#48 | Sunday reads for EMs

My favourite reads of the week to make your Sunday a little more inspiring.

Jun 07, 2026

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. Every Sunday I share with you my favourite reads of the week.

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Kotlin: built for productivity

JetBrains studied 28 million development cycles across 320,000 developers and found that Kotlin development cycles were consistently 15–20% shorter than comparable Java cycles.

Kotlin was designed around a simple idea: spend less time on ceremonies and more time building. Features like null safety, data classes, smart casts, and concise syntax remove a surprising amount of everyday friction.

The result is a language that lets developers focus more on solving problems and less on satisfying the compiler.

Sponsored by JetBrains.

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy (Charity Majors)

tl;dr: Exploration of the growing divide between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics inside engineering teams. Both sides have valid concerns: enthusiasts fear falling behind competitors, while skeptics worry about reliability, maintainability, and long-term system health. Focus on shared reality, honest feedback loops, and treating AI adoption as an engineering problem rather than an ideological debate.

Modern Engineering Values (Christoph Nakazawa)

tl;dr: AI has fundamentally changed software development by making code generation cheap and abundant. As a result, engineering value increasingly comes from ownership, judgment, guardrails, feedback loops, and understanding the business context rather than manually writing code. The future belongs to engineers who can direct AI effectively while maintaining quality and accountability.

Building Software Is Learning (Thorsten Ball)

tl;dr: Building new software is fundamentally a learning process, not an execution process. Since nobody fully understands what a new feature should look like upfront, the goal is to shorten feedback loops through prototypes, demos, small releases, and early validation. Teams that learn faster build better products faster.

Make It Memorable (Molly Graham)

tl;dr: Goals, values, and strategies only matter if people can remember them when making day-to-day decisions. Companies often create too many priorities, making them impossible to use in practice. The best leaders simplify relentlessly so employees can easily recall and apply goals and values without needing a slide deck.

Fast is better than slow (Patrick Dubroy)

tl;dr: Speed is a competitive advantage because it increases learning, feedback, and decision-making quality. Reduce delays, seek feedback earlier, avoid perfectionism, stop over-engineering, and focus only on what’s required. Moving faster isn’t about working longer hours - it’s about eliminating unnecessary friction.

The Software Engineering Books I keep recommending (Dr Milan Milanović)

tl;dr: A curated list of software engineering books grouped by problem area. The main message is that the best book depends on what you’re struggling with right now - coding, architecture, distributed systems, testing, AI engineering, delivery, or career growth. Reading remains a competitive advantage, especially in an AI-driven world where engineers need enough knowledge to guide and challenge AI effectively.

Weird projects I shipped with AI (Sean Goedecke)

tl;dr: AI hasn’t created a flood of startups, but it has dramatically lowered the barrier to building small, useful projects. The author shares several examples that likely wouldn’t have been built without AI assistance. AI removes enough friction to make many niche ideas worth pursuing.