This week I had a retro with my team and everyone shared that they were feelling more productive and found it easier to focus. It wasn't rocket science to make it work, but I thought I'd share a few tips how we made that happen: 🧵 1. First, we got rid of standups. We replaced 15min morning standups with Slack messages that everyone sends when they start working in the morning. I covered this topic in the past: notonlycode.org/ive-moved-to-a…

When interviewing with companies I ask "how will you help me grow?" and most of them respond "we have annual education budget of €X" (usually ~€1k).

That really means "we won't help you grow". Annual budget is cheap and ineffective, here's why and what to do instead: 🧵 First, cheap: €1,000 is maybe 1-2% of a developer's salary, it's not a big expense for the company. Make that tax deductible, and add the fact that few people will actually use the full budget, and what you get is a marginal cost.

Every article about becoming a good writer says "read a lot". Yet in programming we rarely practice reading. We only read the code we have to understand in order to change, we rarely encourage each other to read and analyze some well-written code I think coding is very much like writing and yet we don't teach it like we teach writing. We teach to produce working code, which is bare minimum. We rarely emphasize that the code is written with other developers in mind.

"Refactoring Python Code" book update: a few days ago I started moving all code examples to separate files (out of Markdown files) and covering them all with unit tests. That has been great, as I found tons of small typos. #buildinginpublic (1/4) Using external files is a great idea - each file is fully working code, and in the book I just include the part I need (e.g. I skip imports and some helper functions).

I have the best of both worlds, I have working code and concise examples (2/4)

One interesting thing I've learned from the Alibaba story was how in EBay went from 90%+ of the market in China in 2002, to leaving China entirely just 5 years later. (1/5)

https://twitter.com/gregorywitek/status/1477403365743247361

There are many reasons why EBay lost, but one interesting one is that they refused their Chinese team to drive the product. Instead they tried to unify the platform globally, so that the whole site worked and looked the same everywhere. (2/n)

The president of Square Enix (Final Fantasy games and more) wrote about play-to-earn and NFTs as upcoming major trend in gaming in 2022. A large part of the letter feels like crypto bros' wet dreams, but a small part there could lead to something positive: The bad parts are obviously that they want to shove NFTs and blockchain in players' faces, which I believe is a dangerous and completely unnecessary trend.

Also saying that goodwill and volunteer spirit are inconsistend in comparison with willing to make money makes me cringe

This year I've read so far 20 books. Here's what I do and don't recommend: 📕 1. "Multipliers" - a book about a leadership and being a genius vs genius maker (someone who helps other to reach their potential). Overall ok, but it should be 50 pages instead of 250

🧵The job market for junior devs is not great these days (to put it mildly), so here are a few tips from recruiters, hiring managers, and my own experience about how to get your first job as a developer:
#CodeNewbie #DEVCommunity 1. Check multiple job boards, not only LinkedIn - junior positions are easier to fill, so there's no need for companies to advertise them everywhere, they'll get a lot of candidates anyway

With 💎 Ruby 3 released, let's have a look at how the language evolved since the version 2.0 was released more than 7 years ago. A history thread about #ruby #ruby3 🧵: In 2013 @yukihiro_matz announced Ruby 2.0 and he said the core team would release a new minor version every year during Christmas time🎄This was huge news 🎉 for Ruby devs since until then the releases were irregular. It made the future look very bright