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.
Find Your Angle: Building Burnout Resilience in Software
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter January 20th, 2026 Find Your Angle Building Burnout Resilience in Software Before we talk about finding your angle in the work you do, I want to call out a few caveats. This isn’t a replacement for real support when the problem is bigger than work. If you’re dealing with depression, anxiety, grief, or anything that makes day-to-day life feel heavy,...
Stop Reciting Your Credentials. Build a Bridge Instead.
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter January 13th, 2026 Stop Reciting Your Credentials. Build a Bridge Instead. Most people with plenty of experience still find introductions challenging. The moment often feels loaded, making it harder to introduce yourself naturally. You’re meeting someone new. It might be cross-functional. It might be external. And you can feel the pressure to sound...
Don’t Automate Until You Understand the Work
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter January 13th, 2026 Don’t Automate Until You Understand Making better calls about manual effort, automation, and systems Early in my career, I swung back and forth between two extremes. Sometimes I powered through manual work that I should have automated. I pulled data by hand and repeated the same steps because I hadn’t yet seen a better path. Later,...
How We Learn New Skills Has Changed
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter December 30th, 2025 How We Learn New Skills Has Changed AI certainly makes it easier to get moving with a new tool or learn something new. You can describe what you’re trying to accomplish and get back something usable: a config, a snippet, a rough plan. With a little cleanup, it can save you hours. Used well, that’s a legitimate advantage. Most of...
The Long Game of Professional Growth
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter Dec 22nd, 2025 The Long Game of Professional Growth Last week, I passed the two-year mark of publishing this newsletter every week. I’ve written more than 100 issues. I’m sharing that not because the number itself matters, but because it represents a habit that changed how I think and communicate about my work. When I started writing MoreThanCoders,...
Busy Work Is Inevitable. Don’t Let It Drag You Down.
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter December 16th, 2025 Busy Work Is Inevitable. Don’t Let It Drag You Down. Most software jobs have a steady layer of work that keeps things running but doesn’t feel like “building.”Tickets that should have been prevented. Follow-ups that only exist because context was missing. The same clarification you’ve typed three times this month. Cleanup after a...
Building a Year of Wins
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter December 9th, 2025 Building a Year of Wins Most of us go through the year solving problems that never get recorded anywhere. A bug was fixed under pressure. A teammate you coached through a tough issue. A small cleanup that removed friction for everyone else. These moments matter, but they disappear as quickly as they happen. By the time review...
How to Handle Tension With a Coworker
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter December 2nd, 2025 How to Handle Tension With a Coworker You can feel it when something is off with a coworker. Replies get shorter. Jokes land flat. A meeting that used to feel easy now feels stiff. Most people either ignore it, argue in Slack, or complain to someone else. None of that fixes the tension. It just lets it linger. You do not need to...
You Are Writing Documentation Wrong
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter November 25th, 2025 You Are Writing Documentation Wrong Most technical docs fail for a simple reason: they are written for the author, not the reader. The person who did the work already knows the system, the history, and the weird edge cases. So they write from that viewpoint. They skip context, assume shared language, and mix design decisions,...
Don’t Let Your Next 1:1 Drift
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter November 18th, 2025 Don’t Let Your Next 1:1 Drift Over the last 15 years, I’ve been on both sides of the 1:1—both as an engineer and as a manager. I’ve had conversations that led to real growth, and others that felt like we were both just filling time. Looking back, the difference usually came down to preparation. When someone sends over a few...
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.