Edition 34: Mark Allen on engineering management, CSS-Tricks is independent again, TanStack Redact | Design systems should be fast by default, Hunger beats tenure

The unwritten rules of engineering management with Mark Allen

New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. Mark Allen is Head of Engineering at Junction, after leading engineering at Isometric and running the Partners group at Glovo (Where I also worked).

We get into why you never stop being an IC, the mistakes he made as a new manager, how he handles underperformers, why he banned stand-ups at his startup and then brought them back, and management in the new AI world.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

Listen on Spotify

Community reads

CSS-Tricks is back

CSS-Tricks has a new owner! by Geoff Graham — after 12 years of working on the site he has the keys to the castle, and CSS-Tricks is independent again.

Taking Back CSS-Tricks by Mat Marquis — the other side of that story, what DigitalOcean's "stewardship" looked like from the inside. I love drama.

Engineering leadership

More output, less progress? by Francisco Trindade on Manager.dev — PR volume went up 4-5x, so why does the software barely improve?

Make yourself replaceable by Maroun Baydoun — being the person everyone depends on feels like job security, until you try to get promoted or take a holiday.

Salesforce – Part Two by Johnny Rodgers — what happened inside Slack after the acquisition, from the missing keyboard on day one to the day Stewart Butterfield left.

Career

Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers by Felix Rieseberg — a hiring manager at Anthropic stopped doing coding interviews, and thinks juniors have the biggest opening in years.

Web platform

Design Systems Should Be Fast by Default by Den Odell — the same 249-country dropdown takes 61ms to open in one of ten popular design systems and 1,266ms in another.

Introducing TanStack Redact by Tanner Linsley — a smaller replacement for React and React DOM in the browser that cut a sample Vite app's client bundle by 70% without changing a line of app code.

Tooling

Reylo by Colin McDonnell — import a .sql file straight into TypeScript and get the query's types from your live database, with no codegen step.

AI and agents

Dessa - the Conversation Model trained only on speech by Ragavan Thurairatnam at Block — a speech model trained on nothing but human conversation, so it hears the laughter and sarcasm that voice assistants lose.

Book recommendation

Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love by Richard Sheridan

Sheridan is the CEO and Chief Storyteller of Menlo Innovations, a small software company in Ann Arbor that people fly in to visit for its culture. Fed up with the long hours and failed projects he saw everywhere in the industry, he made joy the explicit goal of the company, built on pairing and on learning from mistakes out in the open. If you run a team, this is the book for deciding what it should feel like to work there.

Find it on Goodreads

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