Issue #729, 13th November 2026

Hunger Beats Tenure: Advice for Junior Engineers
5 minutes read.

Share Felix Rieseberg's five-step list with the least tenured engineers on your team and use it as a coaching checklist: pick business impact over backlog, pick a radical idea, build it (late nights or over a weekend), focus on one strong idea, and lean into your fresh perspective. My favorite step is the fourth: hiding three excellent ideas among 20 bad ones kills a prototype. A prototype should communicate one idea so well that leadership sees both the opportunity and the person who can run with it.

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Me Using Fable 5.2 to Center a Div
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.

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The Power of Sync
4 minutes read.

Worth reading for the three axioms at the end, especially the first: don't make something synchronized unless you can show your work and defend the choice. Try it on your own calendar this week: list your recurring meetings, mark the ones that gain energy or real-time feedback from being sync, and convert the rest to a memo. Then look at your handoffs, since that's where Seth says most of the friction lives (a deadline, for example, is a sync point imposed on async work).

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"Your Lack of Urgency Is Wasting Your Potential."
2 minutes read.

"Whether you realize it yet, achieving your dreams is a race against time. Time forces convergence, and premature convergence is what kills dreams. [...] The further time gets ahead of you, the more likely you are to settle into a life that is 'fine,' or even 'good.'" -- Justin Skycak is describing what happens to teams too: the longer we wait to remove skill bottlenecks, the more people settle into the roles they happen to be in. Our job is to unlock doors early (e.g. context, tooling, AI fluency) so people can explore before the dial turns from explore to exploit.

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I Can Build Almost Anything Now. What’s Worth Building?
6 minutes read.

"A plausible audience is easy to invent. [...] A real person is less cooperative. They have their own workaround, priorities and reasons to leave your email unanswered. They may agree that the problem exists while being entirely unwilling to spend time solving it." -- This is the playbook for agentic products too: deliver one real output to one real user and watch what they do with it, before building the dashboard around it. Which feature on your current roadmap has only been validated by an invented user?

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Are You Unhired or Unfired?
4 minutes read.

Useful (even if a bit scary) framing by Dror Poleg: your job can vanish before your employer notices. His test is simple and uncomfortable: if you left tomorrow, would they hire a replacement, redistribute your tasks, or just let the work stop and keep growing? Worth running it on your own role, and on every role in your team, before the market runs it for you.

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Critical Thinking When Agents Do the Work
9 minutes read.

Addy Osmani offers his perspective on why critical thinking now has to be scheduled, since nothing in an agent workflow forces it on you anymore. I like his spectrum from offloading (you still own the result) to deferral to surrender (the output quietly becomes yours), and the test is simple: if you can't explain the answer even with your agent's help, you've ceded ownership.

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The Coffee Bit
4 minutes read.

Erik Zaadi is spot on here about why people leave even when everything is fine. The bit flips when they can't picture next year, haven't heard "this was great, here's what's next" in months, or their manager went from every other week to "see you next quarter". Which of those three would your best senior engineer say is true today?

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@karrisaarinen: give a man a tool, and he'll get to work. give a man a way to build his own tools, and building tools becomes his work.

@jasonfried: You can admire people who are miles ahead, but the best people to get advice from are just a few steps ahead. They're much closer to your reality, your situation, and your condition. They may have done less, but there's a good chance the know a lot more.