering Strategy Useful?

- Will Larson tl;dr: “This chapter starts by exploring something I believe quite strongly: there’s always an engineering strategy, even if there’s nothing written down. From there, we’ll discuss why strategy, especially written strategy, is such a valuable opportunity for organizations that take it seriously.”

featured in #586


AI Coding Agents For Engineering (And Business) Impact

tl;dr: There’s a lot of BS about AI coding agents. Sourcegraph’s AI coding agents actually work. Our code review agent uses specific rules you define, instead of trying to replace humans entirely. They use search + AI to help you define rules precisely and eval against recent PRs.

featured in #586


This Is How You're Eroding Accountability

tl;dr: “Most management teams aren’t dumb and do their best to establish strong accountability cultures. But we wanted to share a few common ways that smart people screw up accountability on their teams, often despite the best of intentions – and what to do about them.”

featured in #586


Management Mantras

tl;dr: (1) Avoid framing work as "favors" - tasks should align with business priorities and responsibilities. (2) Employee benefits aren't charity but earned rewards. (3) Take ownership of problems rather than placing blame. (4) Effective management requires daily engagement through feedback, conflict resolution, and behavioral guidance, not just quarterly interventions.

featured in #585


The Guide To Becoming Enterprise Ready For SaaS Businesses

tl;dr: "Crossing the Enterprise Chasm" is an inevitable transition every B2B SaaS company has to make when they start selling to enterprises. Although it's a necessary step, moving upmarket is fraught with challenges — building enterprise features takes a ton of capital, it requires aggressive prioritizations, and engineers generally don't like building enterprise features. Here's a guide for product and engineering leaders on making their SaaS apps Enterprise Ready.

featured in #585


Distributed Systems And Organization Design

- Ted Neward tl;dr: Engineers (and their managers) have spent much of the last forty years learning the various repercussions and implications of distributed systems. As an engineering manager, I've discovered that there is a remarkable similarity between distributed systems design and engineering organization design.

featured in #585


"We're A Product Engineering Company!" - Engineering Strategy At Calm

- Will Larson 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.”

featured in #584