10 Jul 2025 #misc
I didn’t know a branding exercise would make me reflect on my life.
I’m taking a branding/writing course online. One of the exercises was to identify our main achievements, mistakes, and lessons to build our online presence around that.
Here are some of my answers for the career-related questions.
What were the most notable things that happened during your young adulthood (20-30 years)?
What were the most notable things that happened in your career?
- I learned English to land high-paying jobs. But I found out I like learning languages. So I learned another two. French and quite a bit of Brazilian Portuguese.
- I found out I’m a lifelong learner.
- By accident, I started writing online and made my first dollars online.
- I doubled my salary and took one year off.
What have been some of the hardest or painful moments in your life?
- I hit rock-bottom. Got burned out, depressed, and stomach sick. In that order. All of that because I decided to keep a “good” job with a decent salary.
What have been the most valuable lessons you learned in life and how did you learn them?
- We’re just a cog in a machine if we keep a “safe” job. I learned this when I got fired and laid off multiple times.
- If I don’t come up with my own life plan, somebody else will give me one. I had to overcome my burnout to learn this.
- I’m not my job and my job title. I should diversify my joy. It shouldn’t come from a single place. Thanks, burnout for teaching me this.
What have been your biggest mistakes and how did it change you?
- I stayed too long at stagnant jobs, expecting things to change without taking any action. It cost me years and thousands of dollars. One of the few things I regret. It made me take control of my career and life.
- After months of waking stressed and anxious, I recovered from burnout by working on my health and writing again. Finally, after almost a year, I could wake up feeling fulfilled and accomplished.
- I lost about 5 kg in the last year, thanks to reordering how I eat. It turned out to be the best productivity hack I’ve discovered.
What are your most significant achievements?
- I paid with my own money for a fancy family dinner.
- I made my first internet money with coding courses and writing online.
- After a layoff, I survived one year without a job, living off my savings and investments. It was a tough time, but I remember it as the season where I grew the most.
09 Jul 2025 #career
After years of working in dev teams, I’ve learned one rule the hard way:
Don’t ask someone leaving to finish a critical task, even if they’re the only one who knows how.
Someone going on vacation, or worse, leaving the job already has their mind elsewhere. They’re already thinking about packing, buying tickets, or finishing paperwork.
Even if they finish the task, something will go wrong after they’re gone. Maybe it’s a requirement change, an unexpected bug, or a new scenario nobody saw coming. And they’re the only one who knows how to handle it.
Too late, they’re already gone. People who stayed will have a hard time catching up.
I don’t know if that’s ever happened inside your teams. But I’ve seen it more than once. Let’s call it the “I Just Went on Vacation” effect. And make sure we don’t fall into it, especially if you’re the one leaving.
Starting out or already on the coding journey? Join my free 7-day email course to refactor your software engineering career now–I distill 10+ years of career lessons into 7 short emails.
08 Jul 2025 #productivity
Notion dashboards. Second brain apps. Inbox zero. None of it matters if you miss one thing.
Rest.
Without a good night’s sleep, your fancy productivity system fails. You drag your feet, drink coffee, and fight the urge to nap anywhere.
To work like the top 1% of high-performers, work hard but rest harder. Schedule rest like you schedule your most important meetings. Non-negotiable.
07 Jul 2025 #misc
I’ve never liked being asked for money on the street.
When someone asks me for money, I ask why they don’t sell something instead.
But I realized I was doing the same thing: holding up a digital sign next to a rusty can in the internet streets. That hit hard.
Instead of asking for coffee, I now invite readers to join Friday Links, where I share 4 curated resources about programming and promote my books and courses.
I get it! When we’re starting, we don’t want to sound salesy, so we go with a “support me” as a call-to-action. We think we shouldn’t monetize creativity, as if artists or writers should starve.
After binge-reading Tim Denning, a digital writer with billions of views, I learned to ditch the “Buy Me a Coffee” link and offer something of value, like a newsletter. Turns out, that’s the strategy millionaire creators swear byr. And now, I do too.
06 Jul 2025 #misc
He turned a half-joking Tweet into a community of over 7,000 creators.
His name is Daniel Vassallo. He was a Software Engineer with a cushy job at Amazon. But one day, after being tired of daily meetings and the lack of freedom, he decided to start a solo business.
His journey went from building software to freelancing, selling info products, and eventually running the Small Bets community.
After binge-watching some of his interviews on YouTube, like this one with the Refactoring podcast, here are 4 lessons I’ve learned:
1. Find an easy way to make $1,000 dollars.
You don’t need a company or investors to begin.
Start with a low-hanging fruit, a small project that makes you a few hundred or thousand bucks to build momentum.
For Daniel’s first project, he tried to imitate the processes from his last coding job. Coming up with a yearly goal, splitting it into milestones, and working in sprints. That only made him burn through almost all of his savings.
Don’t replicate your last full-time job. Find an easy project first.
2. Be like an investor, but without being one.
You don’t need VC funding, but you need to think like an investor.
An investor places bets on lots of startups. They know some of them will fail, but the one that succeeds will pay off all other investments.
Think of your projects the same way. Don’t put all your effort into one basket. And like an investor, don’t get too attached to a particular project. They’re your cattle, not your pets.
Run a portfolio of small bets so income doesn’t have to come from a single place.
3. You don’t need a big master business plan.
You don’t need a mission, vision, or values to start an online business.
Your only goal might be to never return to a 9-5. That’s Daniel’s goal. That could be yours and mine too.
4. The ultimate goal is freedom.
The goal of starting a business is to have the freedom to work under your own terms.
For Daniel, that means having no rigid schedule or routine, but working on the tasks with the biggest ROI every day. Or simply scrolling through Twitter/X looking for project inspiration.
As a solopreneur or creator, you’re an investor, but of your own time.