Issue #394, 12th June 2020

This Week's Favorite


Uncertainty in the Workplace
7 minutes read.

Shem Magnezi shares his personal story that most of us been through in some way or another. I appreciate and respect the takeaways Shem's offering, as they put you in the driver seat and let you deal with the situation to your best abilities. There is a lot of power in "ake a decision for a defined timeframe, and don’t look back" - use it for bad and good situations where analysis-paralysis becomes real.

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Culture


This Guy Is a Software Engineer, You Can Tell by His Awesome Estimation Skills.
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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The Open Feedback Circle (OFC)
8 minutes read.

In a world where many of us work from home (or at least WFH for a big chunk of the week), Padmini Pyapali's experience with OFC can serve as an excellent tool to build trust within the team.

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Architecture Jams: A Collaborative Way of Designing Software
6 minutes read.

"Software is rarely designed in isolation" -- Gergely Orosz provides an interesting concept to let you collect more feedback and ideas early on. A significant benefit of such sessions is to spread knowledge and teach others how to approach a problem. It sets a common ground for the pains and requirements you're trying to solve.

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Does Anyone Have Any Great Product Strategy/Road-Mapping Document Templates They Could Share? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Natanya Montgomery opened a thread that yielded many templates I've saved and plan on using. I think that the quality of your documents says a lot about how you think - as an individual, as a team, and as a company. I'm sure you'll pick up a few interesting resources from skimming the content to see what fits your style.

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Peopleware


Exploration-Personalization-Connection. My Method for Finding a Great Job.
7 minutes read.

I highly recommend Dalya Gartzman's framework to figure out your next job. It's very rare to see people spending time on the Exploration phase that Dalya mentions. I often see the "spray & pray" approach, even for experienced individuals, going to meet different companies without any clear idea of what to look for. Being proactive will help you stand out, as you'll be able to say why you wanted to interview for the company and why you believe you'll be a great fit.

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50 Ideas That Changed My Life
7 minutes read.

David Perell is one of my favorite thinkers (worth following him on Twitter). Sharing the mental models he uses to look at the world can help you explore some ideas that are new to you. I've added many of the points there to my Anki Notes after doing some more research, so I'll be able to remember and apply more often.

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On Books, the Non-Fiction Kind (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Shreyas Doshi's stream of thoughts on books is so good! I found myself wanting to retweet almost every sentence he wrote: "Don’t turn book reading into a status game", "A secret for super-learning: Buy many books, start most of them, but finish just a small fraction of them", "Shed the habit of keeping books in pristine condition. Best way to appreciate a good book is to make it look thoroughly tainted by the time you’re done reading it. With underlines, sidenotes, and dogears." and many others.

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Inspiring Tweets


@mattwensing: The opposite of technical debt isn't zero debt, it's compounding gains: each new thing makes it easier and faster to build new things.

@paulg: One of the biggest things lost in remote work is chance meetings. These are very important, but hard to quantify. If you measure productivity on individual projects, everything will seem fine. Yet when you read stories of how things happened, chance meetings were often crucial.

- Oren

P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.

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