The Weekly Gist
Learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer because you are so much more than a developer.
Why Your Team Can't Focus
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter November 3rd, 2026 Why Your Team Can't Focus AI has made output cheap. An engineer can now take on work that used to belong to a designer, a DBA, a data analyst, or a security reviewer, and the tools make it feel reasonable to say yes to all of it. Every one of those roles is another context to load into your head, and there's only so much room in...
How to Triage a Bug
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 27th, 2026 How to Triage a Bug A bug report rarely includes enough information to pinpoint the issue at first glance. Most of the time you get "invoices aren't sending" or "the dashboard is slow for some customers." It turns you into a detective as you triage the issue. Triage is the work between the report and the eventual fix. Your job is...
How Far Does Your Work Reach?
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 21st, 2026 How Far Does Your Work Reach? Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at a conference about measuring the impact of agentic projects. The room was engaged, the questions were sharp, and a few people even stayed afterward to keep talking. It went well, but the impact stayed with the people in that room. Here's how I expanded that...
The AI Skill Your Company Forgot to Teach
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 13th, 2026 The AI Skill Your Company Forgot to Teach For the last few years, companies told engineers to use as much AI as they could. Unsurprisingly, devs took this blank check and ran with it. Amazon had to scrap its AI leaderboard because employees were competing to see who could rack up the biggest token spend. This year the message...
The Goldilocks Rule for Asking for Help
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 6th, 2026 The Goldilocks Rule for Asking for Help Two engineers start on the same team in the same week. The first one messages a senior engineer every twenty minutes. Where's the config for this service? Is this the right branch? Should this be a new endpoint? Each question is reasonable on its own, but by Thursday, the senior engineer stops...
Why We're Writing More and Saying Less
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 29th, 2026 Why We're Writing More and Saying Less Last month I sat down to write a post about my experience building an application using Claude, along with my pitfalls and what I learned. I was under a time crunch and ended up leaning heavily on AI tools to help me coalesce my thoughts and write the article. It wasn't until after I pushed...
What You Gain From Knowing Your Skip-Level Manager
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 22nd, 2026 What You Gain From Knowing Your Skip-Level Manager Promotion decisions don't usually happen in your one-on-one. They happen in calibration meetings, headcount planning, and quick conversations between your manager and their manager. If you're not in the room, you can't control the narrative. Skip-level manager: your manager's...
The Happy Path Is a Guess
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 15th, 2026 The Happy Path Is a Guess Did you know that before a cooler can be sold as bear-resistant, it has to spend an hour with a grizzly? The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee has run this test since 1989. Testers bait the product with peanut butter, put it in the enclosure, and start a clock. Sixty minutes of biting, clawing, and...
How to Stop Checking In While on Vacation
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 8th, 2026 How to Stop Checking In While on Vacation For years I didn't feel comfortable traveling without my work laptop. It came on vacations and weekend trips, including plenty where I had no plans to work. Leaving it at home felt riskier than carrying it, because if something came up, I wanted to be able to handle it.I was tethered to my...
Your Repo Is the Only Onboarding an Agent Gets
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 1st, 2026 Your Repo Is the Only Onboarding an Agent Gets You give an agent a small, well-defined ticket. There's a failing test attached and clear steps to reproduce the bug, so this one should go well. Instead it spends twenty tool calls working out how to run the test suite, builds on a helper you deprecated eight months ago, and opens a...
Learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer because you are so much more than a developer.