The Weekly Gist

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...

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...

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...