25 Sep 2025 #writing
I have a new writing obsession: Noticing and dissecting the opening lines of books.
I should blame James Altucher, one of my favorite writers, for this obsession. His advice taught me to master opening lines by dissecting the best fiction writers.
And this time, to apply that lesson, I studied Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian writer who won a Nobel prize. He’s a master of opening lines. And this one is no exception.
An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians’ stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black slaves. The fourth, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, the only child of the Marquis de Casalduero, had come there with a mulatta servant to buy a string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday.
OK, that wasn’t just an opening line, but a paragraph. Let’s break it down:
#1. This intro starts with huge drama. A dog is creating an unbelievable mess in the market. It has a white blaze on its forehead. This detail becomes relevant later. But no spoilers.
#2. It uses the rule of three to present the disaster the dog created:
- “knocked down tables…”
- “overturned Indian’s stalls…”
- “bit four people…”
#3. It presents the main character in the middle of the action. That is Sierva Maria. The dog also bit her. This is the starting incident of the entire story.
We also learn more about Sierva. She’s the daughter of a Marquis and she’s about to turn 12. And she’s placed among slaves and servants. Another detail that becomes relevant later.
The formula? Drama followed by a character trapped in the middle of it.
24 Sep 2025 #career
Being the smartest in the room doesn’t mean you’re ready to lead it.
Doing a job well isn’t the same as leading others who do it. Being a soccer player isn’t the same as being the team coach. They need different skill sets.
Ibrahim Diallo makes a good point about leading a room full of experts. Here are three of his points and my reactions:
Technical credibility gives you a seat. But your social skills make you shine
In a room full of experts, your technical credibility gets you a seat at the table, but your social skills determine whether anything productive happens once you’re there.
I learned this lesson in meetings with the CEO and other executives at a past job.
It was at a small tech shop in my city. I was a Software Engineer I, first of five “ranks” in the company’s career ladder. My hard work gave me a seat on the table. I don’t recommend hard work anymore.
The CEO was a coder turned businessman. Sure, he understood a lot of jargon and technical details. But most of the time, he replied with “I don’t care” or “You’re insane” when we dropped technical terms.
By trial and error, I learned to translate technical language into business language.
Your goal is to find the right person for each task
Your value [as a leader] isn’t in having all the expertise. It’s in recognizing which expertise is needed when, and creating space for the right people to contribute their best work.
I’ve seen it all around me. A newly promoted coder who still acts like a rock star, doing all the work. Focusing on lines of code and pull requests instead of projects, milestones, and team dynamics. That’s a recipe for burnout for the leader and failure for the team.
The perfect example of good leadership and delegation comes from the movie Ocean’s 11 and its sequels.
In every movie, there’s an impossible item to steal. Of course, that’s never a solo job. It takes a team. The leader presents the challenge and a solution plan.
But each team member brings their expertise: the locksmith to open a vault, the social guy to extract valuable intel from a person of interest, the gymnastics guy to break into impenetrable rooms, and the explosives guy to create a distraction.
Follow the same idea from Ocean’s 11, but replace the robbery with a project and all specialties with the right ones.
Be comfortable not having all the answers
The more comfortable you become with not being the expert, the more effective you become as a leader.
A business book taught me: a good entrepreneur should manage and lead a team of people way smarter than themself. The same is true for teams in charge of knowledge work.
As a tech leader, learn to lead people smarter than you. Otherwise, you will always lead a team of junior people. A good leader finds the right person for the right job and makes them thrive.
23 Sep 2025 #misc
Today, I found a post promising an “upgraded” roadmap for growth in life.
I found it in a LinkedIn post. I know. LinkedIn is a weird place. Full of shallow advice and “see my perfect routine” posts. I’m not sure which category this post belongs in. I won’t link to it.
It showed a comparison between the outdated and the upgraded roadmaps for growth.
The outdated roadmap was to find a job, work for 40 years, and retire. I completely agree. I wish I had learned that lesson 10 years ago. But the first step in the upgraded roadmap was to “Get clear on your goals in life.” Easier said than done!
How do we “get clear on our goals”? Figuring out what we want in life is hard.
An easier start on the upgraded roadmap
Last year, I was burned out and I was laid off.
The corporate world disappointed me. It squeezed all the passion I had until the very last drop. I was so lost that imagining a new life felt impossible.
I still don’t know what I want in life. Maybe just waking up energized to work on something I love and being content and present every day.
But what helped me recover from burnout and “get clear in life” was to focus on my physical and mental health. I didn’t know what to do next. No career plan, no new job. I only knew I didn’t want to stay the same.
My reinvention phase started with a YouTube workout session, writing 200 words, and a moment of silence every day… And reading books from people who had gone through something similar, like Borja Vilaseca and James Altucher.
James’ books taught me that we don’t need a master goal or passion, whatever that means, to reinvent ourselves. We already have one goal, one passion: taking care of ourselves. That’s an easy place to start and maybe the most important one.
22 Sep 2025 #books
I have a new writing challenge: I’m writing a book. One about how to improve our coding skills.
I’ve had to change my mind about writing books. I used to think I needed a 10,000-word, fully-researched book. But reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century showed me that a book could be a compilation of scattered ideas.
Finishing the first draft is the beginning. Designing and selling it comes with their own challenges. Here are 7 lessons I’ve learned to design and sell a book so far:
Interior design
#1. Start every new chapter on a right-hand page.
#2. You can design a book’s interior with Word or Google Docs. But Reedsy Studio automates a lot of the boring tasks.
Interestingly, Reedsy only supports writing a book in English. You can change the spellchecker language, but I couldn’t find a way to change the copyright notice and front matter. So we’re back to Word for other languages.
#3. The copyright page is boilerplate you can find online. Reedsy does it for us with a few clicks.
#4. Write your author page in the third person.
#5. Invest in a professional cover design. People do judge a book by its cover.
#6. Amazon doesn’t require an ISBN for the Kindle and provides a free one for paperbacks. But you can’t use it elsewhere.
#7. Pricing starting points:
- $0.99 is the new free
- $2.99 for the Kindle version
- $9.98 for the paperback version
#8. To follow Amazon’s rules, you can ask for reviews inside your book. But you can’t include external links to your book page.
21 Sep 2025 #coding #books
I’m celebrating a small victory today: I finished the 1st draft of my next coding book.
Street-Smart Coding: 30 Ways to Get Better at Coding.
Its promise? 30 proven tips to get good at coding. Some are conventional. Some learned the hard way. And a few… weird ones. But all battle-tested.
Why I wrote it?
I went to a 5-year program to learn coding. Actually a bit longer because I had to write a stupid dissertation. But anyway…
My real coding journey started with one Google search: “how to get good at coding.” I found lot of contradicting advice. That Google search put blogging under my radar. And that’s why I started my own blog.
It took me years and trial and error to find out what really works from all that free Internet advice.
That’s why I wrote this book. Well, I’m still editing it. So you don’t have to go down the same rabbit hole.
I wrote it for the younger me, sitting back at my first job reading any tutorial he could find. Full of passion and no direction.
These are the lessons I wish I had when I was starting out. The lessons I learned over 10 years of coding in tech companies and software agencies, making plenty of mistakes.
Preorder your copy here to read a preview featuring 5 of the 30 tips, just to get you started.