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.