Learning

Just Read the Paper

Read more papers. You can learn the latest and greatest in your field in one chill afternoon.

Make sure it works first

Explore the importance of functionality over elegance in Swizec's latest piece. Learn from his experience of tripling an engineering team's size within a year.

Feedback is a strange thing

Performance oscillates around your mean. Your average is what matters.

How to be witty and off-the-cuff as a slow deep thinker

Deep thinking is the super power of wit

3 sticky insights from 3 eng management books

Ever feel like your brain is blended and you can't even keep up with the things you're learning? Me too. But the good shit stays.

Why learning and teaching the good stuff is hard

You can't learn to ride a bike from reading a book.

The best engineering books get good 5 years into your career

The best engineering books aren't those you read at the start of your career. It's the ones you appreciate 5 years in.

The Buxton Index – why some are hard to work with

The Buxton Index measures an entity's planning period and explains many of your work dynamics.

What I learned from Do Hard Things

Do Hard Things is a recent book from an author of my favorite book about burnout (Peak Performance). It talks about why our traditional view of toughness is wrong.

Hard work doesn’t scale

Overtraining won't always get you to the finish line faster. Growth comes in cycles - rest, push hard, recover. Less can be more when it comes to achieving your goals

When's the last time you tried something new?

Dive into this engaging exploration of hands-on learning from pottery to programming. Discover how embracing new experiences can enhance personal growth and improve your coding skills.

Reader question: Should you learn the latest hotness?

Great question. Common concern. *What if I get stuck in a technology that isn't hot??* Or worse, burn out re-learning every new thing 😱

What coding tutorials and teachers get wrong

Chatting about teaching and learning complex technical skills with an engineer I'm mentoring. She's a former chef. We shared the same frustration with online resources.

The audience loved my talk but I didn't

A critical look at a conference talk that went great but felt a little off.

Meetings – a senior engineer's secret weapon

Boo meetings, yay code, right? There comes a time in your career when coding is no longer your highest impact contribution. Might even be holding you back. 🙊

A great engineer knows their tools

Earlier in my career when I thought I was god's gift to engineering but wasn't, I failed one of those stupid interview questions that "have nothing to do with the work". It was a great question.

You don't need a big team to automate your work

The opposite of folks who follow every FAANG trend and over-engineer their companies to death, are the folks who *never* take advice from the big boys.

Tips for a fulfilling tech career

When I dropped out of college to focus on freelancing back in 2012, I set 3 ground rules:

What I learned from Software Engineering at Google

When I first picked up Software Engineering at Google I thought it was another one of those FAANG books full of lessons that make no sense at human scale. I was surprised, lessons apply to teams as small as 5.

Your career needs a vision

In his book, The Art of Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming says the key to a great career is vision. What does that really look like?

Preventing RSI for programmers

I've been computering daily for 24 years, since I was 9, and managing RSI since high school. People often ask how it never gets bad. This is the article I always wish I had written.

Do important work

Next time you finish a project, ask yourself: *"Might this work be important?"*. Add the polish.

Can you code faster?

What slows you down most while coding? It's not lack of skill. It's not lack of ideas. It's uncertainty. Fear.

Reflecting on 2020

The year that felt like a drag and ended in the blink of an eye.

How I use delegation to get more done

Productivity porn shows you how to pack more into your day. Productivity porn is wrong my friend. You need to remove things to grow.

Should you take a pay cut for equity

Would you take some % of your salary in bitcoin? The joke is that compared to pre-IPO equity, bitcoin is predictable and has a known value.

Computer science is not software engineering

Wow, college was such a waste of time ... when did you ever invert a binary tree outside of an interview? Honestly I never inverted a binary tree in college either ☹️

Why senior engineers get nothing done

You start a new job and it's amazing. Code all day, clear objectives, easy guidelines, ship a bunch of features be a hero. Then something happens and suddenly you get nothing done. 🤔

Why Understanding beats Knowledge

Understanding beats knowledge every day. To have a strong career, learn to understand, not just to know.

Tech in 2021 according to a VC