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.
Three Habits for Resilient Software and Teams
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 21st, 2025 Three Habits for Resilient Software and Teams AWS had a bad day. A failure in US-EAST-1 tied to DNS resolution for DynamoDB endpoints disrupted major apps and sites. Services began recovering within hours, though some customers are still dealing with lingering effects while systems stabilize. You cannot prevent every incident, but...
How to Pick Work That Moves the Needle
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 14th, 2025 Title of the Newsletter Impact is often uneven. Two projects can require the same time and skill, yet one significantly impacts a company metric, while the other has a minimal effect. The difference is rarely luck. It is fit. Fit between the problem and a real pain. Fit between the timing and what the business needs right now. Fit...
Four Skills Every Engineer Needs To Grow Their Career
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 7th, 2025 Four Skills Every Engineer Needs To Grow Their Career Why did you get into software? For me, it started with the satisfaction of creating something from nothing. I could open a blank file, write a few lines of code, and end up with something real and valuable. That sense of progress and problem-solving is what pulled me in and kept...
The Time Management Problem in Software
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 30th, 2025 The Time Management Problem in Software The nature of software development makes it challenging to maintain focus for extended periods. Most people only get about four hours of real focus per day. For engineers, much of that time is lost to interruptions, context switching, and meetings. In one study of distributed teams,...
How to Get Clear Direction From Your Manager
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 23rd, 2025 How to Get Clear Direction From Your Manager Clarity is one of the most valuable things a manager can give their team. When expectations are vague, work tends to slow down. Engineers second-guess priorities, redo tasks, or wait on answers that should have been clear from the start. Priorities will shift. That's the nature of...
Writing Code for Readability
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 16th, 2025 Writing Code for Readability Every engineer has opened a file, scrolled through a few lines, and thought: "What does this even do?" I've been there too — only to realize I was the one who wrote it years ago. What seemed clear in the moment turned into a puzzle later, slowing me down just as much as it would anyone else on the...
Raising the Bar With Teammates the Right Way
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 9th, 2025 How to Hold Your Coworkers Accountable Every team has unspoken rules. You learn who's quick with reviews, who's always on time to standup, and who cuts corners when the pressure is on. Most of the time, you adapt. You cover for weaknesses, you celebrate strengths, and you keep moving. But sooner or later, you hit the wall: Am I...
How to Respond When Product Pushes Back on Your Estimate
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 2nd, 2025 How to Respond When Product Pushes Back on Your Estimate You give an estimate. Product responds: "That's too big—we need this live by next month." If you've been in that meeting, you know how quickly the room gets tense. Engineers hear it as pushback on their work. In reality, it's a signal that the business is under...
How to Fix Your Feedback Loop
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter August 26th, 2025 How to Fix Your Feedback Loop You're in a 1:1. Your boss says, "Your last demo ran long. People lost the thread. Tighten it up next time." You nod and agree. A week later, the next demo feels the same. This happens because the feedback is vague and attention shifts to you, not the task. A major meta-analysis found that over...
AI and the Work Around Coding
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter August 19th, 2025 AI and the Work Around Coding AI is often discussed as if it's going to replace developers, or at least write most of their code. But if you ask engineers where AI is actually helping today, the story looks very different. The gains most developers are seeing are in the "surrounding work." The messy, unglamorous, and time-consuming...
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.