Mindset
149 articles
- The one thing every experienced engineer gets wrong
- Just fix their PR
- "But if AI does it all, what's *my* job?"
- Just Read the Paper
- Watch people work
- Frustration Driven Development
- Software engineer interviews for the age of AI
- The best engineers just get shit done, sometimes with AI
- Taming chaos is a learnable skill
- Put scope on your resume
- Probably the realest thing I ever wrote
- Users buy your service, not your code
- GeLLMan amnesia
- The 3 curves that make a scalable business
- Are you playing games you want to win?
- How to lead a project
- *People* detangle a ball of mud
- The unreasonable effectiveness of stack ranking
- Chesterton's true lesson
- The job behind the job [of a high level IC]
- Make sure it works first
- Feedback is a strange thing
- The grind won't get you there
- How to be witty and off-the-cuff as a slow deep thinker
- Should you join an AI startup right now?
- What makes a senior engineer
- A few more thoughts on mentoring
- Cursor background agents in Slack changed my workflow
- My mentoring philosophy
- You're a business
- Stateless decision making
- Your interview is a sales call
- How do you find time for cleanup work
- What to work on next?
- The difference between a product and a project
- Sprint vs Shape Up vs Kanban
- Why sprints
- Why sprints
- Talk to more users sooner
- Depth takes time
- Code yourself out of the job
- How *do* you break down a large project? INVEST
- The score takes care of itself
- Your next mountain, pt2
- What's your next mountain?
- Why system design is my favorite interview
- Don't judge tech just because you're old
- "Yes caviar is great, here's a ham sandwich"
- Yes, AI will "take" your job. No, you won't mind
- Make mistakes easy to fix
- Better is good
- The Tour of Duty approach to career
- Why software projects fail
- Interviewing tips for experienced engineers
- Let small fires burn
- Some personal news
- Small change in big scary codebase?
- 6 books engineers should read
- Get us over the water, not build us a bridge
- Outputs are not outcomes
- Coding is a brawl, not a battle of wits
- The best engineering books get good 5 years into your career
- Code yourself out of the job
- The quickest way to kill a team
- The answer to 5 soloists in a trench coat
- 5 soloists in a trench coat
- Why you need a regular retro
- Your resumé has a job
- 5 tips for effective standups
- Onboarding to a new team
- What interviewers look for in senior engineers
- When to stay at a company
- Be action oriented
- The Buxton Index – why some are hard to work with
- I'm a different engineer than I was 3 years ago
- The 3 budgets
- Keeping a high engineering culture, tips from the field
- Askers vs. Guessers
- How to go from Senior to Lead
- Solve the problem, not a different more difficult problem
- Trust your wings, not the market
- Different worlds
- Clarification on how ownership makes careers
- Ownership makes careers
- What does "solve problems" even mean
- How one sentence guides your career
- Why a tech meltdown is the best time to invest in your career
- Own the outcome, not the work
- Insights for interviews from Kahneman's Noise
- The programming tutorial SEO industry is dead
- Coding is the easy part
- "If you're so good, why aren't you making 600k at BigTech?"
- Own your career like an expert
- Squash merge? Really!?
- Why trunk-based development is best
- Can you stay a senior engineer forever?
- Shipped code wins
- Grow your career ... in this economy??
- The art of the cowboy merge 🤠
- Reader Question: What do collaborative teams look like?
- What coding tutorials and teachers get wrong
- Reader question: So about that perfect burndown chart ...
- Nobody is coming to save you
- Reader question: Feeling guilt as a tech lead
- You don't *have to* build it sloppy to go fast
- What makes a great software engineer?
- Write abstractions, not just code
- Always have 3 answers
- Coding forces you to understand the problem
- There are no bad teams
- Writing software is like kicking a can
- The role of a senior+ engineer
- How we made the best burndown chart you've ever seen
- When to join and leave a company, project, or trend
- Are you the engineer who scoffs at high salary numbers?
- Why experts charge more
- How to give and receive feedback
- Be their shit umbrella
- Quick tip for system design interviews
- What is the goal of engineering?
- Try to work for a brand
- The quickest way to fail a tech interview
- A mental framework that helps you code faster
- Small choices can wreck your codebase
- What to expect in senior level interviews
- Getting from junior to senior
- How defensive coding leads to bloat
- Your job as an engineer is to make yourself unnecessary
- Meetings – a senior engineer's secret weapon
- How to rewrite your app while growing to a $100,000,000 series B
- A great engineer knows their tools
- How to ask for help
- Reader question: "When do you fix tech debt?"
- Pay yourself first
- Your career needs a vision
- Why a coding AI like Github Copilot won't take your job
- How to own projects like a senior engineer
- Do important work
- Flow good for programming, not engineering
- Your luck & opportunity surface area
- How do you know if serverless fits your project?
- Can you code faster?
- The Magic Function principle
- "silicon valley is like hollywood"
- You're not asking for a job, you're selling a service
- How I use delegation to get more done
- Should you take a pay cut for equity
- Computer science is not software engineering
- Why Understanding beats Knowledge