24 Nov 2025 #writing
After 600+ blog posts, I’ve learned one big lesson:
Bad headline = no readers.
No matter how much you polish your words, if the headline doesn’t grab attention, readers won’t open your posts.
It’s almost always the headline
That’s the lesson I’d give to Abhishek, a new writer I found on Medium.
I found a post where he analyzes his top 10 posts.
Let’s compare the best and worst headlines.
His best performing:
- “How I Got My First 100 Followers in Just 15 Days”
- “Earn $10/Hour: Top 5 Websites that Pay”
And his least performing:
- “The Ancient Wisdom Nobody Talks About”
- “10 Relationship Lessons from an Ancient Love Story”
Which headlines make you want to read more? Which one would you open? The ones in the first group, right?
The least performing failed to capture attention. They don’t follow the 3-ingredient headline formula I learned from a top Medium writer with millions of monthly reads.
Want your headline make readers stop scrolling? Follow POC.
Every headline should have a POC:
- One promise
- One outcome
- One curiosity factor
Aim for at least the first two to have a decent headline.
Let’s go over the headline of the first least performing post:
“The Ancient Wisdom Nobody Talks About”
What’s the promise? A piece of wisdom.
To achieve what? Dunno.
Curiosity factor? “Nobody talks about”
That headline fails to promise something. A piece of wisdom for what? To have a happy marriage? To have 6-pack abs? To make more money?
People skip vague headlines and move on the next post in the feed. “Next one, please!”
Now, what do the headlines of the top performing posts have in common?
A clear outcome! “Earn $10/hour” and “get 100 followers in just 15 days.”
Both top performing posts talk about money. And people love that. Analytics might suggest he continue writing about money. But writing about things we don’t care is draining.
And like Seth Godin once said in a interview: if we listen to the data, we might end up showing our feet in a platform for fans. Wink! Wink! OK, I’m paraphrasing to make this post suitable for all audiences.
Lesson to take home? No matter how brilliant your post is, without a strong POC headline, nobody will read it.
23 Nov 2025 #misc
Last year, I met a young translator reinventing herself.
She studied Translation for five years at a local university. We met online by commenting and engaging on each other’s LinkedIn posts. When we met, she was looking for another way to make money. Her agency cut down her rates and couldn’t find as many gigs as before.
Who to blame? AI.
AI isn’t disappointing at translation. But it doesn’t score A+
Her story came to mind when I started my own translation project, and I quickly understood why she was looking for another job.
Recently, I’ve been translating Street-Smart Coding to Spanish. As a native Spanish speaker, I could have done it easily myself.
But to make it faster, I used Copilot with a simple prompt. I specified a tone, voice, and style. Latin American conjugations and vocabulary instead of Spaniard ones, for example.
I was surprised by the results.
Copilot translated chapters with almost no fixes. Of course, there were places where the phrasing made it clear the text was machine-generated.
In English, we say “wear all hats” when someone has to do multiple tasks alone. Copilot translated word by word. The same expression in Spanish (“usar todos los sombreros”) makes no sense at all.
Copilot struggled with coding terms like “parser combinators.” In Spanish, we use a completely different term. Direct translation doesn’t work either.
That’s when I jumped in. But Copilot handled most of the job in just a couple of work sessions.
What if it isn’t only translation, but coding too?
This made me rethink one of the lines I heard the other day. “AI won’t take your job. It will change your job description.”
AI may already be turning translators into proofreaders. Coders could be next. Maybe the world won’t need as many coders, and coding may no longer mean typing symbols anymore. Who knows?
In any case, I predicted AI won’t take our jobs by 2034. Let’s see if I was right. In the meantime, I’d like to pick a DIY skill and double down on my creative skills, just in case. And I’m still learning foreign languages just for fun.
Let’s revisit this in 10 years and see how right or wrong I was.
22 Nov 2025 #misc
Last month, I launched Street-Smart Coding, my first “official” book. It felt exciting and terrifying.
I had already written books, but I didn’t call them that. I thought only traditionally published works counted. And I didn’t know about writing mini-books. I had to change my mind about the concept of a book.
Here are 4 realizations I’ve had after launching it:
#1. The real work starts when you write the last words of your first draft. Editing, designing, launching, and promoting, that’s 80% of the work after the draft.
#2. Once your book is out, the game is in your mind. Waking up to see sales notifications is so satisfying. But silence is draining. I kept refreshing the sales dashboard, asking: “Why isn’t it selling? Is it me, the sales page, or the price?” The inner voice speaks louder than your wins.
The other day, Ryan Holiday, a New York Times best-selling author, shared that as soon as he finishes a book, he focuses on what he can control: working on the next. Now I see why.
#3. It’s easy to fall into the comparison trap online. These days, Gregory Orosz, the guy behind The Pragmatic Engineer, shared an update on his book The Software Engineer’s Guidebook after one year of launch. He shared sales figures. My first thought: I’m far from those numbers. But he admitted that his book is an outlier. Comparison is the thief of joy.
#4. If someone outside your circle buys your book, it’s already a win. That’s a line I found the other day scrolling on r/writing. It’s an anchor to put our feet back on the ground. By that definition, my book is already a success. And I already passed the $1 test.
21 Nov 2025 #mondaylinks
Hey there.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. This week, another major Internet outage. This time at Cloudflare. It raises the question: do we really need Cloudflare? (2min).
#2. Maybe it’s time to migrate to GNU/Linux. Because Windows 11 is adding an AI agent (8min) with access to personal folders.
#3. Imagine all the trouble you’ll face online if you had a single-letter name (6min). Airlines won’t sell you a ticket, and another name won’t match your passport. Keep this in mind next time you’re working on validating web forms.
#4. Faster code isn’t always better. Working at a startup makes you optimize your code for different things (2min).
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about some hard truths about coding they don’t teach you (2min) and the skill that took my career further than anything else (2min).
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Street-Smart Coding: 30 lessons to help you code like a pro, from Googling to clear communication. It’s the roadmap I wish I had moving from junior to senior and the one I hope helps you too.
See you next time,
Cesar
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20 Nov 2025 #coding #career
I was about to start a new list from scratch. But I remembered I already wrote about some hard truths about coding.
Here are five more truths:
#1. Most of your day will be in meetings, not coding.
#2. You won’t be building systems from scratch. Most of the time, you’ll be maintaining and rewriting legacy systems.
#3. Communication skills, not more languages, will take you further. Just asking the right questions will make you stand out.
#4. You will have to learn a lot of subjects. Don’t try to learn them all at once. Get your feet wet in many areas, then stick to a few. The learning phase never ends.
#5. At some point, you’ll realize end users and business owners don’t care about code. It’s a tough lesson. You won’t like it, but it changes how you see coding.
Junior me focused on mastering syntax and forgot about problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. That’s why I wrote the book I wish I had on day one, Street-Smart Coding: 30 Ways to Get Better at Coding. Because coding is more than syntax and typing symbols fast.
Get your copy of Street-Smart Coding here