Tuesday 23rd December issue is presented by Resolve AI | | | When it comes to production issues, the numbers hurt: 54% of significant outages exceed $100,000 lost. Downtime costs the Global 2000 ~$400 billion annually. | Engineering teams at Coinbase, DoorDash, and Zscaler use Resolve AI to get to root cause 75% faster, pull in 30% fewer engineers per incident, and optimize costs by analyzing usage, spend, and telemetry volume. Learn from their work: | | | | | | — Laura Tacho | | tl;dr: “Looking back at 2025, we’ve learned a lot as an industry about how AI is changing the way software gets made. To close out the year, I hosted a research roundtable with prominent voices in the AI and developer productivity research space. I invited them to reflect on what we’ve learned so far, and to share the questions they’re carrying into 2026.” | Leadership Management | | | — Anna Shipman | | tl;dr: “Never split the difference” is a book on negotiation by a former FBI hostage negotiator. Anna found it to be a useful and practical guide to communication in general, sharing some notes. | Leadership Management | | | | tl;dr: As system complexity increases, individual AI tools face exponential growth in context requirements. This is where multi-agent systems can scale by combining coordination and individual domain specialization. During incident response, when AI agents handle log analysis, metric correlation, and deployment timeline reconstruction, engineers can shift their focus to architectural decisions and system design rather than tactical investigation. | Promoted by Resolve AI | Leadership Management AI | | | | tl;dr: Individual contributors can create outsized impact by taking calculated risks to deliver breakthroughs, acting as unbiased leaders, and owning specific goals. Regular written updates, proactive communication with senior leaders, and clear accountability build credibility, accelerate progress, and turn ICs into trusted drivers of real business outcomes. | CareerAdvice | | “Sometimes your most productive thing you can do is relax.” | | | | – Anon |
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| | | — Fran Soto | | tl;dr: “Struggling to stay motivated with long term engineering goals? This guide shows how SMART goals and tiny experiments together create progress that actually sticks.” | CareerAdvice | | | | tl;dr: "Interested to learn how different LLMs perform for coding? New research on models like GPT-5.2 High and Gemini 3.0 Pro reveals trade-offs in structural quality and security. Learn more about the reliability, security, and maintainability of code written by the latest models with Sonar’s LLM Leaderboard—the definitive resource to understand the true quality of AI-generated code. " | Promoted by Sonar | LLM | | | — Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeffrey Dean | | tl;dr: “Over the years, we have done a fair bit of diving into performance tuning of various pieces of code, and improving the performance of our software has been important from the very earliest days of Google, since it lets us do more for more users. We wrote this document as a way of identifying some general principles and specific techniques that we use when doing this sort of work, and tried to pick illustrative source code changes (change lists, or CLs) that provide examples of the various approaches and techniques. “ | Performance | | | — Boris Tane | | tl;dr: “You've probably spent hours grep-ing through logs trying to understand why a user couldn't check out, why that webhook failed, or why your p99 latency spiked at 3am. You found nothing useful. Just timestamps and vague messages that mock you with their uselessness. This isn't your fault. Logging, as it's commonly practiced, is fundamentally broken. And no, slapping OpenTelemetry on your codebase won't magically fix it. Let me show you what's wrong, and more importantly, how to fix it.” | Logging | | | — Marc Brooker | | tl;dr: Databases like Postgres were built for slow spinning disks. Modern SSDs, fast networks, and cloud deployments change those constraints. Marc argues we should keep relational models and SQL, but rethink caching, page sizes, durability, and replication as distributed problems rather than single-machine concerns. | Database | | Most Popular From Last Issue | Choosing Where To Spend My Team’s Effort — Frederick Vanbrabant | | Notable Links | Apptron: Local-first development platform. | Mole: Deep clean and optimize your Mac. | RenderCV: CV / resume generator for academics and engineers. | Server Survival: Tower defense game that teaches cloud architecture. | Snitch: A prettier way to inspect network connections. | |
| 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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