soft skills

Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists

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Recently I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. The basic thesis of the book is that humans require ‘collective fictions’ so that we can collaborate in larger numbers than the 150 or so our brains are big enough to cope with by default. Collective fictions are things that don’t describe solid objects in the real world we can see and touch. Things like religions, nationalism, liberal democracy, or Popperian falsifiability in science. Things that don’t exist, but when we act like they do, we easily forget that they don’t.

Nothing gets done at the end of the day 🤯 Don't worry, we got you covered!

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When interviewing, particularly for technical positions, many people over value their technical preparation, and don't consider the importance of personality and leadership preparation.

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Don’t exercise to be thin. Exercise to be strong. The best place for ideas is alone and on the move. Start or end every day with writing about your life. Take what’s in your head and type it out, even if you don’t feel like you are thinking anything of note. There’s always something buried underneath the to do list in your head, something you didn’t realise you felt, that when written down, will make everything clearer.

March 21, 2022

A behavioral design think tank, we apply decision science, digital innovation & lean methodologies to pressing problems in policy, business & social justice

After 25 years of my career I came to understand that one particular type of programmers is the source of many problems in our industry. Here is the story of a project that was nearly destroyed by two such programmers. One of them was leading frontend development, the other – backend. While the rest of the team was slacking off because business requirements were in the works, these two chaps were working hard.

A study of Google's code review tooling, AI-powered improvements, and recent statistics. Critique, "Modern Code Review at Google," and various Google software engineering papers.

Imagine you’ve been tasked to implement a sizeable new feature for the product you’re working on. That’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for - everybody will see what a 10x developer you are! You open a list of the coolest new libraries and design patterns you’ve wanted to try out and get right into it, full “basement” mode. One week later, you victoriously emerge and present your perfect pull request!

One of the fundamental challenges in software engineering is managing and minimizing complexity. This challenge is not just a theoretical concern; it has real and tangible impacts on the pace of development.

If courses teach you’ll be building more greenfield projects than not, I’d be hesitant to consider it a well-rounded education in software development.