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.
Why Good Developers Forget Things: Blame the Pigeonhole Principle
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter April 22nd, 2025 Title of the Newsletter Does anyone remember learning the Pigeonhole Principle as part of their computer science degree? If you've forgotten or never had the chance to learn about it, here's a quick overview: "If you have more pigeons than pigeonholes, at least one pigeonhole must contain multiple pigeons." It felt abstract and...
It's Okay to Say "I Don't Know"
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter April 15th, 2025 It's Okay to Say "I Don't Know" A few days ago, a colleague approached me with an urgent need for help with a telemetry project he was working on. It quickly became clear that my knowledge of the subject was much shallower than I'd realized. Instead of simply admitting, "I don't know," I tried to guide them with vague suggestions,...
How to Know When You're Over (or Under) Engineering
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter April 8th, 2025 A Smarter Way to Scope Your Engineering Work It's easy to over-engineer a feature. It's even easier to hack something together and hope it holds. Both come with costs — whether it's wasted time or work you'll soon regret. Over-engineered systems waste time solving problems that may never show up. Under-engineered work creates messes...
How Dependent is Your Code Base?
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...
Are Your Agile Processes Holding You Back?
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter March 25th, 2025 Are Your Agile Processes Holding You Back? Most teams follow some version of Agile. But over time, the focus inevitably shifts from outcomes to ceremonies. Standups, sprint planning, and retros become routine, and we stop asking why we’re doing them. Agile was never meant to be a rigid set of rituals. It’s a flexible approach to help...
The Ethical Software Engineer: Why Integrity Matters
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....
How Mistakes Can Build Trust
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter March 11th, 2025 How Mistakes Can Build Trust You might have noticed this week's newsletter is arriving later than usual. No excuses—I got caught up juggling a few projects and realized this was still on my to-do list. Mistakes like this happen to all of us. Maybe you've shipped code that locked up a database table because you missed a critical WHERE...
Build Better Solutions By Focusing On Systems
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,...
The Empathy Gap in Software Engineering
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter February 25th, 2025 Empathy isn’t a skill most software engineers focus on. We entered the field because we love solving problems, working with data, and building things. We’re trained to be analytical, logical, and precise. But software development isn’t just about writing code. We work with teammates, collaborate with stakeholders, and build...
Are You Carrying Baggage Into Technical Decisions?
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,...
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.