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Looking beyond dev productivity to increase speed ft. Brian Guthrie of Justworks

Speed isn't just about developer productivity—it's about market dominance. Rob sits down with Brian Guthrie, Director of Engineering at Justworks and former ThoughtWorks consultant, to explore why lead time from conception to production should be your organization's north star metric.

Playwright fixtures: A deep dive

Fixtures may be one of Playwright’s most powerful yet under-used features. Playwright fixtures can be used to simplify repetitive setup or teardown in your tests, manage test data ,and test state better. Fixtures are key if your objective is to write cleaner, maintainable and manageable Playwright tests. This tutorial is aimed at helping you master using Playwright fixtures, understand their purpose, and showing how you can use them most effectively in your tests.

How to think about quality in the age of cheap prototypes

When AI makes prototyping incredibly cheap, your old quality standards become a bottleneck. The key mindset shift? Quality doesn't matter equally everywhere. You can experiment with lower-quality prototypes to learn faster, then apply high standards only to what customers actually see. This isn't about lowering standards - it's about applying the right quality mindset at the right stage. Stop letting perfectionism slow down your learning phase.

From painted doors to real prototypes - a mindset shift

The economics of building software are changing everything. For years, entrepreneurs used "painted doors" - fake features to test demand - because building was too expensive. But when AI drops development costs, you can create real prototypes and gather genuine user data instead of pretending. This mindset revolution treats experiments like cheap option contracts - the lower the cost, the more you can explore. Ready to abandon painted doors for unlimited experimentation?

Self-hosted runners vs cloud CI/CD: A complete decision guide

Your CFO just asked about operational efficiencies across the engineering org. Tooling budgets are under the microscope, and suddenly CI/CD costs are getting attention. Sound familiar? When the pressure’s on to cut software spend, CI/CD often looks like a tempting target. It’s visible, measurable, and seemingly easy to move.

Is it time to switch CI/CD platforms? 7 warning signs

Every engineering team eventually faces this question: “Is our CI/CD setup actually helping us, or is it getting in the way?” The answer isn’t always obvious. CI/CD problems often develop gradually: small issues become accepted workarounds, and those workarounds become standard practice. What once worked well for your team might not fit your current needs or scale. The decision to evaluate new tooling usually builds over time as pain points accumulate and priorities shift.

Understanding Playwright test hooks in the CI context (JavaScript) - A complete tutorial

All applications need some form of testing, whether frontend, backend, stress testing, or any other. Playwright can help. Playwright is an end-to-end testing framework for web applications, supporting cross-browser testing (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit) from a single API. Its built-in test runner (Playwright Test) provides hook functions to manage set-up and tear-down logic around your tests.

Validating OS-compatibility for locally-run LLMs using Ollama with CI/CD matrix workflows

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly accessible, with regular adoption of open-source models and the growing ecosystem of tools for running them locally. Compact versions are now able to run on consumer-grade hardware, so developers are using LLMs on personal devices like Linux workstations, macOS laptops, or even Windows machines. As this trend grows, so does the need to ensure that your LLM-powered applications run reliably across all major operating systems.