/Career Advice

"Change"

- Chris Kiehl tl;dr: '"What if it changes?" isn't just a question. It's a powerful heuristic for software design that can be used to justify almost anything. Everyone should use it more. It's great precisely because it's rooted in pure speculation.' Chris provides a guide for how to navigate this thinking. 

featured in #321


Learnings From 5 Years Of Tech Startup Code Audits

- Ken Kantzer tl;dr: (1) You don’t need hundreds of engineers to build a great product. (2) Simple Outperformed Smart. (3) Our highest impact findings would always come within the first and last few hours of the audit. (4) Writing secure software has gotten remarkably easier in the last 10 years. (5) All the really bad security vulnerabilities were obvious. And more.

featured in #320


How To Feel Engaged At Work: A Software Engineer's Guide

- Jason Tu tl;dr: 1) Make time to be curious e.g. schedule 30 mins to jot down questions that spark curiosity. (2) Imagine you were the CEO and ask yourself how the business would work, and let your mind guide you through the web of questions a founder might ask. (3) Frame your career as a series of questions to create a sense of ownership of your career. (4) Try something new. 

featured in #319


Intelligent Brute Forcing

- David Koloski tl;dr: "In this article, I will present a new puzzle game and demonstrate techniques I used to write a fast, practical solver for it. Topics covered will include breadth-first/A\* search, memoization, optimization, and strategies specific to NP-hard and NP-complete puzzle games."

featured in #319


Professional Programming: The First 10 Years

- Thorsten Ball tl;dr: "The following is a loose, unordered collection of thoughts that come up when I look back on the past 10 years:" (1) Fearlessness is undervalued. (2) You can’t predict the future; try and you might end up in trouble. (3) Nothing really matters, except bringing value to the customer (4) Perfection is unachievable. And more. 

featured in #318


I Spent 2 Years Launching Tiny Projects

- Ben Stokes tl;dr: "Two years ago, frustrated with a long list of unfulfilled project ideas in my phone notes, I decided to start trying one idea each week in its tiniest form. I never kept to a weekly schedule, but I've kept plodding along since then and launched 8 things. In this post I want to update you on everything I've launched, and share what I've learnt about building lots of these tiny internet projects."

featured in #318


Why I Left Google: Work-Life Balance

- Scott Kennedy tl;dr: "Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. One for career, a second for physical health, and a third for social and family life. At any point, one bucket might be running low. But as long as the overall water level is high enough, things should be fine," Scott discusses how the events in his life, in this context, guided him to leave Google.

featured in #317


Why Success Is Often Elusive At The Highest Echelons

- Cindy Sridharan tl;dr: "Many leaders mould the organization in their image or the image of the past workplace. Engineering leaders brought into embattled organizations tasked with stabilizing the chaos are often heavily incentivized to do this. Many a time these folks, in my experience, tend to fail harder and more often than those who try to learn the organizational ropes and tailor their leadership style to fit the organizational culture."

featured in #317


Complexity Is The Mind Killer

- Philip Kristoffersen tl;dr: "When faced with a choice, always pick the simplest thing that solves your immediate problem. Then make sure you can change your mind later. By the simplest thing I mean the solution that is easiest to reason about."

featured in #316


The Other Kind Of Staff Software Engineer

- Adam Gordon Bell tl;dr: Adam discusses the difference between line and staff software engineers, where a line engineer is core to the mission and staff is a supporting role. Although roles can be similar in either context, this variable is important to consider as it will directly impact your experience. Adam outlines how, as well as pros and cons of both. 

featured in #316