#255 – August 17, 2025
growth from coding basics to leadership roles
My 10 years in software engineering
13 minutes by Mensur Durakovic
Over a decade in software engineering, Mensur chronicles their growth from coding basics to leadership roles. He highlight the importance of finding mentors, focusing on practical solutions rather than complexity, and continuous learning. Their career evolved from delivering working features as a novice programmer to building and leading technical teams as an engineering manager.
Tired of Cursor bouncing between dead ends?
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The politics of software
8 minutes by Philip Su
Office politics is exactly like Hootie and the Blowfish. You’ll never meet someone who says they like office politics or that they’re good at it. Yet everyone laments the existence of office politics in many workplaces.
The best companies are dictatorships
4 minutes by Nikunj Kothari
The founder walked into our product review, looked at the PRD we'd spent weeks perfecting, and ripped it in half. He drew what he wanted on the whiteboard. Three boxes. Some arrows. Then he left.
Mentoring, coaching, and therapy
6 minutes by Busra Koken
This article compares coaching, therapy, and mentoring in the tech industry. Busra explains that therapy helps heal past wounds, coaching focuses on future goals and actions, while mentoring shares lived experience from someone in a similar field.
How do committees fail to invent?
33 minutes by Alex Russell
Conway's law shows how organizations design systems that mirror their communication structures, with major implications for the web development world. The article describes the fifth column problem in standards development organizations, where participants secretly oppose progress while appearing to participate in good faith.
How engineers at Nubank and Ramp spend more time on shipping features (vs drowning in their backlog)
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And the most popular article from the last issue was: