Mindfulness, Leverage, and Forward-looking craft
Six hand-picked essays to sharpen your taste, boost your leverage, and calm your mind.
Hey friend—dive in and may these reads spark fresh insight and a bit more calm in your week 😊
.. and then one day you became Comfortable Here
When done for enough time, meditation offers magical moments. And it is strange that our default state is of artificial busy-ness, distraction, and absence. The author captures that profound shift when we stop running from the present and find true peace in witnessing it.
Impact, agency, and taste
I slowly came to understand that high value work is very rare. And as a result, we have forgiving protocols that makes it difficult to distinguish between "filler" and "valuable" output. It is our job to assess what's what and try hard to produce meaningful things.
Kuhn describes shared characteristics of people who repeatedly produce such work:
They build leverage through automation, tooling/infra, system unlocks, and insight.
They have agency by owning the outcome, driving progress without waiting for permission, and hence bearing some risk.
They have taste: they have a good sense of what to work on and what matters.
No one can teach you to have conviction
The way we become better is through feedback cycles. I see 2 attributes of feedback:
Speed: the quicker you go from action to feedback and back in iterations, the more information you get to use to change your heuristics.
Intensity: the more impact the feedback will have on you, the more you internalize it.
There are ways to generate fast feedback:
Ask mentor to assess ideas before you implement them.
Read engineering blog posts or research papers to learn from others.
Ask someone to pair-program with you.
However, the fast the feedback, the lighter the impact will be. Knowing what is deserving of slow but intense feedback cycles can be the difference between learning leaps and absolutely no progress.
Research Taste Exercises
There are 2 types of skills in technical endeavours:
Taste: or knowing what to work on.
Execution: knowing how to implement or build what you have decided on.
Although both are very important and complementary, the first is quite tricky to develop because it does not improve through brute force hard work. Here are some ways to improve it:
Before coding, list all your ideas, ask your mentors to evaluate and rank them. If you disagree on something, discuss it with them. Finally, decide on what to implement.
Keep a live journal of your ideas and their outcomes, that way you are reminded of and learning from your failures.
When you fail, think & analyze deeply "why". The reason for putting effort here is you are trying to bend your world model and not be passive.
Read research papers. They contain compressed information about the experiences of other teams (too bad they emphasize the successes over the failures though).
An LLM Codegen Hero's Journey
A comprehensive guide to the progression of AI-assisted coding. From my experience, however, the listed coding assistants are not as good in implementing technical research compared to software engineering. But it still def worth it to try all of them!
Tech hiring: is this an inflection point?
Hiring procedures are changing. Worth keeping an eye on!