The Weekly Gist

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...

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...

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...

Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter August 5th, 2025 How to Become a Domain Expert When companies tighten budgets, they make hard choices about who stays and who goes. The engineers who are the hardest to replace are the ones with deep, irreplaceable knowledge. If you understand a critical part of the application better than anyone else, you become essential. Your work makes the team...

Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter July 22nd, 2025 How to Communicate Delays Without Losing Trust Delays happen. They're inevitable, even on the best-run software teams. But delays don't have to damage trust. How you handle them determines whether your stakeholders see you as reliable or risky. Here's a practical framework you can use to communicate delays without eroding stakeholder...