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.
How to Become a Domain Expert
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...
How to Get Your Company to Invest in Your Growth
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter July 29th, 2025 How to Get Your Company to Invest in Your Growth Most engineers know what would help them level up—an online course, a professional certification, or a conference pass. What they don't know is how to ask for it in a way that actually gets approved. Too often, the request feels like a personal favor: "I'd really love to go to this."...
How to Communicate Delays Without Losing Trust
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...
Rubber Duck Debugging with AI
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter July 15th, 2025 Rubber Duck Debugging with AI A practical guide to using AI as a thinking partner when you're stuck It's 1 a.m., and you're staring at your screen. You've read the same lines of code twenty times, the error message might as well be gibberish, and your patience is wearing thin. We've all been there—stuck, frustrated, and no amount of...
Estimating Without the Crystal Ball
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter July 8th, 2025 Estimating Without the Crystal Ball How to make solid estimates even when the scope is fuzzy How many of us have thrown out a wild guess during an estimation meeting? It's easy to get cynical when estimating new projects. You don't have every requirement. You haven't seen the code. You're being asked to pin a number to something that...
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...
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.