02 Jun 2025 #writing
“I don’t want to expose myself,” an ex-coworker texted me.
He had noticed my LinkedIn posts and reached out to ask me how to start. He knew that writing opens doors but feared exposure. That’s one of the most common writing myths.
If you have the same concern:
#1. You don’t have to share selfies or post foot photos. Selfies work best on Facebook or Instagram… And there are places for foot photos.
#2. It takes time and consistency to make people care. Your first post won’t make you an Internet celebrity. Magazines won’t write gossip articles about you. Your first post will be crap. (Mine were.) And nobody will care, not even your boss.
And that’s fine. That’s not to discourage you, but to remove all the pressure of writing.
#3. Don’t share anything you wouldn’t mention in a work meeting. You can keep your online presence as professional and personal as you want. If you’re a coder, start sharing TIL posts.
Forget about going viral. Forget about the influencer vibe. Write for one person. Write for your past self. Share what you’re learning. Show your work. That’s the best way to start.
01 Jun 2025 #writing
In 2024, I went all in with my writing. One of the biggest inspirations behind that leap was Dan Koe.
He has more than 500K followers on X/Twitter, over 200 videos on his YouTube channel, and has sold millions online. He’s one of those internet names that made me believe making money online is possible.
This time, I watched this interview between Dan Koe and Callum Johnson.
Here are some of my takeaways:
#1. A brand isn’t about colors, headshots, or taglines. A brand is an environment you invite people into. It’s your goals, interests, and perspective.
#2. If you don’t know where to start your journey, start with an anti-vision: things you don’t want in your life. For most of us, that’s going back to a full-time job to work on something we don’t care about.
#3. Start by helping others solve a problem you already have solved. And your first product could be an improved version of a product that transformed your life. Create it and promote it to your past self.
#4. A content strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. One long-form piece repurposed into social media posts every week. And every social media post invites people to your newsletter, where you promote your products.
#5. Nothing is original. Creating is about remixing ideas. And if you share it in your own words it’s not copying or stealing.
#6. You don’t need to be discouraged if a “big name” or influencer offers something similar to what you offer. That’s a faulty belief that assumes everyone knows and follows every influencer.
I always remember one of Dan Koe’s quotes: “The goal is being paid to be you.” That’s one of my favorite quotes. A niche isn’t just about talking only about one topic forever. Your goals, mission, and transformation make you the niche. Don’t chase trends, create and sell to you. You are the niche.
31 May 2025 #coding
#1. A micromanaging boss. Why trust your team members when you can ask them every 5 minutes how they’re doing?
#2. A spaghetti-style crappy codebase. Why use good names and focused methods when you can copy-paste code and leave outdated comments all over the code? It’s faster that way, right?
#3. Working on something nobody will use. Why bother having your team create something valuable for users? They’re getting paid, anyway. They don’t need motivation.
#4. QA only caring about colors, alignment, and fonts. Who cares if the app works? QA should just test how it looks, right?
#5. Too many meetings. Daily stand-ups, sprint planning, poker estimation sessions, retrospectives, another meeting to present next sprint tickets, and another one just to answer questions from the previous meeting… They’re Software Meeting Attendees, not Software Developers, after all.
#6. Clueless project managers. OK, you already explained to your PM how serious the issue you had to solve was and that’s why the sprint is behind schedule by one or two days. But they don’t seem to get it. It’s time to fire up ChatGPT and prompt it to explain like your PM is 5.
#7. Constantly being paged. Why even write clean, organized code when you can fix everything while on-call rotation, right?
#8. Not having time to refactor. Again, why bother if we can fix all those issues while on-call rotation?
#9. Code reviews taking too long. A good title and description, and a short PR to make sure it’s easier to review it… But still more than 48 hours to get it approved and merged. Arrggg!
#10. Constantly changing requirements. “What are you working on right now? Oh, there’s a new priority. Sales just promised a client a feature that wasn’t even in our roadmap…,” a random PM told a developer.
#11. Repetitive tasks and grunt work. Why bother using a computer to automate repetitive tasks and best practices if developers are cheap and fast code monkeys? A full regression testing cycle? Let’s make developers click on every button of the app. And let’s create a test case for every single text box of every single page. Manual labor is cheaper than automating it, right? They’re contractors paid by the hour, anyway.
#12. Unrealistic deadlines. “Can we add a Facebook-style feed, I mean, a full Facebook-style feature, in the three days left in this sprint? It’s easy, right? Facebook already did it,” the same PM who asked for another priority just yesterday.
If this feels familiar, I swear it’s just a wild coincidence.
30 May 2025 #mondaylinks
Hey, there.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. This is not the first time we developers are being “replaced.” There’s a recurring cycle of hype (6min). No code, the cloud, outsourcing, and these days AI. You name it!
#2. Here’s a breakdown of what every job title truly means (6min). I plead guilty of using Senior [Insert Technology here] Developer.
#3. Don’t be discouraged about “Haskell” in the title. Here are some silly job interview questions (15min). It’s a good exercise trying to reimplement them in your favorite language, using a more “functional” approach.
#4. Starting from .NET10, we don’t need a solution or project file to run C# programs. We can simply run dotnet run app.cs Here’s the official announcement (5min).
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about six techniques to learn any skill faster (5min) and why free pizzas aren’t a good idea to motivate a team (2min).
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Want to make your SQL Server go faster? Brent Ozar’s special anniversary sale is almost over. Only two days left.
Until May 31st, get the prerecorded Mastering bundle and save $400. This bundle includes four advanced courses covering indexes, queries, parameter sniffing, and full database optimization. SQL Server was my kryptonite until I learned databases from Brent’s courses, and I highly recommend them. Grab the bundle before the sale ends.
See you next time,
Cesar
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29 May 2025 #misc
“The one who finishes all their tasks early can go home,” they told us.
It was at a past job, some time ago, in a galaxy far far away. That was their incentive to make us work harder. We were behind our deadlines and the local government’s. We were stuck in a rewrite within a rewrite.
But, surprise, surprise…
One guy finished all his tasks before the end of our 2-week sprint. I don’t know if he worked from home or padded all his estimations.
But they hesitated to give him the time off. We could tell by looking at our leader’s face when that guy handed in the time-off request form.
The next time the same guy finished earlier, they pulled more tasks from the backlog or ask him to join the on-call rotation. It was a carrot in front of the donkey.
Instead of building morale, they destroyed it and made all the trust evaporate.
Your development team doesn’t want free pizzas.
Oh, by the way, pizza was the next strategy after the “time off if you finish your task” strategy. Close to 100% sprint completion = free pizzas.
Instead of pizzas, give your team interesting work. Give them a challenge and share how that will impact the company. Give them room to figure out things on their own. And if they screw things up, don’t point fingers, let them fix things. Trust them. They’re human beings, not disposable resources. Motivation isn’t about perks. It’s about trust. Build that first.
And if nothing of that works, here’s how to demotivate them. Do the opposite.