Issue #704
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 3rd April’s issue is presented by SerpApi
SerpApi: The Ultimate Sidekick For Your AI Applications
AI is smarter when it can search the web. How are AI companies doing it? Meet the worst-kept secret in the AI industry: the SerpApi web search API. Scrape Google and other search engines, integrate with a dead-simple GET request that any agent can make. Used by NVIDIA, Uber, Adobe, and even the United Nations.
Give it a try now; no sign-up needed.
I’m An Introvert. This Is How I Get Myself To Speak Up.
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “I often get readers who ask, ‘Wes, if I’m not naturally loud, how do I speak up or talk about my accomplishments? How do I gain more visibility, either internally in my company or externally online?’”
CareerAdvice
What Kinds Of New Debt Are Teams Accumulating With AI?
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey at the University of Victoria proposes a ‘triple debt model’ for reasoning about software system health, drawing on recent empirical research on developer cognition, AI-assisted development, and software evolution. The paper is a conceptual framework, not a controlled experiment - it synthesizes findings across multiple studies to argue that technical debt alone is an incomplete lens.”
Leadership Management
The Ultimate Sidekick for Your AI Applications
tl;dr: “AI is smarter when it can search the web. How are AI companies doing it? Meet the worst-kept secret in the AI industry: the SerpApi web search API: (1) Scrape Google and other search engines (including AI overviews, Maps, Shopping, Amazon, and more). (2) Integrate with a dead-simple GET request that any agent can make. (3) Used by NVIDIA, Uber, Adobe, and even the United Nations.”
Promoted by SerpApi
Tools
What I Learned From Nearly 1,000 Interviews At Amazon
— Steve Huynh
tl;dr: “’A Bar Raiser is a specially trained interviewer whose job is to ensure that every hire raises the average talent level at Amazon. I had veto power over any candidate. I sat on nearly a thousand interview loops across every level from intern to Principal Engineer.’ Steven discusses the patterns that emerged.”
Leadership Management Hiring
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” — Henry Ford
No Semicolons Needed
— Terts Diepraam
tl;dr: “’I’m making a scripting language called Roto. Like so many programming languages before it, it has the goal of being easy to use and read. Many languages end up making semicolons to delimit or terminate statements optional to that end. I want that too!’”
LanguageDesign
IaCConf: How Teams Manage IaC At Scale
tl;dr: “Most IaC content focuses on theory. This virtual conference is different. IaCConf brings together engineers sharing what’s actually working in production - from scaling to managing complexity across teams. Real lessons from operators and practical patterns you can apply.”
Promoted by Spacelift
Event
The Skill Of Using AI Agents Well
tl;dr: “’What tips, tricks, approaches are you using to improve your efficiency when using agent harnesses? I personally focus on Claude Code & Codex CLI mostly for single person software development, but I welcome suggestions for other tools and other areas of use.’”
Agents
Reading Leaked Claude Code Source Code
tl;dr: “’Anthropic accidentally leaked a source map file containing the full, unobfuscated TypeScript source code. 1,897 files around 132,000 LOC. What I found is a piece of software that is surprisingly more opinionated and more paranoid than I expected. Here are some of things that I found worth talking about.’”
Claude Design
Architecture Decision Record
— Martin Fowler
tl;dr: “’An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and contain the decision, the context for making it, and significant ramifications.’”