Developer Tea

You are not the sum of your decisions. Making better decisions often relies on having a long list of mistakes to learn from.

How does the smartest person in the world solve the most complex problems that most mathemeticians can't even understand?The same way you write code and build features at your job. The principles always apply.

Choose one thing. Only one important thing. Do that over and over. That's your way out of overwhelm.

What people ask for is not the same as why they ask for it. What people want isn't as simple as what they say they want.Understanding the why is critical - the interest is just as important as the position.

People often erroneously plan for specific futures. This leads down a pathway to failure most times.This is because the future is rarely what we expect it to be. We can think in terms of multiple possible futures, and prepare for most of them. This leads us towards flexibility and adaptabiity.

Making good decisions is about tuning context. If you can't determine the context that matters, the decision itself is impossible to measure against. All decisions can be framed within a context with other decisions; choosing those decisions in concert is often the best strategy.

Feedback loops shape everything around us. We make a change or adjustment, watch for what happens, and repeat. This happens with people in the most unexpected ways. Tuning in to this adjustment loop can help us use it as a tool, rather than reacting to it.

Every decision is a tradeoff. If you are looking for the "right" decision, you can reframe this to the "optimal decision based on my desired outcome." This could have the effect of aligning your biases to work in your favor.

Is your performance review judging the luck or random events of a person's career? What about the times they made the right decision in a bad situation? The outcome may not be desirable every time, even with good decision-making.

Feedback loops shape everything around us. We make a change or adjustment, watch for what happens, and repeat. This happens with people in the most unexpected ways. Tuning in to this adjustment loop can help us use it as a tool, rather than reacting to it.

Almost every complex problem can be broken down and solved. Thinking from the other side - learning general solutions and how to compose those will give you the ability to build against the broken down complex problem.

Today, we'll dismantle a few common excuses often provided for not setting goals. We also briefly discuss the SMART goal-setting framework.

Your time is full of intent, but if you reflect back - how often do you do what you intend?Our actions are usually trying to reach some outcome, but are haphazard and habit-driven. What if we made that outcome explicit, and made our calendars reflect specific processes instead of vague outcomes?

Change is inevitable, but it's not always what we think it will be. Our framework for change should be ready for change we don't expect as much or more than for change we do expect.

The flow of change is inevitable. Are you building with it, or ignoring it in vane?

What if status meant something different? Your status meeting overload is probably a symptom of a more important problem: you're not sure what you're measuring against.

Lower cognitive load by picking your tools, and then using them. Avoid the constant evaluation of tooling; it's an intuitive response to the amazing leverage you experienced when you first picked up the tools you have, but now your highest leverage activity is focus.

Lower cognitive load by looking at your primary activities and modes, and creating cues that help you shortcut to those modes. This importantly gives you a better signal and a spike in cognitive load when something comes up that doesn't match your primary activities and modes.

Cognitive load will destroy your productivity. In this mini-series, we talk about ways to reduce your cognitive load. In this episode we talk about limiting work, and everything else, in progress.

Cognitive load will destroy your productivity. In this mini-series, we talk about ways to reduce your cognitive load. In this episode we talk about the unexpected effects of surprise on cognitive load, and what you can do about this in your work.