/Career Advice

Hands-Free Coding

- Josh Comeau tl;dr: Josh developed a repetitive-strain injury in both of elbows - he couldn't use use a mouse or keyboard. After trying to solve the problem with "physiotherapy, ergonomics, braces, diet and supplements, prescription medications, supplements, mindbody soul-searching, and a bunch of other stuff," he found a solution allowing him to be productive without risking further nerve damage, working almost exclusively using a microphone and an eye-tracker. He shows how that works here. 

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One-On-Ones With Executives

- Will Larson tl;dr: "Often when an organization is going through some turmoil, executives think to themselves, “Ah, I should have some one-on-ones with the team so they can hear how we’re handling this.” Will advises those asked to have a 1-1 with execs: (1) If you’re not sure what’s happening, let the exec take the lead. (2) Try to figure out why the meeting is happening before you’re in the meeting. (3) Know that the executive will very likely have an agenda, but sometimes have no agenda at all, in which case it’s very helpful to have prepared ahead of time. And more. 

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The Forty-Year Programmer

- Noah Gibbs tl;dr: "I’ll talk about things that didn’t make sense to me when I started programming, and now they’re the guiding stars in my sky... it’s not about specific technologies. Technologies come and go. Languages come and go. They can’t be your sky."

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What Distinguishes Great Software Engineers?

- Abi Noda tl;dr: Based on a research paper by Microsoft, Abi discusses the five traits: (1) Being a competent coder - paying attention to details, capable of handling complexity. (2) Maximizing current value of their work - anticipating future needs, intentional about trade-offs. (3) Practicing informed decision-making - gathering information to make informed decisions, open-minded. (4) Enabling others to make decisions efficiently - creates shared understanding with others. (5) Continuous learning - capacity to learn. 

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First Focus. Then Simplify

- John Cutler tl;dr: "Imagine two people - Person A acknowledges the complex problem, and focuses. Person B doesn’t see the complex problem, and simplifies." Both approaches may seem very similar at first glance. "Focus looks like simplification. Simplification looks like focus." But when things go wrong, as they tend to do, Person B will make bad decisions. They’ll pick bad strategies and tactics and spread the lack of context awareness to their team. 

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Stick To Tinkering

- Walid Ziouche tl;dr: "I’m witnessing a generation proficient with NextJS, but not much interaction with Node, the runtime, or, the system in our case. I’ve seen some devs unable to start a project without a ready-made boilerplate, generator or template... Web developers lacking a good understating around HTTP verbs, statelessness, status codes, routing and url parts, .. the behind the scene mechanics of the web." Walid discusses the implications of this and the remedy - learning by tinkering with lower level systems.

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The Joy Of Programming

- Donald Raab tl;dr: "The most important lesson I have taught developers over the years is that programming is fun. If you are programming, and you are not having fun, then you may be doing it wrong. It may not be your fault. Ask for help. We are at our most creative when programming is fun. Creativity is play. We need to be creative to solve the complex problems we are faced with today."

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How Do I Make Sure My Work Is Visible?

tl;dr: James covers: (1) The difficulty of remembering what you’re working on in a fast-paced environment when every week feels like a blur. (2) Brag documents, a great way to tackle the above problem. (3) The process James uses to write one, an iterative process throughout each week. (4) An evolution of brag documents into internal newsletters.

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Choosing Your Next Job

- Molly Graham tl;dr: "At some point in your career you stop looking for jobs and start looking for holes that are shaped like you.” Molly discusses 4 tools that can help guide decision making: (1) A love-good-hate-bad venn diagram. (2) The stool analogy. (3) The dating metaphor. (4) Imagining your day, each discussed here. 

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Knuth And McIlroy Approach A Problem

- Matt Rickard tl;dr: "A computer scientist was writing a column about Literate Programming – one of Knuth's ideas on how documentation and code should live side-by-side. So he asked both Knuth and McIlroy to write a program: "Given a text file and integer k, print the k most common words in the file - and the number of their occurrences - in decreasing frequency."

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