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 Handle Tension With a Coworker
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter December 2nd, 2025 How to Handle Tension With a Coworker You can feel it when something is off with a coworker. Replies get shorter. Jokes land flat. A meeting that used to feel easy now feels stiff. Most people either ignore it, argue in Slack, or complain to someone else. None of that fixes the tension. It just lets it linger. You do not need to...
You Are Writing Documentation Wrong
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter November 25th, 2025 You Are Writing Documentation Wrong Most technical docs fail for a simple reason: they are written for the author, not the reader. The person who did the work already knows the system, the history, and the weird edge cases. So they write from that viewpoint. They skip context, assume shared language, and mix design decisions,...
Don’t Let Your Next 1:1 Drift
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter November 18th, 2025 Don’t Let Your Next 1:1 Drift Over the last 15 years, I’ve been on both sides of the 1:1—both as an engineer and as a manager. I’ve had conversations that led to real growth, and others that felt like we were both just filling time. Looking back, the difference usually came down to preparation. When someone sends over a few...
How to Make Your Resume Easy to Read and Hard to Ignore
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter November 11th, 2025 How to Make Your Resume Easy to Read and Hard to Ignore Most resumes get only a quick skim, not a careful read. Eye-tracking studies show the first pass takes about seven seconds—so deliver your value fast and place it up front. Readers also follow predictable scan patterns, often moving their eyes in an "F-pattern," starting at...
Vibe Coding Without Losing Your Edge
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter November 4th, 2025 Vibe Coding Without Losing Your Edge How do you feel after you use AI to code a new feature or create a document? Does it feel fulfilling? Or a bit empty? That empty feeling often comes from distance. The code lands, tests pass, but it feels like it happened next to you instead of through you. We can get that connection back. The...
A better answer to “So, what do you do?”
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 28th, 2025 A better answer to “So, what do you do?” What do you say when someone asks what you do? If your answer is "I'm a software engineer at XYZ," you're giving up a chance to connect. Titles fade. Clear outcomes stick. Most of us work in niche spaces, so people need a simple context they can grasp and repeat. When you translate your work...
Three Habits for Resilient Software and Teams
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 21st, 2025 Three Habits for Resilient Software and Teams AWS had a bad day. A failure in US-EAST-1 tied to DNS resolution for DynamoDB endpoints disrupted major apps and sites. Services began recovering within hours, though some customers are still dealing with lingering effects while systems stabilize. You cannot prevent every incident, but...
How to Pick Work That Moves the Needle
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 14th, 2025 Title of the Newsletter Impact is often uneven. Two projects can require the same time and skill, yet one significantly impacts a company metric, while the other has a minimal effect. The difference is rarely luck. It is fit. Fit between the problem and a real pain. Fit between the timing and what the business needs right now. Fit...
Four Skills Every Engineer Needs To Grow Their Career
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter October 7th, 2025 Four Skills Every Engineer Needs To Grow Their Career Why did you get into software? For me, it started with the satisfaction of creating something from nothing. I could open a blank file, write a few lines of code, and end up with something real and valuable. That sense of progress and problem-solving is what pulled me in and kept...
The Time Management Problem in Software
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter September 30th, 2025 The Time Management Problem in Software The nature of software development makes it challenging to maintain focus for extended periods. Most people only get about four hours of real focus per day. For engineers, much of that time is lost to interruptions, context switching, and meetings. In one study of distributed teams,...
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.