By committing to two careers, you’ll be less specialized but best at the combination of both. The author tells a personal story how this works out for him being a trader, a music producer and writer. He describes how he leverages his networks to connect people who’d never meet otherwise.

Distractions kill most people’s productivity. A habit to get into flow during certain times of the day that fit you has much more upside than downside. A non-intuitive hack is to record oneself work. Recording will make you feel like you are being watched and rewatching parts of the recording will reveal problems that you’d otherwise never have found.

In interviews one of the non-obvious things people look for is if someone can use their tools, and is fast with the IDE. This is never covered in school and rarely a topic on the job. This free video series is on how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use some exotic features of version control systems, and more. Have a look if you think you could work faster.

It is quite an important moment what to say during a salary negotiation or during a meeting with your supervisor. Within minutes you can make or break a five figure raise in recurring revenue (aka your salary). Here a discussion on that.

Every family member you convince to buy an iPhone, use Gmail or subscribe to Amazon Prime is contributing some small percentage to your salary as a programmer. You want those tech mega-corps to succeed, and keep driving salaries up, even if you don’t work for one, because they’re helping to lift your salary at your firm. Super interesting thought process on factors that influence tech salaries.

The answer is yes! If you’re getting better at what you do then you’ll always look back at old things you did or said and be ashamed. A thing that should regularly happen to you at New Year’s or even better, every quarter of the year. A nice article summing up looking at and showing old code.

Books have been written only about this topic: How to transition from engineer to engineering manager. An interesting ASK HN about the important things to consider.

Kotlin is loved by developers for its conciseness and great integrability with the JVM. A report on its prevalence and how it overtook Scala.

Interesting read on just using a .txt file and a simple process to manage ones tasks for the day. The authors shows that most tools are useless if you don’t have a process that you can repeat over years.

A very short thread about how people who are too long in academia are unfit to real jobs. If you have friends doing a PhD, send them this.

A very short article on an underrated topic. Developers tend to oversee the implications on team dynamics that microservices, docker etc. brought about. Amazon’s notion of “you build, you run it" inspired that a team must own a product over its full lifetime. Microservices architecture brought about the concept of small code bases and made individuals more accountable for it.

Real feedback on interviews is very rare. Candidates are almost neer told why they made it to the next round or why they didn’t make it. It seems like “too much work” to most firms. In this article you’ll learn why you should tell both negative and positive details to candidates and that the risks you see aren’t real.