December 2025

Author

Cody Hiar
December 12, 2025

It's December, and Christmas is almost here! I can finally unlock the cozy section of my wardrobe and bask in the glory of oversized sweaters. Time for the annual viewing of Elf and a good helping of eggnog. Let's see what Santa has in his big bag of links:

What's the use of having a newsletter if you can't do a little self-promotion from time to time? I'm excited to share the tool I've been working on with Andrew Montalenti and Nelson Monseratte: PX. Instead of trying to explain it here, I'll let Andrew's launch post do the talking. If you enjoy tooling that turns working local code into live production reality, this one's for you.

Chances are that if you are reading this newsletter, you were affected when Cloudflare went down earlier this month. The blog itself is a great read; it's even more impressive when you consider that it:

  • came out only 24 hours after the incident, and

  • was written by Cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince.

When people talk about setting an example from the top, this is about as good as it gets. This is what a strong postmortem culture looks like from the outside.

When you think of Bell Labs, you'll likely conjure images of extremely intelligent people working on innovative projects. It's the birthplace of Unix and C, among many other accolades, including 11 Nobel Prizes and 5 Turing Awards. But what happened in between great discoveries? In this article, Elizabeth Van Nostrand interviews her dad about his time at the company tackling the less shiny projects. I love a good dose of the boring.

If you feel like everything you read online is pushing you closer to the brink of insanity, you're not alone. Polarizing comments grab our attention and suck us in, which is how much of the internet makes money. How does one (thou? Bring back thou) remain sane in such an environment? Joan Westenberg talks about some of the things you can do to keep your mind from melting. As long as your current revenue streams don't rely on extreme opinions, you can remedy the situation with some intentional consumption.

Have you heard the story of how baby elephants are tamed for circuses? When they are young, the baby is tied to a steel stake in the ground that it cannot break. By the time it is old enough to break free from the stake, it gives up trying. Old notions can hold us back in our progress and even fool us into thinking we're trying to solve the problem. To sum it up:

The feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re actually trying.

This post almost exactly mirrors my experience while working at Parse.ly. Ask anyone about Staff Engineering, and they will say you need to focus on impact, which generally translates to high-visibility, product-led initiatives. But there is another way:

One that optimizes for systems over spotlights, and stewardship over fungibility.

Lalit Maganti talks about the path of building mission-critical tooling to help support other developers in their daily tasks. At Parse.ly, I worked on a project to build a platform that streamlined delivering code to production. Do clients see these features? No. It allowed other developers to deliver their work faster. There's still work to do in promoting your work and controlling your narrative. But you don’t have to chase the spotlight to have a meaningful, high-impact career.

thelinklist.dev is a project by Cody Hiar.