My dearest reader,

Have you received postcards yet? I have come to appreciate the art of writing postcards. The brevity of it and making sure all the important bits are there. I love all the advancements we have made in terms of communicating, but I like that I can steal moments and write a postcard about a fun thing I saw or the bird that almost flew too close to my face, with disregard for my personal space. Maybe even share that my newsletter got featured in Django News Newsletter issue 354, which had me all giddy, fuzzy, and warm inside.

I hope you get to experience the joy of writing and hopefully receiving a postcard too. Postcards are never dull.

Nikki: is a lightweight Linux terminal tool to capture notes and reminders without interrupting your workflow. Users can quickly add items with commands such as nikki add, then search or list them later.

Screenshot is dead, long live Snapshot: Daily dev now has snapshots you can share with friends instead of taking screenshots.

The Slow and Quiet Cognitive Atrophy of a Modern Software Engineer: over-reliance on AI tools can weaken a software engineer’s problem-solving skills if they prompt AI without first thinking through the problem. AI should complement reasoning, not replace it.

10 uncomfortable UX lessons from real design mistakes: Good UX(User Experience) is understanding how people work. Designers should prioritise users' mental models and familiarity, reduce cognitive load, and balance utility with aesthetics.

The Quiet Weight of Working in Tech in the AI Era: AI has raised expectations for speed and output, created anxiety that hard-earned skills may become obsolete, made engineers question how much of their competence is really theirs, and added the constant burden of checking AI-generated work for mistakes. At the same time, social media amplifies the pressure by showcasing people claiming huge productivity gains while rarely showing the anxiety behind them.

Agentic Skill Decay: Effective agent-assisted engineering increasingly depends on deep domain expertise and applied judgment, especially the ability to decide what to build, specify the desired outcome, steer the agent, and determine whether its work is actually correct. Engineers still need enough knowledge to recognise bad output and enough creativity to know what's worth building.

How to Grow Past Senior Engineer: Moving beyond Senior Engineer requires deliberately demonstrating impact, ownership, and credibility rather than waiting for a promotion. Four moves are:

• Tell your manager where you want your career to go

• Keep a brag list of achievements

• Become the go-to person for a project or domain

• Identify and lead meaningful improvements instead of just completing tasks

The title comes after you have started behaving at the next level.

Every Database Has These Seven Tables: This is a humorous argument that most production databases eventually accumulate the same kinds of strange legacy tables, regardless of industry. It shares that “nobody designed your database; it accumulated”, and now it's an archaeological museum of the people and incidents that helped shape the system over time.

The Terminal Is an Art: the command line is still one of the best tools because it’s simple, direct, transparent, powerful and durable. The author also argues that the terminal is especially well suited to AI agents, because agents can run commands, inspect output, iterate, and work directly within the same environment as the developer without needing a separate interface. The terminal feels like practising a craft.

The word of the day is Eurhythmic. Eurhythmic describes something that moves to a pleasing rhythm.

Example in a sentence:

The hip-hop dancers performed a eurhythmic routine in sync with the beat.

I am making my grand departure into the unknown.

Take care of yourself!

Until the next fortnight, my treasured reader, go forth, and may the odds be ever in your favour! 👏 🤖 ✊ ☠️ 🏹 🪖

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