#256 – August 24, 2025
avoid these three common mistakes
Managing engineers more experienced than you
4 minutes by Suresh Choudhary
When managing engineers with more experience than you, avoid three common mistakes: trying to be the technical expert, completely stepping away, and holding back feedback. Instead, complement their skills by focusing on your strengths in leadership, project management and coaching.
Tired of Cursor bouncing between dead ends?
sponsored 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.
Glue teams vs back-office teams
5 minutes by Michael Matloka
Micheal describes a distinction between two types of engineering teams that emerge as startups scale. While back-office teams serve other internal teams and can be delayed until absolutely necessary, glue teams directly serve users by managing critical cross-cutting product areas like authentication and billing.
Partner with product to pay down technical debt
4 minutes by Jim Grey
Technical debt is inevitable in software development, but it can be managed effectively through a partnership between engineering and product teams. Jim suggests making technical debt visible by tracking its business impact, then building relationships with product leaders to help them understand how code quality affects business outcomes.
GitHub’s internal playbook for building an AI-powered workforce
22 minutes by Matt Nigh
GitHub successfully scaled AI adoption across its organization by treating it as a change management challenge rather than just a technology deployment. Their holistic approach transformed skeptical employees into power users by providing both the tools and human infrastructure needed for widespread AI fluency.
Social and organizational heuristics
10 minutes by Jeff
Description of a set of mental models goes a long way to helping you understand the world. These mental models aren’t laws; they are heuristics. Think of them as pattern recognition tools to guide your intuition rather than a prescription.
Tests are dead. Meticulous AI is here.
sponsored by Meticulous
Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an exhaustive e2e UI test suite that covers every corner of your application – with no developer intervention required whatsoever. Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and hundreds of organisations rely on Meticulous for their frontend testing. It is built from the Chromium level up with a deterministic scheduling engine – making it the only testing tool that eliminates flakes.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: