📣 Headlines

• DP Technology raised $114M to accelerate China’s AI-for-science tooling and platforms for research-driven product development.

• Sauron hired a former Sonos executive as CEO to scale its “super premium” AI-enabled home security business and leadership team.

• HCLSoftware agreed to buy Jaspersoft for about $240M to deepen embedded analytics capabilities across its enterprise software portfolio.

• OpenAI is exploring conversational ads in ChatGPT as it searches for new monetization paths beyond subscriptions and API usage.

• AI investors report they only use a small subset of AI tools focused on coding and data analysis rather than broad automation across the deal workflow.

• Open-weight Chinese models like Qwen are rising in adoption as teams prioritize deployability and control amid frustration with closed-model roadmaps.

• Targets of government spyware are being guided on immediate response steps including device triage, account security, and forensic support options.

• TikTok removed AI-generated weight-loss ads impersonating Boots following scrutiny over fraudulent marketing and unsafe medical claims.

🔧 Company Engineering Blogs

WRAP up your backlog with GitHub Copilot coding agent (github​.blog). WRAP guide to writing effective issues and refining instructions for GitHub Copilot coding agent using atomic tasks and collaboration tips

AprielGuard: A Guardrail for Safety and Adversarial Robustness in Modern LLM Systems (huggingface​.co). AprielGuard, an 8B safety-security guardrail for LLMs, tackles safety and adversarial robustness in agentic, long-context workflows using synthetic data and multilingual evaluation

🚀 Founder Diaries

My role as a founder CTO: Year Eight (miguelcarranza​.es). Founder CTO reflects on Year Eight: growth, OCTO, hiring, culture, and multi-product roadmap at RevenueCat

Something to Latch Onto (tylergaw​.com). Entrepreneurship shift: leaving a job, starting Latchbolt Inc., and prototyping niche software with an iOS app for modern collage

Building Latchbolt #1 (tylergaw​.com). Starting a Delaware C Corporation with Stripe Atlas, funding a bank account, and initial setup steps for Latchbolt Inc

Risk Early (forwardthinking​.substack​.com). Reflections on early hustle in tech, aging and energy limits, startup path choices, and why starting now matters

From App Idea to 10K MRR – YouTube Series (avanderlee​.com). Documenting the journey from app idea to 10K MRR with SwiftLee, RocketSim, Swift Concurrency Playbook, and iOS tech

SwiftLee in 2025: A full year as an indie developer (avanderlee​.com). Indie developer SwiftLee reflects on 2025 milestones, Swift Concurrency course, RocketSim growth, AI adoption, and plans for 2026

Should It Be Easier To Sue Influencers for Defamation?; 2025 Was the Year Self-Driving Car Optimism Went Mainstream; a Startup CEO’s Annual Learnings Post; a Podcast Where I Spoke for 43% of the Time; and +++ [link blog] (hunterwalk​.com). Discussions on defamation of influencers, self-driving car optimism, startup learnings, and a podcast where Hunter Walk spoke 43% of the time

📈 Venture & IPOs

IPO Bloodletting after “Pop” in 2025: Venture Global, CoreWeave, Figma, Klarna, Bullish, Circle Internet, Navan, Firefly, Fermi… (wolfstreet​.com). IPO bloodletting after 2025’s pop: Medline, Venture Global, CoreWeave, Figma, Klarna, Bullish, Circle Internet, Navan, Firefly, Fermi analyzed

MetaDAO: The New Capital Formation Layer of The Internet (shoal​.gg). MetaDAO raises funds on an unruggable launchpad with ownership coins and futarchy-based governance for crypto capital formation

Bet On Slope (chrisyin​.com). Explores hiring for growth, not static experience, and applies the 'slope vs intercept' idea to markets, founders, and investing

Motive S-1 Analysis: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up (tomtunguz​.com). Motive S-1 IPO metrics: $501M ARR, 70% gross margin, 126% enterprise NDR, with Samsara comparison and SMB-to-enterprise trajectory

