August 2025

Author

Cody Hiar
August 06, 2025

August is here and so is another exciting digest of links that made my brain tick. The summer is nearing on it's second half but I was able to get some time in visiting family near Climax, Saskatchewan. Where the people are few, the skies are grand, and the slogan "Please Come Again" is painting on the sign as you leave town. But enough about that, let's talk about some links.

Meetings are an unfortunate necessity of the engineer's life. One that, with some deliberate intention, can be made less painful. In this post, Emil Rosendahl walks us through his ideas on what a great culture looks like. One of my favourite uses of AI is having meeting notes automatically summarized and sent out to digest async. This makes it much easier to say no to meetings, one of the main points of the article. One thing the article doesn't touch on is the value of meetings for the sake of team cohesion in remote settings. Something, I hope, the author will expand on in a future post.

Generally, I don't recommend links without having fully read them, but this is one I'm willing to make an exception for. It's going to take some time to chew through this one, so buckle up. Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and John Ousterhout are two titans in the field of code design. Robert authored Clean Code while John authored A Philosophy of Software Design. This README is the result of a series of discussions between the two. I'm only partway through and highly recommend taking the time to get through this one.

Hopefully, you will want to read this one out of curiosity rather than your current circumstances. Every engineer will eventually reach a point in their career where this becomes a reality. Scott Kosman talks about what comes with transitioning into the manager role and the necessary changes you'll need to make. These kinds of articles can provide useful insights on how to better understand your relationship with your current manager. Scott even added a Part 2 on performance management that I'll be adding to my reading list.

Michael Lynch has reached the front page of Hacker News over 30 times and has a blog that attracts 300k-500k unique readers per year. He knows a thing or two about capturing the attention of developers. While this blog post is about attracting developers to your blog, I think the points apply broadly to all your writing. As a Staff Engineer, it's imperative to communicate your ideas clearly.

This is another long one but I love it. I've read it twice now. Utsav Mamoria weaves together a beautiful story about the journey towards intellectual depth. Armed with your Axe of Satisfaction, Torch of Curiosity, and Oars of Routine, you too can adventure to The Mountains of Knowledge. Once you get there, make sure you take time to come down from your peak. I wouldn't suggest following Paul Erdős's example of using amphetamines along your path, to each their own.

This is probably my favourite resource to recommend to other developers. The Grug Brained Developer is a guide written by Carson Gross on how to avoid accidental complexity. I like to use the term accidental complexity from Rich Hickey because there will always be some degree of essential complexity to the problem being solved. There are many good lessons in here to soak up; take the time to digest them. A quote that's recently stuck with me:

humility not often come big brained or think big brained easily or grug even, but grug often find "oh, grug no like look of this, grug fix" lead many hours pain grug and no better or system worse even

thelinklist.dev is a project by Cody Hiar.