/Career Advice

How To Do Great Work

- Paul Graham tl;dr: Key takeaways include: (1) Recognizing the right kind of crazy: Good ideas that are innovative and groundbreaking often seem crazy or bad to most people. (2) Breaking rules: Being independent-minded, whether aggressively or passively, allows for rule-breaking. (3) Choosing the right problems: People tend to be more conservative when selecting problems to solve, favoring fashionable problems. And more.

featured in #429

Building Personal And Organizational Prestige

tl;dr: Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were better known. In this post, Will discusses building engineering organizational and personal prestige. He covers: (1) The distinctions between building prestige, building brand, and building an audience. (2) Deciding whether it’s valuable to build your personal and engineering brands. (3) The playbook to manufacture prestige with a small quantity of high-quality content. (4) Pitfalls of measuring prestige, and what to measure instead.

featured in #428

Speed Matters: Why Working Quickly Is More Important Than It Seems

- James Somers tl;dr: “The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.” James demonstrates various examples.  

featured in #425

Get It Done

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: “I relate strongly to the instinct many of us have to do things ourselves rather than involve others. We don’t want to bother them. If we’re being honest, we don’t want to have to. We may worry how it reflects on us. We may worry it means we are failing. But my experience in leadership tells me the exact opposite is true. Someone who tells me when things are going poorly is someone I am going to trust relative to someone who struggles in silence.”

featured in #424

IKEA-Oriented Development

tl;dr: "Every codebase is a home. Repos carry scars, arguments, memories, secrets, decorations, and sometimes graffiti. Programmers are homeowners. They perform repairs, rearrange things, and embark on redesigns. To frugally furnish a codebase, imitate Ikea: (1) Packaging is the Product. (2) Pre-Packaged Dependencies. (3) Composable & Disposable. The author plays out the analogy.

featured in #424

Some Blogging Myths

- Julia Evans tl;dr: (1) You need to be original. (2) You need to be an expert. (3) Posts need to be 100% correct. (4) Writing boring posts is bad. (5) You need to explain every concept. (6) Page views matter. (7) More material is always better. (8) Everyone should blog.

featured in #423

Making A Plan

- Thorsten Ball tl;dr: Writing down a plan helps developers think through the tasks, identify potential challenges, and construct a clear mental model of the work involved. Plans serve as checklists, aid in delegation, and improve overall performance. By starting to create plans and refining them through iterations, developers become better at planning and gain a deeper understanding of their work. Making plans enhances productivity and allows developers to confidently answer questions about their progress.

featured in #422

Should You Optimize For All-Cash Compensation, If Possible?

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: “Although still rare in the industry, companies like Netflix and Shopify let employees choose how much of their total compensation is stock. What are the approaches to take?”

featured in #421

2 Regrets Of A 55 Years Old Retired Software Engineer

tl;dr: (1) Pressure: “The more pressure you take, the more pressure you will get.” (2) Not taking enough risks: “The biggest risk is not taking any risk… in a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

featured in #421

My Approach To Building Large Technical Projects

- Mitchell Hashimoto tl;dr: “I've learned that when I break down my large tasks in chunks that result in seeing tangible forward progress, I tend to finish my work and retain my excitement throughout the project. People are all motivated and driven in different ways, so this may not work for you, but as a broad generalization I've not found an engineer who doesn't get excited by a good demo. And the goal is to always give yourself a good demo.”

featured in #420