Top of the Tech (week 2)
The second week of Top of the Tech brings you a curated list of 39 awesome newsletters
This week ended up with a whooping 40+ tech newsletters in my inbox 😮. Some even did not make it in this digest due to email size limitation. Below is a chart showing the distributions of ratings and audiences (both of those are subjective ofc).
With so many newsletters I foresee that scrolling through (even short and summarised) versions of all of them can be painful. To improve your UX when reading these, I ordered the list. Now, articles with ⭐⭐🌟 ratings go first and then articles with ⭐⭐ and ⭐ ratings follow.I hope that is helpful.
If it is not, or there are any other suggestions you want to share that will make the Top of the Tech newsletter more valuable drop the feedback below.
With all that out of the way, let’s kick off this week!
Happy reading! 📖 🙌
The one framework every engineer should know
High Growth Engineer
This article describes the MECE principle and how you can use it in your day-to-day life as a tech professional. It is a framework for structuring your thinking and your communication that can boost your impact. It was developed at McKinesy in 1960, but it goes back to Aristotle. I used the technique the day after I read about it and immediately got positive feedback on the clarity of my communication.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Improve how you think and communicate about problem-solving
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
Fake It Till You Make It — To Become a Leader, Act Like One 💵
Scarlet Ink
This article will move you from passively waiting for promotions to making it easier both for you and your manager to get you promoted. It describes a simple mind hack you can use to take more control of your career growth.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Simple technique that helps to get promotions faster
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
Software architecture with Grady Booch
The Pragmatic Engineer
Gergely does a podcast with a living legend of software - Grady Booch.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Get one of a kind perspective on software architecture and its history
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
What I wish somebody told me during my first year as a manager
Leading Developers
Two things to stop doing today as an Engineering Manager.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Become a better Engineering Manager
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Staff Engineer vs Engineering Manager
Alex Everlöf Notes
Amazing article on the role of Staff Engineers. It brings clarity to this role, and talks about Staff Engineer anti-patterns. Alex also shares when you need this role and when you don’t.
Audience: Staff Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Learn about the role of Staff Engineers
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Over-commenting is a code-smell: How to decide when comments are worth it
Strategize Your Career
In this article, Fran touches upon an everlasting debate around code commenting. Are comments bad? When should you comment code?
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn when (not) to use comments
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How to think about money - if you're a dev in Europe
The European Engineer
In this one, Nicola openly talks about materialism in tech and how software engineers are cheap bastards (ok, exaggerating a bit, he describes it as “being frugal” 🙂). He also gives a nice quick overview of tech compensation and savings rates in Europe.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Do not be a cheap bastard
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
From laid off to hired: A Software Engineer’s guide
Engineering Leadership
As you probably know the tech market is brutal for job-seekers at the moment. In this guest article, David Weiss shares insights on how he secured a new role 2 months after being laid off. I find this one to be generally relevant, not only for job-seekers but for everyone to increase situational awareness of the tech market state right now.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: How to secure a new job in the new tech market reality
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
From Developer to Engineering Manager: A Two-Stage Path
Besides Code
In this guest post, Péter Szász gives you a 2-stage plan for transitioning from being an individual contributor to people management.
Audience: Software Engineers aspiring to become Engineering Managers
Value: Plan for transitioning from IC to EM
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
A Crash Course on Using AI to Save Time and Focus on What Matters
ByteByteGo Newsletter
One more guest post where Peter Yang will teach you how to write great AI prompts by using very clear examples. Apart from that he gives an overview of his 8 favourite AI use cases for work.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Boost your AI prompting skills
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
IDEs with GenAI features that Software Engineers love
The Pragmatic Engineer
In this week’s deep-dive Gergely covers the explosion of AI-powered IDEs. There are some super cool new IDEs like Cursor and WindSurf. These IDEs are not just doing plain code completion, but are introducing AI agents that are directly making changes to the code.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn about the latest AI-powered IDEs that can boost your productivity
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
28 Year Old Staff Engineer @ Google
The Developing Dev
28-year-old tech professional from Google shares his path from Junior Engineer to manager. The newsletter is a summary of a podcast, so you can watch it if you prefer that format.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Career growth advice
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
It's all about the story
Tech Books
This week Orel reviews a book about storytelling. The article reminds me of two things:
how much I suck at storytelling and how much I need to improve it and
a recent statement on the power of storytelling from Yuval Noah Harari.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Improve your storytelling to super-power your career
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
The whole University IT system stopped working 😱
Engineering Leadership
This is a breif article that teaches you what is ransomware and the steps to take if you get hit by it.
Audience: IT specialists/System Admins/Security Engineers
Value: Learn about ransomware
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
6 Ways that Good People Build Trust, and Become Leaders That Others Follow 💵
Scarlet Ink
Free part of the article shows one way to build trust - by admitting your mistakes. I feel this one is valuable on its own so I included it in the newsletter.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Learn to admit your mistakes to gain trust
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Should you use Scrum in 2024? 🗺️ 💵
Hybrid Hacker
Spoiler alert, free version of the article will not answer the question from the title 🙂. However, I decided to include this one, because of a nice defintion of what is the role of a process in software development (this definition is applicable in general).
Audience: Software Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Learn what is the role of a process in software development
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Safe vs ALL-IN Engineering Management
Leading Developers
I feel like Anton opened up his heart to us in this one. Especially as the subtitle is “Why some people find it impossible to work with me“ 🙂 It is formatted as a personal 3-minute rant, but it does strike a cord.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Which type of EM are you?
ToT Rating: ⭐
Growth Through Vulnerability
Besides Code
This one briefly covers the topic of how showing vulnerability by asking for help can help both your growth and help in building kick-ass teams.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Value of asking for help
ToT Rating: ⭐
How LinkedIn Customizes Its 7 Trillion Message Kafka Ecosystem
ByteByteGo Newsletter
As you might already know Kafka is a piece of tech that came directly from LinkedIn. This article covers how LinkedIn uses Kafka and how do they make changes to it.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Kafka trivia
ToT Rating: ⭐
Measuring PR throughput—perspectives from SPACE author Brian Houck
Engineering Enablement
Article is an interview with Brian Houck from Microsoft that developed the SPACE framework and talks about using PR throuhput as the measure of productivity.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Measuring engineering productivity
ToT Rating: ⭐
How GenAI is reshaping tech hiring 💵
The Pragmatic Engineer
A deepdive on how and how much engineers are cheating using GenAI during interview processes.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Learn about AIded interview cheating
ToT Rating: ⭐
EP139: Design a Live Streaming System
ByteByteGo Newsletter
Whenever I needed to paginate an API I used the offset/limit pagination. In this episode, ByteByteGo describes why that can be suboptimal and why you should use cursor-based pagination instead for large data sets. It also gives a refresher on:
how live streaming works,
what is NAT (Network Address Translation) and how it enabled internet growth and
what are system design concepts you must know.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Refresh on important System Design concepts
ToT Rating: ⭐
SLI vs KPI
Alex Ewerlöf Notes
In this brief article, Alex Ewerlöf makes a distinction between SLIs and KPIs and elaborates on how they are (or are not) related to each other.
Audience: SREs/DevOps/Platform Engineers
Value: Learn to differentiate SLIs from KPIs
ToT Rating: ⭐
Is a PhD in CS worth it for European engineers?
The European Engineer
PHD is not considered as a must-have for software engineers. The article is giving you a few scenarios where PHD could prove useful for software engineers.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Do you need PHD as a Software Engineer?
ToT Rating: ⭐
Reactive Real-Time Notifications with SSE, Spring Boot, and Redis Pub/Sub
InfoQ
If you need uni-directional communication from the server to the client Server Side Events (SSE) might be an option for you. This article describes what is SSE, when to use it, and how to implement it with Spring WebFlux and Redis Pub/Sub.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to push data from the server to the client with Spring Boot
ToT Rating: ⭐
What causes 'bad days' for developers?
Engineering Enablement
Abi reviews a paper published by Microsoft on the causes of “bad days” for developers. They found that unreliable tooling, infra issues, and slow processes are the main pain points impacting developer productivity.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Learn about the main developer pain points
ToT Rating: ⭐
Code Quality in the Age of AI
Refactoring
The last DORA report published an interesting finding “As AI adoption increased, it was accompanied by an estimated decrease in delivery throughput by 1.5%, and an estimated reduction in delivery stability by 7.2%.”. Why is AI dropping delivery when it allows you to write more code faster? In this article, Luca gives some hypotheses and shares a framework for ensuring quality in the age of AI
Audience: Software Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Learn about AI impact on code quality
ToT Rating: ⭐
How to give a senior leader feedback (without getting fired)
Wes Kao's Newsletter
Wes gives you 4 techniques for giving feedback effectively with a lot of examples that make those techniques super clear.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Learn how to give feedback effectively
ToT Rating: ⭐
How to Explain Technical Concepts to Non-Technical Stakeholders
The Hustling Engineer
In this article you will get:
6-step framework for explaining technical concepts to non-technical audiences,
3 practical tips for communicating technical concepts effectively and
an exercise for you to practice explaining tech concepts.
Audience: Software Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Improve explaining tech concepts to non-tech audience
ToT Rating: ⭐
How to be "street smart" about your Tech Career in Europe
The European Engineer
Many great engineers are not reaching six-figure tech jobs in Europe. This article is just scratching the topic of taking control of your career growth and optimizing it so you get the most out of it.
Audience: Software Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Taking control of your career growth
ToT Rating: ⭐
Pair Programming in 2024 💵
Hybrid Hacker
This article is heavily paywalled but I decided to include it because pair programming is an amazing practice. The article has links to several other articles you can read on pair programming which are completely free.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn the value of pair programming
ToT Rating: ⭐
How Changing Teams Can Boost Your Career Growth
The Hustling Engineer
There are situations when switching teams could be beneficial for your careeer. In this short article Hemant summarises 5 scenarios when you should consider switching teams, how switching team could benefit you and how to switch like a boss.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: When to switch teams
ToT Rating: ⭐
AI coding tools, managers' productivity, and tech debt 💡
Refactoring
3 more random ideas from Luca in this one. Interestingly 2nd article in this week is covering the topic of AI coding tools. Seems like Cursor and Zed are capturing attention of a wider coding community. 2nd topic shows how the higher people raise in the org ranks, the more productive they feel - to the detriment to the rest of their team 🙂. 3rd topics cover everlasting topic of tech debt.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Get an overview of latest AI coding tools
ToT Rating: ⭐
One Thing I Wish I Changed
The Developing Dev
Short advice on work-life balance tactic you can (should) do to get more “life” without jeopardizing the “work”.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Improve your work-life balance
ToT Rating: ⭐