🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Deanna Tran, senior software engineer at Cloudflare. Deanna has a background in software engineering and community leadership, and she’s currently working on some really interesting problems around AI agents and security. She recently co-authored a great article on building an evidence-grounded agentic security operations harness, which is a fantastic look at how Cloudflare is putting agents to work. Thank you so much for everything you do, Deanna!
💯 Spotlight
I’m starting us off this week with a piece of satire instead of our normal deep engineering blog post. Last week, Degenerative Pixels, a YouTube channel that makes music videos with AI, shared a video that is unfortunately right on the money for the state of our industry. The video is called LGTM, and it pokes fun at how we’re (generally) increasingly tossing work over the wall to AI and letting it take the wheel. There’s less supervision than there ever has been and diminishing proof that what we’re doing is actually moving us forward faster. The song is an absolute banger, too. 😅
🔥 My Favorite Content
Doubling down on the “LGTM” mentality, Tamiz Uddin wrote a great article last week talking about the code review paradox and how code reviews are legitimately changing. We need to stop relying on code coverage (honestly, we should never have used this as a quality metric) and AI-generated tests and make intentional shifts over to reviewing semantic changes instead of syntax changes. I like the methods Tamiz suggests in this article, it’s something I hadn’t considered but makes a lot of sense.
Shifting gears a bit, Danielle Heberling posted an article as an homage to Infrastructure Composer, which AWS recently announced they are discontinuing. Danielle worked on the original version of Infrastructure Composer at Stackery, and her article recounts its progression to its eventual sunset. But it’s not all grey skies, Danielle talks about the lessons she learned and the opportunities she’s had because of her early work, which is a great reminder to all of us that it’s about the people you encounter and the lessons you learn throughout your career, not necessarily the products you work on.
Speaking of lessons, I found a HackerNews thread particularly interesting last week where members were sharing what they use a cheap, personal VPS for. The entire thread is sharing ideas and lessons learned from hosting their home servers, and there are so many good ones! Reading through this gave me tons of ideas to start doing at home. I felt really inspired after reading all these success stories.
But nothing made me more inspired than Anton Frolov’s article last week where he hired an illustrator to draw his house for his Home Assistant dashboard. This has to be one of the best stories I’ve read about solving a non-technical problem with a beautiful user experience. Anton talks about how nobody in his family would use the home automation he setup because they didn’t want to use an app to control anything. So he took it upon himself to make an absolutely stunning dashboard that shows the state of his house and lets his family control things by touching them. It’s a fantastic idea and exceptional outcome.
💡 Tip of the Week
Sometimes the short and sweet posts are the most impactful. Especially when they come from an influential source with decades of credibility behind them. Last week, Kelsey Hightower posed a simple statement about super intelligence that says so much in only 12 words.
Last Words
This week the AWS re:Invent session scheduler opened. Unfortunately for me, I forgot and when I went an hour after it opened, all the sessions I wanted were booked up. Did you have better luck than I did? Guess I’ll see y’all in line 😅
That’s my take on the week, but what’s yours?
What did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you’re reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.
Happy coding!
Allen