We’ve arrived in Düsseldorf! Some thoughts below. Big open concept kitchen space combined with the living room… amazing. I’m excited and a little overwhelmed by the sheer possibilities. Goal: cosy, very active, full emphasis on the word living. Haven’t met neighbours yet but eager to make a good…

Will I find my people in this city?

This post is for anyone who is wondering what might be a good approach to writing tests during a software engineering live coding interview. Companies assess different things during the live coding stage of an interview process. Some will want you to have an efficient algorithm, others will want you…

Quicksort – stylised as a single word for some reason unknown to me – is a practical sorting algorithm that is often used in production code because it is very efficient for a sorting algorithm. To give you an idea of how complicated this is, I spent about 45 minutes reading the Quicksort chapter in…

How I feel about attempting to write 30 essays in 30 days

(This is #7 of 30 raw essays in 30 days.) It’s 6 am and the alarm goes off. Not the riiiiiiing on the iPhone designed to yank you back from dreamland (what a terrible list of built-in alarm sounds), but the subtle sound of crickets getting gradually chirping louder. Chi chi chi… CHI CHI CHI CHI… I…

These days, people call this first principles thinking. I call it thinking for yourself.

Failure, success, and the next thing and the nex thing.

I no longer wish to write to be understood... I wish to write to understand.

Fiction?

Once we become parents, our lives start revolving around our children’s needs rather than our own. This is the biggest distinction between life before and after kids.

Why do some of us wonder if becoming a parent (newly minted or an old timer) is compatible with having a new job?

This version of me would be so sad for that if we really didn't have her.

These days there is not a thing that I’m more grateful for than my wife. I have much to say about her, about how much she has influenced who I am today, which I fully expect to write about in this newsletter over time. In this post I want to examine something that I’ve been thinking about a lot…

The story of my almost-catastrophic encounter with ambition.

More fun, surprising, fulfilling, rewarding, and memorable experiences await us.

I had unthinkingly been buying and using mechanical keyboards to signal something else. I admit that it is time to stop it.

Stop pretending that you like everything about feedback. A gift is something that is meant to be liked. Feedback is not. Photo by Mark König I once gave feedback in a direct message (always default to 1–1 DMs when giving constructive criticism) to a leader at a company whom I thought was acting in…

I've consciously taken a new approach to learning to do my job, and it's by doing one simple thing very deliberately - always teach what I learn

I no longer see my blog posts as static after publication. They're