The top things I found this week 🏆
A different edition than usual!
Hey, Luca here!
Today I am trying something different than usual, and rather than giving you an essay about some specific topic, I am going to list the best articles I have read this week, plus the most interesting tools I spotted.
Why?!?
Because so many people ask me what I am reading these days. Engineers are hungrier than ever for good reading, because of everything that it’s going on.
So I started by doing a simple thing: I made what I read public. I created this Mailbrew digest that I receive every day, which includes a combination of community listings (Hacker News, Slashdot, Product Hunt), magazines, and amazing individual blogs.
Mailbrew it’s free and you can clone the digest or simply subscribe to it to read literally the same things I read every day 👇
But that’s not enough! I still read probably only 10% of what I receive in the digest, and, out of that, very few articles were actually worth my (and your) time.
So let’s go one step forward, and just list the best things I actually read, and why.
Also, mind you, the fact I read those this week doesn’t mean they went out this week (even if it’s often the case). I could have saved them for later and caught up after days, weeks, or even months!
But if you accommodate for some delay, the promise here is immaculate signal — only the very best comes through.
So here they are for this week:
👓 Weekly Readings
1) Positraction
2 min • by Boz (Meta)
Boz managed to put into words why diversity matters, better than I ever could. An evergreen piece, in only 200 words.
2) The Profitable Startup
4 min • by Karri Saarinen (Linear)
Linear is spear-heading a culture shift in which even top-tier, VC-backed startups can focus on quality and profitability rather than growth at all costs. Awesome article with many timeless mental models.
3) Collaboration sucks
4 min • by Charles Cook (PostHog)
Refreshing and provocative piece on why solo work is often preferable to collaboration. This is one of the most important mental models to wrap our heads around, especially now in the age of AI and product engineering.
4) Reflections on Palantir
24 min • by Nabeel Qureshi (Palantir)
One of the best pieces I read the whole year. It covers so much ground: the case for working for morally ambiguous companies, forward-deployed engineering (which is hot right now), company culture, and more.
5) The Sound of Inevitability
2 min • by Tom Renner
Inevitabilism is the belief that certain developments are impossible to avoid. This is most often false, and we should fight for the future we want, rather than take others’ futures for granted.
I also have a short list of tools I found this week which I saved for later.
I can’t fully endorse them because I barely managed to try them, but that’s not the point: when something looks interesting, I save it in my tool database on Notion, and possibly fetch it in the future when needed.
Consider this a way to keep the pulse on new things that get released:
🔧 Weekly Tools
1) Jam.dev
Auto-captures all the info engineers need to reproduce a bug. Looks pretty neat!
2) Vibecode
A mobile app to vibe-code other mobile apps! It builds everything in React Native + Expo, and you can test it live on your phone. Nice and well-made!
3) Fire your QA
The name was enough to look into it 😂 looks pretty clever but hard to figure out how well it will work on real-world scenarios.
4) Chatter
Search for stock tickers and fetch ideas from Reddit. This was way better made than I expected! It gives plenty of context about the stock and even displays the hit rate of the authors of posts.
5) Cyrus
A Claude Code agent that attaches to Linear and works autonomously when you attach tasks to it. I got pitched Cyrus many times and only recently got to test it, and it’s really cool (see the video demo for more detail).
And that’s it! How did you like this email? Since it’s a new format, I would love to get feedback from you 👇
And that’s it for today!
Sincerely
Luca