Productive Compliments: Giving, Receiving, Connecting
- Kent Beck tl;dr: “At it’s best, a compliment is a warm fuzzy. Receiving or giving a compliment blesses the day. At it’s worst, a compliment is a naked power play, an assertion of dominance. Giving and receiving compliments are not natural skills. This article summarizes what I’ve learned about giving and receiving compliments so far.” Kent provides specific and actionable advice around the semantics of human connection.featured in #493
Data Will Not Tell You What To Do
- Mikkel Dengsøe tl;dr: “Data may give you a conclusive answer that changing the color of a button from yellow to green increases the conversion rate by 0.15ppts but will tell you nothing about the other ideas that would have had ten times more impact.” Mikkel believes that the best ideas are often complex and require persistence, and that intuition is heavily underrated.featured in #493
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The Compounding Seeds Of Creativity
- David Heinemeier Hansson tl;dr: “Early on in my career, I learned a very important lesson about creativity: It can’t be saved for later. Creativity is perishable, just like inspiration. It has to be discharged regularly or it will spoil. And if you let enough of it go to waste, eventually your talents will sour and shrivel with it.” David discusses how the best folks are able to find creativity in the mundane parts of their jobs, and that is what separates them.featured in #489
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Should You Stay Technical As An Engineering Manager?
- Nicola Ballotta tl;dr: Dedicating 20% of weekly time to technical activities to stay technical is a good balance. Suggested activities to stay technical are: (1) Joining technical meetings to stay up-to-date and engaged with the team. (2) Contributing to documentation to solidify understanding. (3) Building internal tools to maintain coding skills and create resources. (4) Presenting team projects to understand and simplify technical concepts. (5) Participating in code reviews to stay connected with the codebase. (6) Continuous learning through tech talks, conferences, online courses.featured in #487
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