The top things I found this week 🏆
Week #49 / 2025
Welcome to a new edition of Hybrid Hacker, in this new digest format! If you missed last week’s announcement, you can find it here.
It’s still very experimental and every week I am trying new things. Here is what’s new today:
🏆 There is a ranking — I ranked articles in rough order of how much I liked them, so if you don’t have a lot of time you can choose to read only the best of the best.
📣 There is a sponsor — I am including one sponsored tool among the ones on the weekly list, but only if I can genuinely recommend it! Today’s one is Snyk.
Back to the list!
👓 Readings
🥇 Become the Consequence
10 min • by Rands
How to think about your role as a senior leader. You are not thinking in tasks anymore — you are thinking in strategy, sharing it repeatedly and enforcing the consequences of achieving / not achieving goals.
🥈 Tying Engineering Metrics to Business Metrics
4 min • by Iccha Sethi
How to tie leading engineering metrics like test coverage or PR size, to lagging business metrics like CAC or ARR. I consider myself a connoisseur of metrics articles and this is a really good one!
🥉 Writing a good CLAUDE.md
9 min • by Kyle Mistele
How to write an effective CLAUDE.md by thinking about strategy and first principles, rather than pure tactics. Loved many of the ideas, like the progressive disclosure, less is more, and the why/what/how.
4) Productivity Rain Dances
2 min • by Cal Newport
There are busy activities that feel productive but don’t lead to real results. Productivity nerds like me are often guilty of focusing more on inputs (how I do stuff), rather than actual outputs (what results they bring). Great reminder and memorable mental model.
5) Detailed Nano Banana Prompting
24 min • by Max Woolf
I think Nano Banana Pro didn’t get enough attention vs the wider Gemini 3 (and now Claude Opus 4.5) releases. For me it’s been an incredible step change in many of the things previous models struggled with, like text and diagrams. It can also be prompted with a lot of detail, and this is the best guide I have found about it.
🔧 Tools
1) Snyk (sponsor!)
Snyk is an awesome platform to handle all-things-security for your engineering team, and I have used it a lot in the past. Next week they are also hosting a live session about the new OWASP Top 10, to go through the new emerging threats, and practical measures you can adopt.
2) HOTO Tools
Ok this is not software! Inspired by this amazing video (check out the whole channel, really), I went on to a quest to upgrade some of the DYI tools I have at home, and I just love these by HOTO. I have one of their screwdrivers and am planning to buy more stuff!
3) Agenta.ai
This looks very good: a full open-source suite to handle all-things-LLMOps, including prompts, evals, observability, and more.
4) Once UI
I am a sucker for design systems / frameworks, but I also have a high standards. Once clears them: it’s open source, comprehensive, and includes both code (Next.js) and design (Figma).
And that’s it for today!
Sincerely 👋
Luca