Tuesday 29th July’s issue is presented by WorkOS | | | Free trials fuel growth, but bots and fake accounts exploit them, stealing tokens, burning compute, and distorting key metrics. | Teams like Cursor use WorkOS Radar to stop these threats before they spread with real-time defenses: device fingerprinting, brute force detection, and free trial abuse checks. With simple APIs and minimal engineering overhead, Radar keeps signups clean and real users protected. | | | | | — Mike Fisher | | tl;dr: “Some of these are strategies I’ve personally used and found invaluable, while others are well-regarded methods worth sharing. As I examined them, I noticed they naturally fell into two key categories: Structured Time Management Techniques and Productivity-Boosting Frameworks, each offering a unique approach to mastering time and maximizing efficiency. Let’s dive in.” | Leadership Management | | | — Rafa Páez | | tl;dr: “Ignore one of these and your capital fades. Practice all three and you’ll earn trust, support, and influence that grows over time, like compound interest. The small deposits you make consistently can grow into career-changing impact.” | Leadership Management | | | — Michael Hadley | | tl;dr: Securely authorizing access to an MCP server used to be an open question. Now there's a clear answer: OAuth. This guide breaks down the five specs that make it work in practice, covering delegation, token exchange, and scoped access. WorkOS packages everything into one API so you can skip building your own OAuth stack. | Promoted by WorkOS | Guide AI | | | — Bill Mill | | tl;dr: “One of the tasks that I do most often is to review code. I've written a review command that asks an AI to review a code sample, and I've gotten a lot of value out of it. I ignore most of the suggestions that the tool outputs, but it has already saved me often enough from painful errors that I wanted to share it in the hope that others might find it useful.” | Tools AI | “What you do has far greater impact than what you say.” | | | | Stephen Covey |
|
| | — Jacob Jackson | | tl;dr: “Everyone is always wondering how to make Postgres faster, more efficient, etc, but nobody ever thinks about how to make Postgres slower. Now, of course, most of those people are being paid to focus on speed, but I am not. As I was writing a slightly more useful guide, I decided someone needed to try to create a Postgres configuration optimized to process queries as slowly as possible. Why? I am not sure, but this is what came of that though.” | PostgreSQL | | | | tl;dr: Generic AI creates obvious test cases while missing the integration failures that wake you up at night. BrowserStack’s AI agents are purpose-built for testing, they analyze your PRDs, user stories, and system patterns to create comprehensive test cases and convert them into automated tests. Watch how they work and integrate the AI agents into your workflow. | Promoted by BrowserStack | Tests AI | | | — Jayant Tikmani | | tl;dr: Carta built dynamic AI agents to solve complex accounting problems. The most impactful use case turned an 11-minute task into one that’s completed in seconds — normally, there are 20,000 to 25,000 of these tasks per month that need to be reconciled by Carta’s internal teams. That’s a savings of over 3,500 hours per month. This enables a faster, more scalable, differentiated service experience for internal teams and their clients. | Agents AI | | | — Ian Carroll | | tl;dr: “During a cursory security review of a few hours, we identified two serious issues: the McHire administration interface for restaurant owners accepted the default credentials 123456:123456, and an insecure direct object reference (IDOR) on an internal API allowed us to access any contacts and chats we wanted. Together they allowed us and anyone else with a McHire account and access to any inbox to retrieve the personal data of more than 64 million applicants.” | Security | | | — Pol Piella | | tl;dr: “Being familiar with how to debug an application and being familiar with or even aware of the tools you have at your disposal is a skill that will save you a lot of time and will allow you to move on to the next task faster... In this post, I will share a few examples of real-world bugs I have recently fixed in my apps and walk you through the entire debugging process in each case.” | Debugging | | Most Popular From Last Issue | Leading Your Engineers Towards An AI-Assisted Future — Pete Hodgson | | Notable Links | Agents For Beginners: 11 Lessons to get started building AI agents | LiftKit: Components from design to production. | OpenBB: Investment research for everyone, everywhere. | Remote Jobs: Semi to fully remote-friendly jobs. | Wren: Class-based concurrent scripting language. | |
| How did you like this issue of Pointer? 1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|
|
|
