Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
14 minutes by Avery Pennarun

Avery points out that more approval layers dramatically slow work, mostly due to waiting time, not effort. While reviews aim to improve quality, too many create delays and hide root causes of errors. AI speeds up coding but doesn’t fix slow review pipelines. Lasting improvement comes from reducing reviews, building trust, and designing systems where teams produce high-quality work from the start, addressing problems at their source rather than catching them later.

The end of push-wait-guess CI
sponsored by Depot

Edit YAML, commit, push, wait, squint at logs, guess, repeat. That was CI debugging. Watts, an engineer at Depot, walks through how Depot CI turns it into a local loop you can actually control — run against uncommitted changes, scope to one job, SSH into the machine, fix it, rerun.

Shell tricks that actually make life easier
9 minutes by Christian Hofstede-Kuhn

Many shell shortcuts have existed since 1989 but never get taught. Christian explains how simple key combos like CTRL+W to delete a word, CTRL+R to search history, or CTRL+Z followed by disown to free a locked terminal can save enormous time. Brace expansion, process substitution, and script safety flags like set -u prevent both tedious retyping and serious mistakes. Christian suggests to learn one trick at a time until it becomes habit.

The unwritten laws of software engineering
7 minutes by Anton Zaides

Experienced engineers learn most lessons by breaking things first. When production fails after a deployment, roll back immediately instead of trying to prove your change is innocent. Backups only matter if you have tested restoring from them, every external service will eventually fail, and temporary fixes tend to become permanent. When in doubt, always get a second pair of eyes before touching anything risky.

Big tech engineers need big egos
10 minutes by Sean Goedecke

Sean claims that strong self-belief is essential for software engineers, especially in large companies. You need confidence to take firm positions, challenge wrong assumptions, and push through complex problems. But ego must have limits. When it comes to organizational decisions made above your level, you have to let go, even if your work gets cancelled or caught in political crossfire. The best engineers know when to speak up and when to step back.

Sorting algorithms
1 minute by Simon Willison

Simon's project creates simple animated demos of common sorting algorithms using Claude. It includes bubble, selection, insertion, merge, quick, heap, and a Timsort-inspired method. The interface was improved with better colors and a “run all” feature that shows all algorithms working at once. The result is an easy way to compare how different sorting methods behave.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• 7 more common mistakes in architecture diagrams