Friday Links: Politics, highlighting, and death of coding
17 Oct 2025 #mondaylinksHey! Hope your week’s been good.
A quick update on my book, Street-Smart Coding:
I’m done addressing feedback from my beta readers. Turns out I had forgotten about a references section. Arrggg!
I’ve reread my draft countless times, still afraid of typos. My next step? Design the interior of my book. Quick update over.
Now, the 4 links as usual:
#1. A corporate job is a game of politics. (Just try to make a change in your company.) Here’s a guide on how to play and influence the tech company politics (8min).
#2. Like any new coder, junior-me spent hours tweaking my IDE with themes and extensions. Eventually, I settled down to the Solarized theme. And more recently, while looking for a simple theme for live coding and code samples on my books, I found Alabaster and the rationale behind it (10min). When everything is highlighted, nothing really stands out.
#3. Plastic bags killed basket-making. Is coding next? Is coding becoming a dying craft? (3min) No clear answer, just food for thought. For sure, coding is evolving. We’re not punching cards anymore. Maybe, in the future we won’t be typing symbols like we do now.
#4. Often great coders get promoted to management, to stop coding eventually. But what if a promotion meant going deeper instead of moving up and out? (6min).
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about the one rule I use to code with AI (to avoid losing my skills) (2min) and the best bad coding example I’m using in my book (2min). Coming up with a good bad example is surprisingly hard, but I think I nailed one.
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Preorder Street-Smart Coding here (pay what you want just for these days) and read 5 of the 30 strategies just to start. If you’ve ever typed “how to get better at coding” on Google, YouTube, and more recently on ChatGPT, this is for you.
See you next time,
Cesar
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