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Happy Monday (first of the year)! ☀️
Wishing everyone a productive and healthy 2026, I feel like this year is going to be huge both for the industry and the hungry minds that are reading this. This year, I plan to have:
Better and intentional volume around the curation issues, with more thoughts and commentary blended in to increase your signal-to-noise ratio
Sharp, occasional deep dives on relevant topics of the industry to keep the deeper parts of learning software engineering/AI
Exclusive resources for our community and unique opportunities and partners
And welcome to the 433 new hungry minds who have joined us since last Monday!
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📚 Software Engineering Articles
Discover why clock synchronization remains engineering's biggest challenge
Learn internal dev tooling secrets from Meta's engineering team
Connection pooling demystified for better database performance
Build smarter AI-powered agents for internal tools
Challenge engineering dogmas holding your team back
🗞️ Tech and AI Trends
OpenAI's compensation breaks records in tech industry history
Warren Buffett's exit marks the end of an era
Meta acquires Manus for $2B, expanding AI capabilities
👨🏻💻 Coding Tip
Master Zsh glob qualifiers to streamline complex file operations efficiently
Time-to-digest: 5 minutes
Big thanks to our partners for keeping this newsletter free.
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Shopify's platform processed a mind-bending 90 petabytes of data during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2025, handling 489M requests/minute at peak. This massive scale required a complete rebuild of their readiness program, involving thousands of engineers working for nine months.
The challenge: Prepare a global e-commerce platform to handle unprecedented traffic spikes while maintaining reliability across multiple regions, with some systems facing their first BFCM.
Implementation highlights:
Three-track approach: Parallel execution of capacity planning, infrastructure roadmap, and risk assessments with continuous feedback
Game Days: Chaos engineering exercises simulating production failures at BFCM scale, starting in early spring
Resiliency Matrix: Centralized documentation tracking vulnerabilities, incidents, and fixes across the platform
Load testing at scale: Custom tool (Genghis) simulating real user behavior across three Google Cloud regions
Progressive testing: Five major scale tests ramping up to 150% of previous year's load
Results and learnings:
Massive scale: Successfully handled 200M requests/minute in final tests
Regional resilience: Validated disaster recovery through complete regional failovers
System hardening: Identified and fixed critical issues in analytics, API layers, and core infrastructure
The key takeaway? Success at scale requires systematic, continuous testing; not just hope and last-minute fixes. Shopify's approach shows that preparation isn't about surviving one big day - it's about building lasting infrastructure improvements.
ARTICLE (future vibes)
Agentic AI, MCP, and spec-driven development: Top blog posts of 2025
ESSENTIAL (meta secrets revealed)
The Pulse #157: Internal dev tooling at Meta & the "trajectories" feature
GITHUB REPO (zoom zoom data)
TRON
GITHUB REPO (brain bytes)
Ensue Memory Network
ESSENTIAL (log drama)
Logging Sucks
ARTICLE (robot snail mode)
Slowing Down AI On Purpose
ESSENTIAL (humans ftw)
The Future of Software Development is Software Developers
ARTICLE (hands-on or hands-off)
You can't design software you don't work on
ARTICLE (snake bye bye)
Go away, Python!
Want to reach 200,000+ engineers?
Let’s work together! Whether it’s your product, service, or event, we’d love to help you connect with this awesome community.
Brief: Meta makes a strategic move by acquiring Manus, an AI startup bringing millions of paying users to strengthen its artificial intelligence portfolio and expand its market presence.
Brief: Analysis reveals Simon Willison tops Hacker News for third year with AI content, followed by Jeff Geerling, Sean Goedecke, Brian Krebs, and Neal Agarwal, showcasing how quality content and consistent publishing drive success on the platform.
Brief: Legendary investor Warren Buffett hands over Berkshire Hathaway to Greg Abel after transforming it from a textile mill into a $1-trillion conglomerate, while remaining as chairman and planning to continue providing guidance from his office.
Brief: A comprehensive look at how 2025 transformed AI, from Chinese labs dominating open-weight models to the rise of coding agents, while prompt injection concerns grew and $200/month subscriptions became standard for premium AI services.
Brief: OpenAI is making headlines by offering unprecedented compensation packages to attract top talent, with some engineers earning $800k-$1M annually, marking the highest salary standards ever seen in tech startup history.
This week’s coding challenge:
This week’s tip:
Zsh glob qualifiers provide powerful file filtering directly in pathname expansion, eliminating the need for separate find commands. Qualifiers like (.) for files, (/) for directories, and (om) for modification time sorting streamline complex file operations.
Wen?
Build cleanup scripts: Finding old build artifacts or temporary files with complex criteria
Log rotation automation: Selecting log files based on age, size, and permissions
Deployment verification: Checking file permissions and ownership patterns across directories
Life is a series of choices, and all we can do is make them.
Kamal Ravikant
That’s it for today! ☀️
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See you in a week — Alex.
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