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 Your Demo Isn’t Landing
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter May 20th, 2025 How to Run a Demo That Lands I've seen strong engineers get overlooked because their demo didn't land. The work was solid. But when it came time to show off what they built, they lost the room. They went too deep, skipped the context, or fumbled through the setup. The value got buried. Too often, demos are treated like a box to check....
Looking Beyond FAANG Companies
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter February 13th, 2025 Looking Beyond FAANG Companies Many software engineers pursue careers at big-name tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix. These companies offer prestige, impressive benefits, and significant opportunities, making it easy to understand their allure. But there's more than one path to a fulfilling career....
How a 2-Second Pause Builds Credibility
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter May 6th, 2025 How Reacting Too Quickly Can Hurt Your Credibility Responding too quickly is a pattern I know all too well. Someone says something unexpected in a meeting. It's either way off base or just frustrating. Before I've had time to think it through, I speak up. I jump in too quickly, trying to correct the narrative or make my point. And more...
If Story Grooming Feels Broken, Here’s What to Change
Helping you learn practical, straightforward methods to boost your soft skills and enhance your career as a software engineer. Weekly Newsletter April 29th, 2025 Why Story Grooming Falls Apart (And How to Fix It) If story grooming feels like a waste of time, you're not imagining it. For most teams, grooming sessions drag on, lose focus, and leave everyone more confused than when they started. Instead of solving problems together, it becomes a slow-motion meeting where stories get read aloud,...
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....
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.