TSBT69: Coding Less, Thinking More!
"Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work."- Khaled Hosseini
My dearest reader, this recent heatwave is a hot reminder that it can always get hotter than we anticipate. On the bright side, it has made a cold pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie taste even more delicious. I guess sometimes it really is okay to be hot and cold at the same time. Wherever you are today, I hope your beverages are the perfect temperature, your day runs smoothly, and everything goes exactly your way. Life is meant to be lived, not just endured. Find the joy in the everyday.
60+ scenario-based system design interview questions to help build practical reasoning skills rather than memorise architectures. The book includes explanations to strengthen understanding. The questions progress from beginner to advanced, making them useful for seasoned developers as well as for interview prep.
Drunk Post: Things I’ve Learned as a Senior Engineer: Long-term success comes more from mastering core engineering principles than from chasing specific tech stacks. You need to be willing to change companies when growth stalls, write simple, maintainable code, and invest in communication and documentation. Senior engineering is less about knowing every technology and more about making sound trade-offs, staying adaptable, and focusing on people, fundamentals, and continuous learning.
The Agent-Era Career: Exercising judgement, choosing worthwhile problems, and taking responsibility for outcomes are among the most valuable engineering skills in the age of AI agents. He advises building a strong public reputation through meaningful work rather than chasing compensation. Being deliberate in practising core engineering skills without AI to preserve deep understanding, and treating AI as a collaborator. Engineers who thrive will be those who can identify important problems, direct AI effectively, validate its output, and add the final polish that transforms adequate AI-generated solutions into exceptional products.
Agentic Tip #6: Use Fable as an architect: Use the Fable model to analyse requirements, design the architecture, break work into detailed implementation tasks, and produce a clear execution plan. Delegate routine coding, file editing, testing, and other repetitive work to faster, less expensive models.
How to Become a Senior Software Engineer? I hired 1,000 of them: Becoming a senior software engineer is defined by impact, ownership, and leadership. Senior engineers consistently solve ambiguous problems, make sound architectural decisions, communicate effectively with stakeholders, mentor teammates, and improve the broader engineering organisation. Seniority is earned by consistently creating value for the team and the business, and by demonstrating judgment and ownership that others can depend on.
Reicon: is a free, open-source icon library for designers and frontend developers, offering pixel-perfect SVG icons for use across web applications. Every icon is manually designed for consistency and supports both outline and filled styles. It is also optimised for performance with tree-shaking and zero dependencies. Additionally, it provides an interactive playground for customising icon size, stroke width, and colour, making it easy to prototype and integrate icons into modern UI workflows
Get Ready For the Powerful CSS border-shape Property: the new border-shape CSS property lets developers create arbitrarily shaped elements without clipping away borders, shadows, outlines, or backgrounds. Browser support is still a work in progress, it is best suited for experimentation rather than production use today.
A Lot of Software Engineering Is Becoming Engineering Leadership: Engineers in AI-first organisations are increasingly expected to act like tech leads, taking responsibility beyond implementation. As a result, while technical skills remain essential, the greatest career advantage now comes from developing leadership, communication, empathy, and business awareness, enabling engineers to deliver impactful outcomes rather than simply complete assigned tasks.
What AI Secretly Changed About My Engineering: AI has fundamentally changed the nature of software engineering by revealing that requirements, architecture, legacy systems, and operational complexity have always been the harder problems. As routine coding becomes increasingly automated, the skills that create the most value are clear communication, domain knowledge, system design, critical thinking, and sound engineering judgment.
What is the future of software engineering with Adam Bender, Principal Software Engineer at Google: The future belongs to engineers who combine technical expertise with strong judgment, product thinking, and leadership.
The word of the day is snuggery. A snuggery is a snug, cosy place, usually a small, comfortable room you can retreat to.
Example in a sentence:
She spent the rainy afternoon in her snuggery under the stairs, a cup of piping hot chocolate in hand and a book on her lap.
I am making my grand departure into the unknown.
Take care of yourself!
Until the next fortnight, my treasured reader, go forth, and may the odds be ever in your favour! 👏 🤖 ✊ ☠️ 🏹 🪖
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