Hacking SaaS #36: New Year, New Blogs
2025 going well for everyone? So far so good? If your new year resolution included "reading more", "build more" and "ship more", you are at the right place.
The year just started, and I already feel behind on my reading. So much good stuff out there. Here are a few of my favorites - all pretty fresh for the new year.
Colt McNealy, long time active member of the SaaS Developer community published another post in his series on integration patterns: Retries and Dead Letter Queues. His blog is becoming a really great resource for anyone building microservices, especially of the event-driven kind. He also re-did the LittleHorse website over the holidays, so you may want to check it out and admire the chocolate-first design.
I restrained myself from too much AI for the holiday-reading post, but everyone is saying that 2025 is the year of the AI Agent, so we need to keep an eye on those. There’s a very comprehensive paper from Google called “Agents”, Agent design patterns from Anthropic, and if you are worried about AI Agents taking your job, this nice writeup on “70% problem” has good perspective. Last, but not least, this 2 hour video will catch you up on literally everything important about AI. I suggest watching while properly caffinated - it is super high pace and has 0 fluff.
On to security! This writeup from Wiz on how they found a serious vulnerability in a security tool is entertaining and educational. The issues they discovered - parsing bugs and prematurely stripping signatures are not uncommon. Its good to have an explicit example of how these can be exploited - in case someone asks why spend time on those small details.
And lets finish off with some engineering organization reading. I normally don’t link to LinkedIn posts, but this writeup on the various roles that principal engineers play in an organization is a great mental framework. And this blog on refining engineering strategies is pure gold. It has great patterns for working on engineering strategy - an activity that is as important as it is neglected.
Thats it for today! Don’t forget to leave a comment and let us know what topics you love most, which links were the most useful and what you want to see more of.