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Jan 7, 2025 | 
addyosmani.com | Addy Osmani
The web’s caching model served us well for over two decades. Recently, in the name of privacy, it’s undergone a fundamental shift that challenges many of our performance optimization assumptions. This is called Double-keyed Caching or cache-partitioning more generally. Here’s what changed, why it matters, and how to adapt.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
addyo.substack.com | Addy Osmani
After spending the last few years embedded in AI-assisted development, I've noticed a fascinating pattern. While engineers report being dramatically more productive with AI, the actual software we use daily doesn’t seem like it’s getting noticeably better. What's going on here? I think I know why, and the answer reveals some fundamental truths about software development that we need to reckon with. Let me share what I've learned.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
addyosmani.com | Addy Osmani
AI code generation tools like Bolt, v0, Replit Agents, Cursor, and even GitHub Copilot promise increased productivity. But treating them as black boxes is a recipe for long-term pain. Especially in complex projects, we need to understand why the AI made certain choices, not just what code it spat out. That’s where automated decision logs come in. An Automated Decision Log (ADL) is a targeted, low-overhead mechanism for capturing the reasoning behind significant AI-driven code modifications.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
leaddev.com | Addy Osmani
As you advance in your career, a new challenge emerges: how do you amplify your impact beyond your immediate scope? Shaping the direction of projects, teams, and even entire organizations boils down to one valuable skill: scaling your influence. Building on my experiences at Google and other tech companies, this guide distills my experiences, successes, and failures for those looking to amplify their impact across teams and organizations.
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Jul 17, 2024 | 
leaddev.com | Addy Osmani
A well-defined technical strategy aligns the engineering team's efforts with the business objectives, enables efficient decision-making, and sets the team up for long-term success. Learning how to craft a realistic roadmap, communicate engineering needs to stakeholders and higher-ups, and make technology decisions for an entire department are important aspects of any tech strategy.
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Jun 4, 2024 | 
smashingmagazine.com | Addy Osmani
18 min readSmashing Books,Performance,Accessibility,WorkflowShare on Twitter, LinkedInThe web is still a young platform, and we’re only now beginning to recognize what “success” looks like for large projects. In his recent Smashing book, Success at Scale, Addy Osmani presents practical case studies featuring the web’s most renowned companies and their efforts to make big changes to existing apps and sites. In this article, Addy shows some of the key insights he has learned.
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May 21, 2024 | 
leaddev.com | Addy Osmani
Throughout my time as an engineering leader at Google, I have observed the rapid transformation of the software engineering field. Where upskilling was once an optional pursuit it’s now become a fundamental requirement for sustainable success. AI is just one example of a recent addition to the list of upskills on engineers’ minds. However, the reality of keeping skills sharp amid the demands of a full-time job, family responsibilities, and work-life balance isn’t ideal.
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
addyosmani.com | Addy Osmani
Let's talk about Gemini 1.5 Pro and practical examples of what it can do. It's a mid-size multimodal model, optimized to scale across a wide range of tasks involving text, images, videos, audio, and even code. I’ll cover all of these today. The real difference here is the model's long-context window, capable of processing up to a whopping 1 million tokens in production. To put this into perspective, the original Gemini 1.0 had a context window of 32,000 tokens.
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Mar 26, 2024 | 
leaddev.com | Addy Osmani
As software engineers, we're experts at tackling complex technical challenges. But there's another critical skill that can make or break our success: communication. Effective communication is the glue that holds teams together, aligns stakeholders, and ensures that the right problems are solved in the right way. Yet, it's a skill that many of us struggle with, leading to misunderstandings, delays, and suboptimal solutions.
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Jan 30, 2024 | 
leaddev.com | Addy Osmani
As software engineers progress from junior to senior roles, their scope of impact grows from focusing solely on excellent technical execution, to influencing people and processes. However, even as experienced individual contributors (ICs), some of the key enablers for software engineering effectiveness lie outside your direct control. This is where managing up – the art of building mutually beneficial partnerships with managers – becomes critical for delivering more impact.
