Professional Skills

Things that will make you better at many other things you might do. (I hate the term “soft skills”)

Not exclusively things you’ll want for “professional” reasons - learning, prioritisation, etc. are all valuable outside of work - but I don’t have a better name right now.

Learning

• You Aren’t Learning If You Don’t Close the Loops - Commoncog

• Learning to work on personal projects - Part 1 - Community | the scapegoat dev

• The Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are The Most Important - Farnam Street

• How to kick ass at a new skill you’re not wildly passionate about - Stacking the Bricks

• Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice - Commonplace - The Commoncog Blog

• How DRMacIver reads so many books

• Syllabus Design

• Teach People How To Do Things

• Behind the Scenes: Planning a Lecture

• Some of my favourite PyCon UK 2018 talks

• While most people fight to learn “in-demand” skills, smart people are learning rare skills instead | by Michael Simmons | Accelerated Intelligence | Medium

• Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content meant for other roles

• Expiring vs. Long-Term Knowledge · Collab Fund

• 3 Tips to Learn any New Skill Faster - by Kunal Sarkar

• Your Strengths Are Your Weaknesses – Terrible Software

• DRMacIver’s Notebook: The fastest way to learn something is to do something

• charlax/professional-programming: A collection of learning resources for curious software engineers

Feedback

• How To Praise

• Becoming More Assertive: How to Express Yourself, Give Feedback, and Set Boundaries - InfoQ

Communication

• Writing for Engineers

• Writing Coherently At Scale - Xe

• Advocate, educator, and authorial stance

• How to read a formal document – The Law and Policy Blog

• Honesty is a professional behavior - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

• Insecurities as non-native English speakers

• Cocktail party ideas

• Networking for wallflowers: tips from a former community “new kid”

• How to Say “No” After Saying “Yes”

• Interviewers vs Volunteers: What Type of Conversationalist Are You? | McKinley Valentine | P.S. I Love You

• How to give good advice - by David R. MacIver - Overthinking Everything

• How to Write Technical Posts (so people will read them) :: Reasonably Polymorphic

• The One Weird Word Rule

• Improving My Technical Writing

• How to write when writing is hard

• How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects

• How to tell a great story

• no hello

• Writing Is Magic - Marc’s Blog

• Specificity: A weapon of mass effectiveness

• The Cheesecake Scale of Explanation — Dr. Lisa McNulty

• How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read · Refactoring English

• Tradeoff costs in communication – Surfing Complexity

• Explaining

  • “the place where the question is asked is generally not the best place to write a detailed answer” [..] “Always look for a deeper, more permanent place to record explanations, ideally in the codebase or related documentation. Avoid explaining in ephemeral Slack- or Github conversation threads which won’t be easily discoverable by future maintainers”

  • This is a hugely hugely valuable point I’ve repeatedly tried to articulate, and never as well as this article, so it was great to find

• Read widely, apply selectively, share regardless - The Engineering Manager

• How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written

• DRMacIver’s Notebook: Honesty is kinder than lying

• DRMacIver’s Notebook: Disingenuous Advice

• DRMacIver’s Notebook: Defining definition

• DRMacIver’s Notebook: Shared frustrations

• DRMacIver’s Notebook: Things I believe about ethics and personal development

Productivity

• When You‘re Stuck, Start By Making a List | Mathias Meyer

• Time and energy. | Irrational Exuberance

• Checklists. Reusable, remixable.

• Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

• Reduce Friction – Ceejbot’s notes

• DRMacIver’s Notebook: You have to do the easy bits first

• OutHorse Your Email

• People don’t work as much as you think

• Managing attention with stacks – Dan Slimmon

• Want Better Time Management? Start Saying No | by Niagara Institute | Management Matters | Apr, 2021 | Medium

• About Time: How to Dig Yourself Out of Overwhelm

• 15% Solutions

• 4 Cognitive Biases That Impacts Productivity - TechTello

• Slack

• A system to organise your life • Johnny.Decimal

• Double your productivity without more work or stress

• A Dot a Day Keeps the Clutter Away — Scott Lawson

• Time Management - by Mike Fisher - Fish Food for Thought

• Advice for time management as a manager | benkuhn.net

• Autofocus System - Get Everything Done

• The non-work calendar | Georges’ Blog of Improbable Technical Works

Presenting

• How to have a great DjangoCon · Better Simple

• Ten Rules for a Better Conference Name Badge

• alexwlchan’s ideas for inclusive/accessible events

• Conferences Should Publish Menus

• Dear Developer, The Web Isn’t About You

• The Ultimate Guide To Memorable Tech Talks

• How To Prepare for a Tech Conference Talk

• The Less Obvious Conference Checklist | lessobviouschecklist

• How to Get a Standing Ovation as a Conference Speaker | akos.ma

• How I make annotated presentations

Mindset

• The Perks of Taking the High Road - The Atlantic

• DRMacIver’s Notebook: On having different thresholds

• Don’t Wait for Motivation, Act for Momentum

• Author Talks: What poker pro Annie Duke can teach you about quitting on time | McKinsey

