Why does development slow down?

Why does development slow down?
4 minutes by Kent Beck

Software projects start fast but slow down as they accumulate complexity and technical debt. Each new feature reduces future options by making the codebase harder to change. Kent argues the solution is to alternate between adding features and restoring flexibility through code cleanup. This rhythm prevents projects from getting stuck with too few options to move forward effectively.

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Using metrics to measure individual developer performance
13 minutes by Laura Tacho

Leaders often ask what metrics to use for measuring developer performance. Using wrong metrics breaks trust and can encourage gaming the system. Laura suggests that instead of seeking a standard list of metrics, work backwards from job responsibilities to find evidence that matters to your company. Focus on outcomes rather than activity data, and remember that metrics alone aren't enough without proper performance management and feedback.

Shadow work in engineering teams
7 minutes by Anton Zaides

Anton shares three types of shadow work that steals your team’s capacity. First is invisible production support where engineers handle alerts and ad-hoc requests without tracking them. Second is technical glue work like mentoring and documentation that burns out senior staff. Third is shadow backlog where work happens outside official roadmaps, breaking capacity planning and trust between teams.

Startup engineering team organisation
13 minutes by Marc G. Gauthier

Marc explores different ways to organize software engineering teams at startups. He walks through various team structures using a B2B SaaS company as an example and showcases the different options and their limitations.

Speak so they can hear you
3 minutes by Jessica Kerr

SRE teams struggle to justify their work in ROI terms, even though preventing incidents saves money that's hard to measure. Jessica uses a metaphor from 19th century Louis Agassiz who translated scientific work into language that secured funding, modern tech leaders must frame system health and reliability improvements in business terms that executives understand, even while knowing the deeper technical benefits.

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industry

• Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws
• Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3
• Our most advanced weather forecasting model
• Software Development in the Time of Strange New Angels

security

• Effortless Web Security: Secure by Design in the Wild
• The Cloudflare Outage May Be a Security Roadmap
• Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Good engineering management is a fad