Tuesday 12th August’s issue is presented by Unblocked | | | Unblocked’s MCP gives your AI-powered IDE’s the missing context from tools like Slack, Confluence, and Jira, so they generate usable code the first time. | | | | | — Sriram Narayan | | tl;dr: “The productivity of knowledge workers is hard to quantify and often decoupled from direct business outcomes. The lack of understanding leads to many initiatives, bloated tech spend, and ill-chosen efforts to improve this productivity. Technology leaders need to avoid this by developing an intelligence of the business impact of their work across a network connecting output to proximate and downstream impact. We can do this by introducing robust demand management, paying down measurement debt, introducing impact validation, and equipping delivery teams to build a picture of how their work translates to business impact.” | Leadership Management | | | | tl;dr: “I’ve focused very heavily on overcoming flaws in my mind for the past ~11 years. Initially it was because I had to overcome huge problems that significantly reduced my quality of life. But years after I overcame them, I still continue to ‘debug’ my own mind because I like the growth and quality of life I get out of it. And also because it’s just interesting.” | CareerAdvice | | | | tl;dr: With Claude Code + Unblocked MCP, I've finally found the holy grail of engineering productivity: context-aware coding. It's not hallucinating—it's pulling insight from everything I've ever worked on." – Staff Engineer @ Nava Benefits | Promoted by Unblocked | Management Tools | | | — Scott Kosman | | tl;dr: “Being a first-time manager is weird. You go from being great at your job to being a total beginner at a job that nobody really taught you how to do. There’s no “Manager Bootcamp.” There’s no Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering Management (ok, actually, there is but they’re scams. Just don’t.) You’re just… here now.” | Leadership Management | “We make, not to have, but to know.” | | | | — Alan Kay |
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| | — Dr Milan Milanović | | tl;dr: “In this newsletter issue, I want to share five books that influenced my journey from engineer to CTO the most. Each of these books contributed beyond just technical knowledge; they challenged my assumptions, introduced new mental models, and ultimately changed how I work and lead teams.” | CareerAdvice Books | | | | tl;dr: Every new feature branch competes for the same staging space - one unstable service, and delivery slows for everyone. Signadot allows teams to bypass the limits of full duplication in Kubernetes by using request-level isolation, enabling parallel testing, faster feedback, and up to 90% lower infrastructure costs. | Promoted by Signadot | Microservices Kubernetes | | | — Matthias Endler | | tl;dr: “I’ve been reviewing other people’s code for a while now, more than two decades to be precise. Nowadays, I spend around 50-70% of my time reviewing code in some form or another. It’s what I get paid to do, alongside systems design. Over time, I learned a thing or two about how to review code effectively. I focus on different things now than when I started.” | Guide CodeReview | | | — Alex Kladov | | tl;dr: “It’s a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting detail about the language, but, still, I can’t stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you’ll have to think about that too.” | LanguageDesign | | | — Laurence Tratt | | tl;dr: “That we are using LLMs for inflation should not be taken as a criticism of these wonderful tools. It might, however, make us consider why we find ourselves inflating content. At best we’re implicitly rewarding obfuscation and time wasting; at worst we’re allowing a lack of clear thinking to be covered up. I think we’ve all known this to be true, but LLMs allow us to see the full extent of this with our own eyes. Perhaps it will encourage us to change!” | LLM | | Most Popular From Last Issue | How To Be An Empathetic Manager (Without Becoming A Therapist) - Wes Kao | | Notable Links | Codex CLI: Coding agent that runs locally on your computer. | GoogleTest: Google testing and mocking framework. | LangExtract: Extract structured data from unstructured text using LLMs. | Stagehand: The AI browser automation framework. | Umami: Simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. | |
| 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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