Today I’d like to talk about a quality that’s essential to success as a computer programmer. Let’s call it “comfort with discomfort.”

Our industry has a concept of “10x engineers”, individual contributors who have the impact of ten colleagues. How can you become one? I’ll try to answer that in this post.

If you’ve ever watched me debug, you might think I’m moving slowly. That’s because I try hard to find every marker on the debugging trail. I believe this is one of the most valuable skills in debugging.

Reviewing code is tricky. When I’m doing it, I’m trying to achieve a few things at once. In this post, I’d like to document the ways I try to add value via code reviews.

I recently calculated that I merge 0.8 pull requests every day into my team repo. “How to Deliver Code Every 0.8 Days” didn’t sing, so let’s say I merge about one PR every day, delivering one or more features to production. I like this velocity, and in this post, I’ll explain how you can achieve it yourself.

I’ve been a practitioner of Shawn Wang’s ‘Learn in Public’ for years. In this post, I’ll share a list of ways I’ve found to learn in public.

I recently hit a decade of professional programming. I’d like to take a moment here and reflect on what I’ve learned.

Here’s my annual professional review covering 2023.

When I was learning to program, I was fortunate to pair with very experienced engineers. One day while coding, I said: “I think we need to use Ruby’s map method, but I’m not sure how that works. Let me look it up.”

Later, my pair offered some feedback: “You can’t be looking up map. You need to know how all of Ruby’s Enumerable methods work.”

When I don’t feel like I’m making sufficient progress at work, I have a favorite technique: asking “What would finishing this today look like?”