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✨ 21 Google Lessons Every Dev Should Know

✨ 21 Google Lessons Every Dev Should Know

Real-world engineering wisdom you won’t find in tutorials.

Journals GG
December 08, 2025

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Programming

🧠 21 Lessons from 14 Years at Google
Addy Osmani distills 21 lessons from 14 years at Google, revealing that long-term engineering success depends far more on people, alignment, clarity, and decision-making than raw coding ability. He highlights how the strongest engineers obsess over user problems, favor momentum over perfection, and treat communication, collaboration, and learning as core technical skills. The piece reframes seniority as the ability to reduce complexity, build trust, and compound expertise over time, offering a candid look at what actually drives impact in large organizations.

🤔 AI Skeptic to AI Pragmatist
Rockford Lhotka describes his shift from AI skeptic to pragmatist, arguing that while AI remains overhyped and ethically complex, it can be genuinely useful when applied deliberately. He shares practical lessons from months of hands-on development with tools like Copilot, emphasizing the need for clear context, collaborative mindset, model switching, and strict review of AI output.

✈️ F-35 Fighter Jet’s C++ Coding Standards
This resurfaced document outlines the F-35 fighter jet’s original C++ coding standards, an artifact from the C++03 era that once guided safety-critical military software. While commenters note it’s now outdated and replaced by modern frameworks like the C++ Core Guidelines, MISRA C++, and CERT C++, it remains a fascinating snapshot of how rigorously high-stakes systems enforced safety, clarity, and predictability in code. The thread highlights how military and government software today is far more modern than many assume, even as older standards continue to spark nostalgia and debate.

😇 Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer
Lalit Maganti reflects on why he avoids the “spotlight-driven” path of Staff engineering, contrasting high-visibility product roles with the quieter, long-horizon world of infrastructure and developer tools. He argues that deep stewardship creates compounding impact, enabling systemic innovations like Bigtrace that only emerge from long-term context and trust. By prioritizing stability, technical ownership, and user trust over executive visibility, he shows how engineers can build high-impact careers grounded in depth rather than churn, proving that not all influence comes from being on stage.

🗣️ Authentication Explained: When to Use Basic, Bearer, OAuth2, JWT & SSO
This guide demystifies core authentication models, Basic Auth, Bearer tokens, OAuth2, JWTs, and SSO, and explains when each fits into modern distributed systems. It shows how authentication choices influence scalability, latency, and microservice communication, making them foundational in system design interviews. With clear examples and trade-offs, the article helps engineers understand how to pick the right identity mechanism for real-world architectures, especially as systems grow more complex.

Front-End

🤖 TanStack's Open. AI. SDK.
Oscar Gabriel breaks down TanStack’s new Open.AI SDK, showing how its type-first, framework-agnostic, multi-language architecture offers a sharply different path from Vercel’s popular AI SDK. He highlights TanStack’s modular design, isomorphic tool definitions, rich event-driven observability, customizable streaming UX, and upcoming headless UI components, arguing that it sets a strong foundation even if feature coverage is still growing. The article ultimately frames TanStack AI as a long-term, vendor-neutral alternative, ideal for teams that value portability, tight type safety, and deep ecosystem integration.

👀 Progress on TypeScript 7
This update showcases major progress on TypeScript 7’s native rewrite, with a fast, stable editor experience, near-complete type-checking parity, and dramatic 8–10x compiler speedups thanks to native performance and parallelism. It outlines expected breaking changes as TS moves toward modern defaults, highlights remaining gaps like emit and watch mode, and explains why TypeScript 6.0 will be the final JavaScript-based release. Overall, it signals a turning point: the native toolchain is now real, reliable, and ready for broader adoption as the future of TypeScript.

📤️ Serve the same route from Next.js App Router and Pages Router
Erfan Ebrahimnia explains how he served the same /issues/[issue_id] URL from both the Next.js App Router (new issues) and Pages Router (legacy issues) without migrating old content. After discovering that matching routes always default to the App Router, he shows two solutions, first a middleware rewrite, then a cleaner approach using Next.js fallback rewrites to let the App Router try the route and seamlessly fall back to the renamed Pages Router path. The result is an elegant, transparent routing setup that preserves URLs while enabling an incremental migration.

⚔️ Essential Do's and Don'ts of useEffectEvent in React
This guide explains useEffectEvent, an experimental React hook that lets Effects read the latest props or state without re-running when those values change. It highlights how this solves common dependency-array headaches by separating reactive logic from non-reactive logic and providing a stable callback that always sees fresh data. Through clear do’s, don’ts, and practical examples, it shows when the hook is safe, useful, and preferable, and when traditional handlers or memoization should still be used, while emphasizing that it should remain experimental for now.