Monday Links: Blog, Error Messages and Recruiters

25 Apr 2022 #mondaylinks

Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation

I have read a couple of times about the Great Resignation. I guess the world isn’t the place after the pandemic. And that is reflected in the job market too. “A toxic corporate culture is the single best predictor of which companies suffered from high attrition in the first six months of the Great Resignation.” Read full article

What’s in a Good Error Message?

I don’t know how many times I have debugged the “The given key was not present in the dictionary” error. In fact, I wrote two C# idioms to avoid exceptions when working with dictionaries. From the article, to write better error messages: give context, show the actual error, and tell how to mitigate it. Read full article

Why don’t I have a blog?

I have always heard: “start your own blog.” Well, I started my own blog…you’re reading it. But this is a post about the opposite: why not have a blog. The author points out is that posts only rephrase Reddit or StackOverflow’s comments. But, I learned from Show Your Work that nothing is completely original. We all have some sort of inspiration. And, precisely that, and our own voice make our blogs unique. Read full article

Learn By Wrapping

The best advice to learn something is to learn by doing. Finding project ideas is often difficult. Another TODO app, really? This article shares a learning activity: Write a wrapper for a library or an API you’re already familiar with. Instead of jumping to the documentation, start writing a wrapper in the language you want to learn. Read full article

Career Advice Nobody Gave Me: Never Ignore a Recruiter

These days, anyone with a LinkedIn profile and “Software engineer” in the headline is getting lots of spam messages and connection requests. I bet you already got a message between these lines: “Hi X, I have one company interested in your profile. Are you available for a quick call to share more details? Please, send me your CV at this email.”

This article shares a template to reply back to these spammy messages. If you use it, you will be asking for a company name, seniority, and compensation before starting any conversation. That would be enough feedback for recruiters too. Read full article

Voilà! Another five reads! Do you answer spammy messages or connection requests on LinkedIn? Do you have a template to answer recruiters? What strategies do you use to learn new programming languages?

Are you interested in unit testing? Check my Unit Testing 101 series. Don’t miss the previous Monday Links on Going solo, Making Friends and AutoMapper.