• The IKEA Effect - Why people fall in love with their own ideas

• DRMacIver’s Notebook: You can’t actually run out of ideas

• Is the Startup Grind Really Necessary? - The New Stack

• Reminiscing: the retreat to comforting work. | Irrational Exuberance

• Chronic and Acute Stuckness: A Handbook · Mordecai’s Ramblings.

• It Is Your Responsibility to Follow Up - Alexey Guzey

• jml’s notebook: The Galahad Principle

• Learning to walk through walls - by David R. MacIver

• You should complain about it - by David R. MacIver

• Butterfly Ideas – Aceso Under Glass

• Why I Am Not a Maker - The Atlantic

• How I learned to turn Impostor Syndrome into an Advantage - The Impostor’s Advantage

• Being the (Pareto) Best in the World - LessWrong

• Cynicism kills progress

• Career Advice: Be Confidently Uncertain - Earthly Blog

• Live versus Dead Players. This is an excerpt from the draft of my… | by Samo Burja | Medium

• The first hard choice - by David R. MacIver - Overthinking Everything

• Embrace the Grind - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

• Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving

• You don’t need to work on hard problems | benkuhn.net

• How to overcome the fear of putting yourself out there - Stacking the Bricks

• The Roadmap to Mediocrity – Aviv Ben-Yosef

• How to (Continually) Do Your Best Work

• Outsourcing Opinions

• Load-bearing Habits

• Can charisma be learned? (Yes.)

• How to Explain Anything to Anyone

• Try not to think about it

• Things you didn’t know you can be bad at

• On Craft

• Consistency is boring

• How Hard Should I Push Myself?

• My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it - 80,000 Hours

• Sweat Some of the Small Stuff | Gabriel Jiva

• How to embrace performance anxiety - by George Sudarkoff

• The Art of Activity Innovation: How to Be Impressive Without an Impressive Amount of Work - Cal Newport

• The Winner’s Edge

• Is Critical Thinking the Most Important Skill for Software Engineers? - The Pragmatic Engineer

• The Only Thing That Matters - Commoncog

• How to Keep Winning

• How to engineer luck - by George Mack - High Agency

• Paul’s Treatise Against Efficiency

• Structured Procrastination

• Fuck willpower - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions

• Flounder Mode - Colossus

• Learn to love the Moat of Low Status - by Cate Hall

• Leverage - by Jeff - JoT

• 7 Questions To Help You Prepare For A Big Change

• Orienting Toward Wizard Power — LessWrong

• Be less scared of overconfidence | benkuhn.net

• Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win? - Commoncog

• Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

• The Tale of Daniel

• The Tacit Knowledge Series - Commoncog

Product & Business

• So you want to be a consultant…?

• Marketing to Developers is Not Hard

• 12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory | @johncutlefish’s blog

• Yes, You Can Charge More. Artists, hustlers, consultants … low… | by Marianne Bellotti | Apr, 2022 | Medium

• Tom Blomfield — How to raise investment

• The startup founder’s guide to analytics

• 5 Things I Wish Somebody Told Me Before I Founded My SaaS - Stacking the Bricks

• How To Create A Self-Paced Email Course — Smashing Magazine

• How To Write The Perfect Proposal

• Opportunity Canvas

• 25 Case Study Examples Every Marketer Should See

• Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

• Replacing The User Story With The Job Story

• My Losing Battle with Enterprise Sales

• 7 Common Content Marketing Mistakes Developers Make and How to Avoid Them

• A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved… failure

• How to do customer journey mapping

• What I learned getting acquired by Google

• What I learned bootstrapping 3 companies to $450k | by Maddie Wang | Sep, 2023 | Medium

• Feature Factories vs. Value Generators - Itamar Gilad

• 🔥 Hot Take Alert #1: PRDs are the worst way to drive product progress

• The Audience Shortcut: How the Right People Paying Attention Changes Everything | Nathan Barry

• Boldly going where no one has gone before? — creating a Discovery backlog. | by Mark Dalgarno | Medium

• The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail - Commoncog

• The Secret at the Heart of Continuous Improvement - Commoncog

• Product-Led Growth: What It Is and Why It’s Here to Stay

• Introducing Xmrit - Commoncog