/Career Advice

Things They Didn’t Teach You About Software Engineering

- Vadim Kravcenko tl;dr: (1) You rarely write something from scratch. (2) Domain knowledge is more important than your coding skills. (3) Writing documentation is not emphasized hard enough. (4) Code is secondary. Business value is first. (5) You’ll need to work around incompetence. (6) You work with uncertainty most of the time. (7) Assume everything has bugs. And more.

featured in #382

The Zen Of Proverbs

- Lane Wagner tl;dr: 20 rules of thumb for writing better software: (1) Optimize for simplicity first (2) Write code for humans, not computers. (3) Reading is more important than writing. (4) Any style is fine, as long as it’s black. (5) There should be one way to do it, but seriously this time.

featured in #381

Overcoming The Resistance

- Paulo André tl;dr: Paolo discusses hesitating due to one's imposter syndrome: "How can we create the conditions to just start? How can we feel the fear… and do it anyway?" (1) Create a process… and then trust in it. (2) Use the Procrastination Pomodoro. (3) 80% is good enough. (4) Feed your own feedback loop. (5) Don’t seek to make the right decision. Make the decision right.

featured in #380

8 Hard Truths I Learned When I Got Laid Off From My SWE Job

- Steven Buccini tl;dr: (1) Getting laid off is a profoundly lonely experience. (2) It’s gonna take longer than you think. (3) Interview invites are a poor proxy for your desirability. (4) You are going to have to do things that you don’t want to do. (5) Most offers for help are reflexive responses. (6) Honesty can only hurt you. (7) You probably should turn down that job offer. (8) You’ll learn more from getting laid off than you did at your job. 

featured in #379

A Guide To Fixing Developer Posture

- Gayle Laakmann McDowell tl;dr: "This post is about anterior pelvic tilt, the most common posture dysfunction... How do you know if you have an anterior pelvic tilt? Look at your belt. If you belt points towards the floor, you have an anterior pelvic tilt. Or, look sideways in the mirror. does your butt stick out? Chances are that you have an anterior pelvic tilt. I’m gonna break bad posture in 2 sections, lower body and upper body. The lower body influences the upper body, but upper body doesn’t always influence the lower body."

featured in #378

From BigCo To Startup: 20 Tips For Evaluating Early-Stage Companies & Making The Leap

tl;dr: Broken down into 3 categories. Tips for: (1) Assessing a startup’s trajectory. (2) Assessing your fit with the role and the team. (3) Assessing your startup readiness & shifting to a scrappier startup mindset.

featured in #375

A Debugging Manifesto

- Julia Evans tl;dr: Julia discusses the attitude and approach to take when debugging, explaining the following: (1) Inspect, don’t squash. (2) Being stuck is temporary. (3) Trust nobody and nothing. (4) It’s probably your code. (5) Don’t go it alone. (6) There’s always a reason. (7) Build your toolkit. (8) It can be an adventure.

featured in #375

What If Two Programs Did This?

- Raymond Chen tl;dr: The question “What if two programs did this?” is helpful in evaluating a feature or a design request. Combining this with “Imagine if this were possible” leads to an impressive one-two punch, explained by examples in this post.

featured in #373

Focus On High-Leverage Activities

- Addy Osmani tl;dr: Leverage is impact produced divided by time invested. To increase your leverage, ask yourself the following before any activity: (1) What if this activity was simple? (decrease time cost). (2) What if this activity was huge? (increase value). (3) What else could I be doing? (opportunity cost).

featured in #370

12 Factor App Revisited

tl;dr: "The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a methodology for building software-as-a-service applications. We cover how they have since evolved, and what we can learn from them today and how they changed the status quo of yesteryear."

featured in #369