The top things I found this week 🏆

Week #50 / 2025 — Edition #4

Hey there! 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.

Here are this week’s top items 👇

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👓 Readings

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🥇 Frictionless

Book • by Nicole Forsgren & Abi Noda

I just finished reading the new book by Nicole Forsgren (co-author of Accelerate) and Abi Noda (co-founder of DX) about removing barriers that slow engineering teams down. I loved it — feels like the perfect follow up to Accelerate.

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🥈 Increasing Your Luck Surface Area

2 min • by Jason Roberts

I stumbled on this while reviewing Umberto’s article on Refactoring, and loved it. Your luck is not random, it’s a function of doing things + telling people about them. The more you do, and the more you share, the more serendipity finds you.

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🥉 Invert, Always Invert

10 min • by James Stanier

Charlie Munger’s classic mental model applied to engineering leadership. Instead of asking “how do I succeed?”, ask “how would I guarantee failure?” Then avoid those things. Very practical article with a lot of examples.

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4) How Good Engineers Write Bad Code at Big Companies

8 min • by Sean Goedecke

Great take that connects the dots between bad code, short tenure, and incentives that prize shipping rather than maintaining. That’s how you get great engineers to write bad code. It’s a systemic issue, not a talent one.

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5) Revisiting Manager READMEs

4 min • by Camille Fournier

Years after her famous critique of Manager READMEs, Camille revisits the topic. She argues that READMEs are not 100% bad, but you can easily do better by decentralizing the instructions into the respective processes and ceremonies. Make instructions less about you and more about what needs to be done.

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🛠️ Tools

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Fizzy

Couldn’t I leave out a new tool from 37signals? Nope. Fizzy is a very opinionated take on Kanban. In a nutshell, it’s about keeping momentum, keeping lists fresh, and avoiding long backlogs. It’s peak 37signals philosophy, but the design is extremely polarizing and will not appeal to everyone!

PGlite

Full Postgres running in your browser via WASM. Just 3.7MB compressed. So cool! Useful for local-first apps, demos, or anywhere you need a real database without a server.

Pylar

Sensible middleware to give AI agents safe access to your structured data sources — i.e. databases. You can create governed SQL views, build MCP tools, and deploy to popular agent builder. For teams (legitimately) worried about letting LLMs loose on their dbs.

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And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca