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.
To Get Better Feedback, Show Your Work
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter July 1st, 2025 To Get Better Feedback, Show Your Work "We'll route by tenant through the API gateway. We'll validate the token up front, then call billing early to pre-authorize before fulfillment. Fulfillment triggers off an event. Keeps it clean." You walk through the design on a call. The flow makes sense in your head. A few people nod. No one...
When Doing Good Work Stops Being Enough
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter June 24th, 2025 When Doing Good Work Stops Being Enough Most engineers eventually stall out in their careers. Sometimes, it happens early, once the ramp-up period ends and the learning curve flattens out. At other times, it happens years later, after long stretches of consistent delivery with no change in scope, role, or expectations. Their title...
From Shipping Code to Delivering Outcomes
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter June 17th, 2025 Writing solid code isn't your end goal. It's a starting point. Your code is only valuable when it helps customers, reduces friction, or enables your team to move faster. Once you shift your mindset, common workplace frustrations make a bit more sense: Internal tools that no one adopts after launch Migrations that stall midway because...
How Great Leaders Learn to Disagree
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter June 10th, 2025 How Great Leaders Learn to Disagree If your goal is to grow into a leadership role, learn how to disagree. Not to win arguments. Not to prove a point. But to help your team reach their full potential. The best leaders I’ve worked with aren’t the loudest in the room. They’re the ones who can challenge an idea without shutting anyone...
How to Make the Most of Your next 1:1
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter June 3rd, 2025 How to Make the Most of Your 1:1s Most engineers treat 1:1s like a check-in. A few updates, maybe a blocker or two, and that's it. The reality is your manager doesn't have full visibility into your work. They're in meetings all day, managing shifting priorities, and helping coordinate with other teams. They don't know what decisions...
How Great Engineers Catch Gaps Before They Ship
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter May 27th, 2025 How Great Engineers Catch Gaps Before They Ship The scope of what engineers need to know keeps growing. It's not just writing code anymore. You're expected to understand system design, security risks, accessibility, how to track user behavior, and maybe even weigh in on product strategy. The work is more complex. The teams are more...
Why Your Demo Isn’t Landing
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter May 20th, 2025 How to Run a Demo That Lands I've seen strong engineers get overlooked because their demo didn't land. The work was solid. But when it came time to show off what they built, they lost the room. They went too deep, skipped the context, or fumbled through the setup. The value got buried. Too often, demos are treated like a box to check....
Looking Beyond FAANG Companies
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter February 13th, 2025 Looking Beyond FAANG Companies Many software engineers pursue careers at big-name tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix. These companies offer prestige, impressive benefits, and significant opportunities, making it easy to understand their allure. But there's more than one path to a fulfilling career....
How a 2-Second Pause Builds Credibility
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter May 6th, 2025 How Reacting Too Quickly Can Hurt Your Credibility Responding too quickly is a pattern I know all too well. Someone says something unexpected in a meeting. It's either way off base or just frustrating. Before I've had time to think it through, I speak up. I jump in too quickly, trying to correct the narrative or make my point. And more...
If Story Grooming Feels Broken, Here’s What to Change
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter April 29th, 2025 Why Story Grooming Falls Apart (And How to Fix It) If story grooming feels like a waste of time, you're not imagining it. For most teams, grooming sessions drag on, lose focus, and leave everyone more confused than when they started. Instead of solving problems together, it becomes a slow-motion meeting where stories get read aloud,...
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.