Having a Conversation With Myself: 2025 (investing101​.substack​.com). Reassessing themes in tech investing and writing process; concepts like Adventure Capitalists, conviction, noise, and nuance in venture capitalism

Ep 20: The startup landscape with Vivek Ramachandran (boringappsec​.substack​.com). Vivek Ramachandran discusses startup growth, global markets, AI in security, and building for India and the U.S. with SquareX and founders

Whether AI is a bubble or revolution, how does software survive? (stackoverflow​.blog). AI funding surge, market consolidation, open source, data advantage, and disruption across startups, SaaS, and enterprise with insights from HumanX, Crunchbase, and VC leaders

🧑‍💻 Careers & Hiring

How to Land an Engineering Manager Role in 2026: A Practical Roadmap for Senior Engineers (diamantinoalmeida​.com). Step-by-step roadmap for Senior Engineers to become Engineering Managers in 2026, covering motivation, readiness, resume, LinkedIn, networking, interviews, and negotiation

25% Unemployment in Tech? (adamcaudill​.com). Tech unemployment and hiring trends; poll insights, BLS data, tax changes, AI impact on roles, and industry voices

Failing interviews (fzakaria​.com). Reflections on software interview failures across years, including Google training insights and early Facebook interviews

The Pragmatic Engineer in 2025 (newsletter​.pragmaticengineer​.com). Year-in-review: AI dominance, job market shifts, RTO trends, and deepdives on Claude Code, Cursor, MCP Protocol, and AI in software engineering

How I Left YouTube (zhach​.news). Career pivot from Google/YouTube, leveling, NDAs, 13-interview marathon, and leaving to prove value in the open market

🎯 Product Strategy & PMF

Building Startups that Last (Part 1 of 5) (sachinkamdar​.com). Entrepreneur shares war-tested startup playbook: focus on execution, sustainable growth, and building moats with real customer traction

The Venture Story Guidebook (pointc​.co). Guide to turning strategy into a 3-act, 9-scene, 54-beat venture story; prototypes, mantras, and a free-to- subscribers guidebook

Ep 18: Product differentiation in API security with Ankita Gupta (boringappsec​.substack​.com). Ankita Gupta of Akto.io discusses API security product differentiation and leveraging AI/LLMs in enterprise SaaS

A Practical Guide to Sample Product Strategy for Ambitious PMs (aakashg​.com). Practical three-battle tested sample product strategies for AI SaaS, growth mobile apps, and enterprise platforms with OKRs

The Product Operating Model at Google – A Critical View (itamargilad​.com). Google's product operating model evolution: strategic context, product discovery, and culture, with insights from Itamar Gilad on MuST, big bets, and Google’s testing practices

Customers Don’t See Opportunity (belowwaterlevel​.com). Lessons from a failed domain-name project: customer struggles, renewals, and the gap between numbers and real need

Scope discipline when AI makes building fast (zarar​.dev). Zarar discusses building contextual messaging with PostHog, a custom system, and AI-assisted brainstorming in Elixir/Phoenix LiveView

🏛️ Leadership & Org Design

Clean up org debt with systems thinking (leaddev​.com). Systems-thinking for engineering leaders: manage organizational memory, hygiene, throughput, and trust to reduce org debt

Nobody knows how large software products work (seangoedecke​.com). Large software products are complex and opaque; documenting behavior across features is hard as systems evolve, leaving tacit knowledge to engineers

Mediations #31: Increasing Efficiency and Effectiveness with Economics & Psychology - Part II (mediations​.candost​.blog). Explores autonomy, psychological safety, and cognitive load in boosting efficiency and effectiveness via psychology-driven socio-technical systems

You can lead a horse to water but... (williamdurand​.fr). Tech lead reflects on leadership boundaries, enablement over rescue, and focusing on clarity and blockers

What I’d Stop Doing in 2026 (As a Tech Lead) (journal​.optivem​.com). Tech lead habits to drop in 2026: shorter meetings, fix messy tests, refactor in small steps, and share knowledge—focusing on TDD, Hexagonal Architecture, and acceptance tests

