Positional Dominance Is Making You a Worse Engineer At Staff level, needing to be the source of every best idea — positional dominance — quietly undermines your leadership. Here's the shift to outcome dominance.

Your ego wants to win the idea. Your career needs to win the outcome. Positional dominance is making senior engineers worse at their jobs.
devdosvid.blog/2026/02/19/p...

Pro tip number 714: do not buy new Sony full-sized headphones, just change the ear pads on your current ones. Amazon has plenty of them. Thank me later.

With IaC rooted so deep into infra management with its declarative and deterministic behavior, using agentic CLI tool that is never deterministic feels quite unnatural now.

Docker Model Runner Learn how to use Docker Model Runner to manage and run AI models.

🔦 Tool Spotlight – Docker Model Runner – an easy and fast way to run LLM models locally or in CI. Curated list of LLM models to use as simple as "docker model run", or through "chat/completions " for models compatible with the OpenAI API. bit.ly/43uqoIh bit.ly/4mqPJv0

GitHub - simonw/llm: Access large language models from the command-line Access large language models from the command-line - simonw/llm

🔦 Tool Spotlight: Simon Willison's "llm" CLI.
Game-changer for my PR workflow! I pipe git diffs to analyze changes, generate descriptions, and get a concise result without leaving my terminal.

"cat changes.diff | llm -t pr-description"

Saves me like 20min per PR. Try it!

Oh thanks for watching! 💚 In short words, it’s a combination of support from leadership and real value for the teams (by co-creating templates with devs). Of course not 100% use them but we “softly” close the possibilities of custom setups making them exceptional. So majority accepted it well.

Should we expect a podcast? This would be an amazing duet!

AI-hype train is unstoppable! 🔆 Tool Spotlight: kubectl-ai - AI-powered #Kubernetes agent. It works as a standalone tool or a plugin for kubectl. Made by Google and works with different AI providers! But not an officially supported product and without Claude (for now?). bit.ly/44SKfD0

Super excited about my upcoming talk at UXDX next week! If you will attend the conference, drop me a message here — I'll be happy to connect! #uxdx #techtalk #engineeringplatform #devops #platformengineering

Prototyping with AI models - GitHub Docs Find and experiment with AI models for free.

🔦 Tool Spotlight: Apparently, GitHub Models service provides FREE access (rate limits apply, though) to a few popular AI models, incl GPT-o4-mini, for experiments and low-activity usage with GitHub CLI or API for anything else (including GitHub Actions). Go check it out! #github #aitooling #devtools

Well, there is an AI CEO as well; I bet we can gather a full staff with those tools so they could launch a startup 😀

servers/src/sequentialthinking at 93a9e036bfd801096b8cb545ebe9e089cb282893 · modelcontextprotocol/servers Model Context Protocol Servers. Contribute to modelcontextprotocol/servers development by creating an account on GitHub.

So far, the one perk I know to improve the decision-making capabilities — is to use the sequential thinking MCP from Anthropic. This adds up to the total “thinking” time but results are generally better and decision making is more reliable.
github.com/modelcontext...

Nice article; thanks for sharing! That one about “blind copy-paste coding” is a good sign indeed, but it kind of contradicts those agentic features when an assistant can make code changes for you. Anyway, I believe over-reliance on AI makes one a weaker engineer in the long run.

⚒️ Tool Spotlight:
Sequential Thinking MCP from Anthropic is quite a thing! And #TIL that you need to explicitly ask Claude to use that tool. This helps a lot with breaking down complex problems or branching into alternative paths of reasoning. bit.ly/3EO9eg7
#Claude #MCP #MCPservers #DevTools

IMO, there is nothing shocking in that as long as it is the human then who reads that code and commits/pushes to git. I write a lot of code with AI but I read and adjust that code then. AI coding is a powerful instrument but it does not mean that we remove all the guardrails we have.

Wonder how it could do the changes described (it’s clear that it did modify TF files code) and at the same time had issues with other tf files. 😀

😄 Not only at large ones. What I observed, though, is that people magically find the ways to contribute if they *really* need the change. If not, they are OK to wait. Or even to abandon the idea. But the outmost blocker is docs or large code base which is less of an issue nowadays with AI tools.

I also see how it gains popularity in secops tooling too. But then, of course, this ML > AI popularity evolution is the most prominent and well deserved. Wonder if Go will get some boost besides cloud-native solutions and utilities-for-any-kind.

Delegate for Growth: Scaling Your Impact Through Others Senior IC guide to scaling impact. Master peer influence & growth delegation to effectively lead without formal authority.

Recently published a new blog post: "Delegate for Growth: Scaling Your Impact Through Others"

How do senior ICs multiply impact without direct reports?

My experience + practical strategies for peer influence: bit.ly/4jSMqLk

#TechLeadership #PersonalExperience #SoftwareEngineering

It was 10:21, a cozy vintage cafe in a quiet neighborhood of Berlin, only three tables out of fifteen were taken. Yet one of the table was actively discussing the integration of MCP servers into their agentic startup 😀

Sunday is good for cats, not for releases :-D

You’re now now just one step away from using some automation for these queries to send you an alert if the response crosses some threshold. MCP-SRE basically 😄

Seems like instead of focusing on the genuine customer pain and making a real value and the purpose of the apps from that, a lot of companies are adding AI as a “magic solution to everything” and putting that fact on a spotlight with lower focus on discovering real customer pains or needs.

Tibetan Healing Music, Zen Meditation, Stress Relief, Relaxing Music, Tibetan Bowls, Indian Flute Playlist · Steven Jones · 251 items · 199.7K saves

Somehow, this playlist has recently become my "default music for work". open.spotify.com/playlist/0mn...

Beyond "Agree to Disagree" A guide to making disagreement a competitive advantage

Check out Steve Huynh’s piece on PRODUCTIVE disagreements. Do you know that situation when "... well, If the team X wants it so much, so be it..."? This article won’t make that less awkward for you, but it helps you decide when to stand your ground and how to do it effectively.

Some punch about JavaScript vibes and Electron-ish ubiquitous could be here, but I’ll just say that I feel your pain 😅

My guess is that people spam that shit to abuse LinkedIn ranking algorithms. Similar to what SEO folks do with meaningless texts on webpages.

Your newsletter is a true gem! It's no surprise you have those stats! Great work!!!
Interesting to know, though, if Substack tracks the sessions (e.g., min 1 minute on the page) in addition to page views.

As long as money exists— doubtfully. 😄

What is Security Engineering? Part 1. A deep dive into the ever-changing field of security engineering; a domain that can feel intimidating to some software engineers. With Nielet D'Mello, security engineer at Datadog.

Reading that article sparked a memory of my old “security hardening” work long time ago: a solid one-time fix that held up as long as systems stayed unchanged. Now, after a year in security automation, I’ve learned how crucial it is to make security reproducible and adaptable to everyday change.