Why It's Harder to Accept That You're Wrong if You Have More Experience

Your brain is constantly trying to simplify the world. It takes a snapshot of what it sees, builds a picture that makes sense, and then works from that picture. Most of the time this works well enough...

5 Nov 17min

Keeping up has always been part of the job for software engineers, and with AI it's harder than ever. In this episode, I talk about two signals that you, your coworkers, or the people you manage might...

24 Okt 16min

You're tired of hearing that you need to pick up AI, so today I'm not going to add to that pile. Instead, we'll look back at two moments in history that look a lot like this one: the arrival of Fortra...

30 Sep 17min

Fundamentals get talked about constantly, but rarely defined. In this episode I dig into what a fundamental actually is — the building blocks, heuristics, and core characteristics that don't change — ...

21 Sep 13min

In 1967, a study on shock avoidance gave us "learned helplessness," and for nearly fifty years that was the prevailing explanation for why people give up. Then the original authors published a follow-...

5 Sep 16min

As you grow as an engineer, something counterintuitive happens: the systems you build get simpler, not more complex. In this episode, I explore why senior engineers tend to collapse abstractions, acce...

21 Aug 15min

Accountability is a word you'll hear in your performance reviews, from your manager, and increasingly as you step into leadership. It's also one of the most abused and misunderstood concepts in our in...

14 Aug 22min

There's a cognitive trick our brains play whenever we face a hard question or a difficult decision: we quietly swap the hard thing for something easier to answer. It's called substitution, and we do i...

22 Jul 18min