/Career Advice

Before You Try To Do Something, Make Sure You Can Do Nothing

- Raymond Chen tl;dr: Raymond advises starting software projects with a 'do-nothing' component to establish a good foundation. The step-by-step approach lets developers debug and validate at each stage, making problem-solving easier. He encourages incremental complexity to keep projects manageable and on track.

featured in #434

Accidentally Load Bearing

- Jeff Kaufman tl;dr: Jeff uses the principle of Chesterton's Fence to emphasize that understanding the original and current roles of a system component is crucial before making changes. The author illustrates this through their experiences in home renovation and complex computer systems.

featured in #433

Allergic To Waiting

- Thorsten Ball tl;dr: Thorsten believes programmers may be tolerating longer-than-necessary wait times due to a lack of understanding about what computers are capable of, what is a reasonable time for a given task, and how internet-based work might be skewing their perceptions of acceptable speeds. The author encourages developers to question and understand the cause of long wait times instead of passively accepting them, as many of these delays can be optimized or eliminated.

featured in #433

Fresh Work 80/15/5

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “How do you balance risk, novelty, production, growth, short-term certainty, and long-term viability? I learned a simple rule that has been useful to me and is often cited by my students as a key lesson from coaching: (1) 80% of your time goes to low-risk / reasonable-reward work, (2) 15% of your time goes to related high-risk / high-reward work and (3) 5% of your time goes to satisfying your own curiosity with no thought of reward.

featured in #432

New Study Finds An Unstructured 5-Minute Break Can Help Restore Attention

- Paul Ginns tl;dr: “Researchers found a 5-minute break from thinking is all you need to get your concentration back. There is no need for a walk along a river, or a lengthy video of bamboo forests swaying in the wind. A five-minute total break will do the trick.”

featured in #432

Finding A Buddy When You’re A Team Of One

- Lara Hogan tl;dr: These steps can help mitigate isolation felt when working as a "team of one," fostering a more supportive and collaborative work culture: (1) Regular Check-ins. (2) Peer Groups. (3) Cross-team collaboration. (4) Training sessions and workshops. (5) Online Social Activities. (6) Mentorship Programs. Lara explains how to act on each.

featured in #431

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