Why high performers make assertions

Hello, 👋

Thanks to everyone who participated in the LDX3 ticket giveaway. You sent me heaps of exceptional articles. Here's a few of them:

• Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?
• Influence Without Authority
• Give Away Your Legos
• Data-Informed, NOT Data-Driven

and many many others. Congratulations to Janina and I hope you'll enjoy the conference. And now, let's look at this week's highlights.

Why high performers make assertions
9 minutes by Wes Kao

An assertion combines a bias toward action, personal conviction, and ownership—essentially stating what should be done and why you believe in it. Unlike insights (observations) or suggestions (recommendations), assertions put you on the hook and demonstrate your willingness to take responsibility. Making well-reasoned assertions helps move projects forward.

Developers don’t need more documentation
sponsored by Unblocked

Docs get written, but answers stay hard to find. The problem isn’t the docs themselves. It’s that the context developers need is scattered, outdated, or missing entirely. Why does this keep happening? And what’s the alternative?

How to avoid sleepwalking into irrelevance in the age of AI
6 minutes by Irina Stanescu

Irina argues that traditional career security factors like experience, seniority, and execution skills are no longer sufficient. Instead, future-proofing requires adopting CEO-like thinking about one's career, mastering self-management, embracing uncertainty, improving communication skills, and developing influence capabilities.

Ultimate employee is proactive
3 minutes by Auren Hoffman

Proactive employees deliver exceptional value. These individuals manage their bosses rather than being managed, take ownership of company-wide problems without waiting for permission, anticipate leadership needs, and actively seek information and improvement opportunities.

The function of strategy
11 minutes by Whitney Zimmerman

Whitney explores strategy theorist Colin S. Gray's concept of strategy as a bridge between purpose and action, not merely a direction or set of choices. According to Gray, effective strategy enables organizational shifts toward important goals and must integrate across multiple dimensions to connect abstract objectives with practical implementation.

How to get good at strategy
13 minutes by Claire Lew

True strategy involves identifying critical challenges and developing coherent approaches to address them, rather than simply creating goals or to-do lists. Key principles for strategic thinking are pinpointing specific challenges, confronting uncomfortable truths, seeking hidden insights, working with constraints, and ensuring coordinated actions.

The intelligent terminal with AI built for Mac, Linux, and now Windows
sponsored by Warp

Never forget a command or struggle with syntax again. Warps Agent Mode allows you to type in natural language to accomplish any task right in the terminal. Store and share resources, from repeatable runbooks to templatized commands with Warp Drive.

industry

• Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing
• Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
• Redis is open source again

security

• How Kraken identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job
• Agent of Chaos: Hijacking NodeJS’s Jenkins Agents
• Troy Hunt got pwnd

LDX3: The festival of engineering leadership
partnered with LDX3

Join 2,000+ engineering leaders for bold keynotes, practical case studies, and deep-dive sessions on org design, workflows, and technical decision-making – plus workshops, roundtables, and a packed tooling expo.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• How to collaborate cross-functionally