/Career Advice

The Programmer's Brain

- Felienne Hermans tl;dr: “Your brain responds in a predictable way when it encounters new or difficult tasks. This unique book teaches you concrete techniques rooted in cognitive science that will improve the way you learn and think about code.”

featured in #527


The Case Against Morning Yoga, Daily Routines, And Endless Meetings

- Andrew Chen tl;dr: Daily routines are comfortable but add no new information, and contain no risk. Andrew shares his plan for 10x work. (1) Remove / delegate / automate the 1x work. If it doesn’t matter much if it’s done well or not, then just get it done. (2) For the 2-5x work, keep doing it — it is “work” after all. But perhaps figure out how to align it towards your plan for work and life? (3) For 10x work — we need to remind ourselves that our careers are defined by the highest moments of the biggest swings. Embrace more serendipity, talk to more interesting people, take more swings, and go deep on your craft. Andrew shares what this looks like. 

featured in #526


The Programmer's Brain

- Felienne Hermans tl;dr: “Your brain responds in a predictable way when it encounters new or difficult tasks. This unique book teaches you concrete techniques rooted in cognitive science that will improve the way you learn and think about code.”

featured in #526


How To Create Software Quality

- Will Larson tl;dr: “This observation is the underpinning of my beliefs about creating software quality. Expanding from that observation, I’ll try to convince you of two things”: (1) Creating quality is context specific. There are different techniques for solving essential domain complexity, scaling complexity, and accidental complexity. (2) Quality is created both within the development loop and across iterations of the development loop. 

featured in #525


The Trough Of Despair

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “That initial dip is the price you inevitably pay for improvement. If you built a factory you’d expect to pay first, see widgets later. How much you pay & when, how many widgets you see & when, those are the parameters that determine whether you’ve made a good investment. So with software design — how much you pay & when & how many features you see & when, those are the parameters that determine whether you’ve made a good software design investment.”

featured in #525


I've Been Thinking About Tradeoffs All Wrong

- Hillel Wayne tl;dr: “Normally I think of tradeoffs as framing two positive things, like saying "SQS has better control while SNS is easier to add new services". Instead the speaker framed it as two wholly negative things, and the tradeoff is which negative thing you want less of. We can do this with any tradeoff, because any positive quality about X can be turned into a negative quality of Y. Instead of "X is faster, Y uses less space", we can say "X uses more space, Y is slower.””

featured in #524


How To Build Anything Extremely Quickly

tl;dr: (1) Make an outline of the project. (2) For each item in the outline, make an outline. Do this recursively until the items are small. (3) Fill in each item as fast as possible. Do not perfect as you go. This is a huge and common mistake. (4) Finally, once completely done, go back and perfect. 

featured in #523


How To Build Anything Extremely Quickly

tl;dr: (1) Make an outline of the project. (2) For each item in the outline, make an outline. Do this recursively until the items are small. (3) Fill in each item as fast as possible. Do not perfect as you go. This is a huge and common mistake. (4) Finally, once completely done, go back and perfect. 

featured in #522


How I Give The Right Amount Of Context (In Any Situation)

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “Giving the right amount of context helps teams move faster. Too much context? Your manager can’t tell what’s important. They’ll need to wade through details, trying to sort information into a pile of what’s important vs what to ignore. Too little context? Your manager has to follow up and pull information out of you that you should have mentioned proactively. There is such a thing as being too concise.”

featured in #521


Inbox Ten

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: CTO at Meta, discusses his approach to managing communication with his teams... “For those who are curious, my system is Inbox Ten. That means I aim to end every day with fewer than ten emails in my inbox. I also have fewer than ten open chat threads across all interfaces. I’ve also read all relevant notifications in internal tools, read all relevant posts in internal groups I care about, and started rough drafts of any relevant proactive communications I intend to produce.”

featured in #519