79a: Engineers have more power than they think (candost​.blog). Engineers hold power to refactor, reduce tech debt, and reshape architecture without permission

The CTO Scrooge (avivbenyosef​.com). Explores how CTOs lose their spark, contrasting CTO Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come, with guidance to regain fun and impact

💸 Monetization & Pricing

[Stratégie] Les coulisses de ma communauté payante à 300K€ / an (boardmembers​.substack​.com). Strategie sur la communauté payante, Mighty Networks, incuber solopreneur et revenus récurrents sans épuisement

Recurring income without recurring work (setin6​.substack​.com). How to earn recurring revenue by building simple tools for other creators and revenue-sharing with Substack newsletters

Storekit Subscriptions Understanding Monetization Models (azamsharp​.com). Explores StoreKit monetization models including one-time purchases, auto-renewing and non-renewing subscriptions, consumables, non-consumables, freemium, paywalls, and hybrid approaches using examples in iOS apps

Storekit Subscriptions Onboarding Experience (azamsharp​.com). Interactive onboarding for StoreKit subscriptions through My Veggie Garden, with a hands-on flow using real features and emotional engagement

My Apologies, but Your Creative Expression Isn't Covered by Your Subscription (jxself​.org). Critique of SaaS lock-in and color-tier monetization; fictional chat with OmniCreative, highlighting digital rights, cloud reliance, and open-source alternatives

How much money is Cursor losing to keep users? (andreagao​.com). Estimating Cursor's 2025 LLM API costs vs subscription revenue using Claude pricing, token usage, and discounts

🧱 Architecture & Delivery

Why developers aren't like figure skaters? (no-kill-switch​.ghost​.io). Senior engineers, pragmatism over aesthetics, and the shift from hype to measurable impact in software teams using Elixir/Phoenix and other tech stacks

Build / Buy / Bot (sneak​.berlin). Build/buy dynamics shift as SOTA AI enables rapid prototyping; SaaS startups face open-source, edge-compliant alternatives and reduced moat

Thoughts & Links 13 (blog​.separateconcerns​.com). Thoughts & Links 13 covers AI coding agents, incremental architecture, cross-functional teams, design quality, and Mozilla WebNN, with references to Gall’s Law and future-oriented reflections

The Cost of CI/CD Performance (craigpardey​.com). Enterprise CI/CD bottlenecks force manual steps, shadow pipelines, and slower feedback in a microservices setup

From Services to Products: Composing Multi-Provider Checkout On-Chain (egpivo​.github​.io). Multi-provider on-chain checkout pools combines services from registries into a single product using deterministic settlement in Solidity

Why You Probably Shouldn't Use Microservices (Yet) (mostlylucid​.net). Microservices are a organisational scaling strategy, not an upgrade; warns about SerDe, latency tax, and modular monolith patterns with .NET examples

🤖 AI Power & Peril

The Enshittifinancial Crisis (wheresyoured​.at). Long-form critique of AI hype and stock manipulation, examining enshittification, Rot Economy, and dubious OpenAI, NVIDIA, Meta, and VC funding dynamics

Santa’s Naughty and Nice list for privacy 2025 (peterfleischer​.blogspot​.com). Santa’s Naughty and Nice list examines privacy in 2025, critiquing AI data theft, online ads tracking, and regulator inaction

On Monsters, Men, and Time Horizons (danieldrezner​.substack​.com). Explores Frankenstein, AI, and oligarchic sovereignty; links tech elites to long-term time horizons and global power dynamics

AI Product Development Crash-Course (paulkoullick​.substack​.com). Gen AI feature development emphasizes response design, eval-driven quality, and LLM-as-judge calibration for product-quality control

Agi Slaves (mattmower​.com). OpenAI-like investors chase lottery outcomes for AGI, exploring ownership, slavery ethics, and human-level AI implications using AgendaScope, Rez, and Ergo