Friday 21st February’s issue is presented by WorkOS
How Will Your App Survive The AI Bot Wars?
Today’s bots can easily bypass traditional detection — executing JavaScript, storing cookies, rotating IPs, and even solving advanced CAPTCHAs.
Their attacks are advanced by the day, fueled by growth in AI agents. So how do you block these bad actors? The answer is WorkOS Radar.
A single JS script is all it takes to instantly protect your signup flow. Whether it’s brute force attacks, leaked passwords, or throwaway emails, WorkOS Radar can catch it all, keeping your real users safe from abuse.
Protect Your App With WorkOS Radar Today
Eyes Light Up (ELU)
— Wes Kao (
)tl;dr: Wes introduces "Eyes Light Up" as a key indicator of effective messaging for leaders. Rather than relying on intellectual feedback, she advises watching for genuine excitement in your audience's eyes. These visceral reactions are more valuable than verbal responses. Stop when eyes glaze over, pivot when interest wanes.
Leadership Management
The Rotation Program That Keeps This Startup’s Engineers Learning — And Not Leaving
— Krista Moroder
tl;dr: Over the past several years, Moroder has helped formalize the rotation program at Checkr, and she’s scored some pretty brag-worthy retention stats as a result. “Two years ago, non-regrettable attrition was zero, and the year after that, it was 2% — because one person left. Across the board, my team is extremely tenured right now,” says Moroder. “For staff engineers and above, about 60% of them have been here six years or longer.
Leadership Management
What Is Device Fingerprinting And How Does It Work?
— Zack Proser
tl;dr: “Every time a device connects to your server, it broadcasts a wealth of information through its browser. Some of these signals are obvious, while others are subtle technical artifacts of how browsers and hardware work together.” Zack breaks down what servers can see and how to mitigate bad actors.
Promoted by WorkOS
Security Management BestPractices
Gaining Years Of Experience In A Few Months
— Marc Gauthier
tl;dr: “My takeaway is that, when you get the chance to be faced with an opportunity that could get you in the “fast growth” zone, it’s very important to focus and make the most of it. Projects that can challenge you this much do not always appear, so when they do and you are in the right place to handle them it’s a great opportunity.”
CareerAdvice
"A leader’s job is to look into the future and see the organization not as it is, but as it can become." - Jack Welch
Judge Your Coworkers
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)tl;dr: “One of the most counterproductive things that companies do is coach people to not judge their coworkers. Having an understanding of your coworkers’ performance means that you understand what they do, and understanding what they do is critical to making sure you collaborate with them effectively. This is especially important if you’re in a leadership role or a cross-functional team. Also, raising the alarm on peer underperformance can be both necessary and highly impactful.”
CareerAdvice
Validate Your SaaS Idea While Building An Audience
— Brian Morrison
tl;dr: In this guide, you'll learn how to validate market demand for your next SaaS idea before investing resources blindly. Using Clerk's <Waitlist /> component allows you to capture intent signal as you're building project awareness. Paired with a newsletter platform, you unlock the ability to keep interested parties up to date on progress, keeping them engaged and building anticipation ahead of your launch.
Promoted by Clerk
Guide
"A Calculator App? Anyone Could Make That"
— Chad Nauseam
tl;dr: “A calculator should show you the result of the mathematical expression you entered. That's much, much harder than it sounds. What I'm about to tell you is the greatest calculator app development story ever told.”
Entertaining
My LLM Codegen Workflow ATM
— Harper Reed
tl;dr: “I have been building so many small products using LLMs. It has been fun, and useful. However, there are pitfalls that can waste so much time. A while back a friend asked me how I was using LLMs to write software. I thought “oh boy. how much time do you have!” and thus this post.”
LLM
How DoorDash Leveraged Its Product Knowledge Graph To Enable A High-Velocity Tagging And Badging Experience
— Irene Chen, Chuanpin Zhu
tl;dr: “DoorDash launched a number of item badges — user interface (UI) components that highlight key product attributes, such as the number of items in stock. Some badges performed well, while some did not. One thing was clear, though — consumers noticed the badges and changed their behaviors based on their perception of the badge’s value proposition. In this blog post, we explore the issues we encountered trying to ship new badges and the resulting architectural changes that we made.”