Friday 9th January issue is presented by Upsun | | | Outages don’t fail because of code. They fail because of hidden dependencies, brittle environments, and assumptions no one remembers making. This deep dive breaks down: | | | | | | — Jason Cohen | | tl;dr: “A single word of advice, given to all startups, and to CEOs of large companies, and they in turn to their teams: “Focus!” But what does that mean, precisely? And anyway isn’t quantity sometimes in fact better than quality? Don’t we need to test a bunch of stuff instead of trying to make one thing work? Only when we stop doing most things, do we have the time and energy to fully, deeply execute the most important things. And the important things are the difference between thriving and perishing.” | Leadership Management | | | — Brian Guthrie | | tl;dr: “Moving slowly is often a choice: everyone involved has decided that speed is a subordinate requirement to talking to all the right people, writing all the right documents, and ticking all the right boxes. Sometimes that’s necessary. But the hardest part of moving fast isn’t execution; it’s deciding that it’s necessary, and then convincing people that it’s possible.” | Leadership Management | | | | tl;dr: Outages don’t fail because of code. They fail because of hidden dependencies, brittle environments, and assumptions no one remembers making. This deep dive breaks down: (1) What actually fails first in cloud outages. (2) Why “multi-AZ” isn’t a safety net. (3) How teams design for failure before it happens. | Promoted by Upsun | Leadership Management | | | — Mike Fisher | | tl;dr: “Technical debt, as I’ve written before, isn’t a moral failing, it’s a strategic tradeoff. You cut a corner today to move faster, knowing you’ll need to revisit that corner tomorrow. The danger isn’t the debt itself, but ignoring its interest. Culture debt works the same way, except the corners you cut aren’t in code, they’re in norms, expectations, and relationships. And people, unlike software, don’t forget. They also don’t refactor easily.” | Leadership Management Culture | | "The best way to predict the future is to create it." | | | | – Peter Drucker |
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| | | — Addy Osmani | | tl;dr: “Below are five critical questions that may shape software engineering through 2026, with two contrasting scenarios for each. These aren’t really predictions, but lenses for preparation. The goal is a clear roadmap for handling what comes next, grounded in current data and tempered by the healthy skepticism this community is known for.” | CareerAdvice | | | — Mark Van Oppen | | tl;dr: Engineering teams solved authentication, but authorization has become the bottleneck. Separate AuthN/AuthZ systems create fragmentation and performance issues. FusionAuth's acquisition of Permify unifies identity and authorization, and delivers sub-10ms permission checks with fine-grained control (RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC) that scales to billions of users. | Promoted by FusionAuth | Security Guide | | | — Patrick Roos | | tl;dr: “In this blog post, I present you a list of the best software architecture books you should read in 2026, and what interesting software architecture books will be published in 2026.” | Architecture Books | | | — Andy Pavlo | | tl;dr: Postgres kept consolidating power in 2025: major DBaaS buys, new sharding efforts, and cloud vendors doubling down. Meanwhile, DBs raced to add MCP for LLM / agent access-raising serious guardrail / security needs. File formats reignited, consolidation accelerated, and GPU-first DBs fizzled. | Database | | | — Julia Evans | | tl;dr: “I asked for test readers on Mastodon to read the current version of documentation and tell me what they find confusing or what questions they have. About 80 test readers left comments, and I learned so much!” | Git | | Null Pointer |  | Human Approved |
| Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know | | Most Popular From Last Issue | 10 Ideas For 2026 — Shreyas Doshi | | Notable Links | Agent Scripts: Scripts for agents, shared between repos. | Clawdbot: Personal AI assistant on your own devices. | Gas Town: Multi-agent workspace manager. | Opencode: The OS AI coding agent. | Web-Check: On-demand OS intelligence for any website. | |
| 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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