The Weekly Gist

Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter April 1st, 2025 How Dependent is Your Code Base? Dependencies are everywhere—and most of them get added without much oversight. A quick npm install feels harmless, but these small decisions can have significant implications. Every new dependency affects your application's security, performance, and developer experience. And yet, we rarely stop to ask...

Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter March 18th, 2025 The Ethical Software Engineer Software shapes nearly every aspect of modern life—communication, healthcare, infrastructure, and defense. As software engineers, the systems we build significantly impact the world, both positively and negatively. Given the widespread impact of our work, establishing clear ethical standards is crucial....

Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter March 4th, 2025 Build Better Solutions By Focusing On Systems On the surface, a Jira ticket for a new feature or minor bug fix looks simple: check off the acceptance criteria, submit a pull request, and move on to the next ticket. However, that "simple" change might have significant consequences. Does the change overlap with your authentication flow,...

Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter February 18th, 2025 Are You Carrying Baggage Into Technical Decisions? I hesitated to write about this because "baggage" has such a negative connotation. No one likes to think they're bringing unnecessary history into a conversation. But the truth is, especially in tech, we often let our past dictate our actions. Every project, every frustrating bug,...

Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter February 3rd, 2024 Your Manager Can't Read Your Mind Ever had that moment where you thought, "Surely my manager knows how much work I've put into this," only to realize later that they had no idea what you accomplished? You're not alone. We assume that everyone sees how hard we've worked, the impact we've made, or the problems we've quietly solved....