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This month, my blog turned 8 years old…and my dev.to account turned 7. To celebrate it, I ran an AMA session on dev.to. For some moments, it felt I was talking to bots. Most likely true, if you also believe in the Dead Internet Theory. I didn’t take too much time to answer questions that sound like AI. Here are my favorite questions: Before vs Now What changed in your perspective and what makes a Senior Software Engineer…Senior? For me, there’s one true sign of being Senior: when you stop…
Hey there. Quick update: Street-Smart Coding Manifesto is almost done. No more hunting for typos. If you preordered, I’m sending a preview next week. And as usual, here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Google search (if that’s still a thing) and LLMs are great for quick facts. When was America discovered? But the real problem is offloading our thinking to AI (10min), even for simple tasks. #2. LLMs often reply “You’re absolutely right.” For your next project or idea, get…
In 2023, I burned out. It was the darkest moment of my life. It was a long process on the way down…and a longer one on the way up. It took me about a year to wake up with a sense of purpose again. What helped me can be summarized into one line: Taking care of my health (by doing something for my mind, body, and spirit every day) and bringing a sense of joy and fulfillment to my life every day (by going back to some of my hobbies just for fun). Writing played a big role. It worked like therapy.…
It’s sales day, and the whole grocery store is crowded. “We have to be patient, right?” a guy said to me. I’m in the butchery section. The guy is frantically walking from one side of the aisle to the other, phone in his hand. “I have 70,” he said when I asked what turn he had. “I have 94, and I only need one chicken breast,” I told him while taking my U-shaped ticket out of my pocket. The display shows 64 in red LED lights. We both laughed. He knew I was more screwed than he was. A few minutes…
Street-Smart Coding Manifesto is almost here. This past month, I’ve been writing a book to help you become a street-smart coder. It’s my case against syntax obsession to stand out as a coder. This week, I heard back from my awesome beta readers: Ricardo Cardona and Darren Lin. Their feedback helped me simplify chapters and cut duplication. Here’s some of their feedback. “What I liked the most is that it is actually relatable, experiences we’ve all been through at some point in our careers. You…
Blogging for 8 years hasn’t been unicorns and rainbows. I abandoned my blog for months. I’ve also wanted to quit more than once. Even when I preach to write like nobody is reading, my last 100 daily posts made me question if I should keep a blog. Maybe YouTube, Substack, or a social media platform aren’t that bad after all. Then I remember Seth Godin sharing about his 10,000 posts. That’s 25 years of blogging. That reminds me that the real hack is sticking for years. I’m reflecting on my 8-year…
Like an 8-year-old boy, my blog has grown and changed. In case you missed it, yesterday my blog turned 8. The project and habit I’ve kept for the longest. Here’s what I’m doing differently: #1. No more SEO-optimized posts. Google killed blogging as a business. Then LLMs put the last nail in the coffin. I wrote my first posts to rank high in Google search results. I chose subjects and headlines from Google’s “People also asked” and related searches. Not anymore. #2. More subjects apart from…
Eight years ago, I wrote my first blog post. I didn’t know what I was doing. After googling “how to get better at coding,” I found start a blog. That’s what I did. By the way, that search inspired Street-Smart Coding, my first coding book. I spent days choosing a Jekyll theme and a name. I turned hours of googling into a post and hit publish. OK, I vomited some words onto a page. That first post is still unedited as a reminder. That’s how I started blogging. Here I am, 816 posts later. 624…
Since 2024, I’ve kept ideapads to capture bad ideas. Back then, by pure chance, I found the concept of becoming an idea machine. That’s writing 10 bad ideas about anything. Every. Single. Day. That habit has helped me write books and keep my creative juices flowing. It’s been so helpful that I made it Idea #5 in my book, 10 Surprisingly Simple Ideas That Changed My Life And Could Change Yours Too. That book itself started as a 10-idea list. But before starting to write bad ideas, I faced the…
While catching up with ex-coworkers, the conversation inevitable turned to the future of coding. By the end of the evening, “You’re absolutely right!” had become an inside joke. That’s what ChatGPT seem to say when it’s wrong. Each time someone asked a question, they got an “You’re absolutely right!” AI answers aren’t 100% reliable. Coding’s short feedback loops make AI mistakes evident. Now imagine trusting every answer just because “AI said that.” Medical recommendations, investment…
Binge-watching TV isn’t exactly productive. Books are better. But recently, I’ve binged Brilliant Minds. Think a less dramatic version of House M.D. with wilder patients. Near the end of season 2, Dr. Wolf, the protagonist, said: “We’re all just doing our best to hold ourselves together.” A little reminder that: Nobody is normal. We’re all figuring out life as we go. We’re all just holding ourselves together. Want to change your life, but not sure how to start? Check out 10 Surprisingly Simple…
Last week, I found this question on a dev.to post: “Is it just me, or has anyone noticed that articles on dev.to don’t get as many reads/views as they used to before?” Yes! On dev.to, Medium, and on the Internet overall. There’s no point in writing how-to tutorials anymore, unless you’re starting your coding or writing journey with TIL posts. For step-by-step guidance on coding tasks, there’s a magical text-area that seems to understands you and spits out answers fast. Less people are landing…
Anne Lamott has written over 20 books. Among them, Bird by Bird, one of the most popular writing memoirs. I just devoured her interview on David Perell’s YouTube channel. Here are my quotes, extracts, and lessons: #1. “The point is not to try harder, it’s to resist less.” #2. “If it’s literary, you can’t use it.” This line reminded me of Smart Brevity’s beach and bar test: If you wouldn’t use it at a bar, don’t use it. “Don’t use words, you’d have to look up.” As a rule, Anne Lamott decides to…
Yesterday, I found Seth Godin’s riffs: a collection of his best quotes from his blog. He’s one of the writers I’ve stolen from. Here are my favorites: “Seek out the smallest viable audience, not the largest possible one.” The smallest viable audience is you: who you were years ago or who you are now. Write or create for your younger self. And if you make something just for you, at least one person will like it. That’s why I write some of my books for my younger self. And they’re a success if at…
Hey there. Quick update: 4 people have already preordered Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. A small win I’m celebrating. If you want to grow beyond syntax, this book is for you. As usual, here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. The new profitable coding gig seems to be to clean up vibecoded apps. Here’s a team already doing it (3min). It’s time to change our LinkedIn bios to “AI slop fixer.” #2. Cheap and accessible media has changed the meaning of resting, turning us into fat…
As a creative practice, I write 10-idea lists every day. Here are 7 interesting ideas I found recently. I’m writing them as I go, so I’m missing sources. #1. Have a list of alternative activities to scrolling. Instead of grabbing your phone, have a default activity for when you’re bored. That might be opening your journal or reading a book. Or have a creative date with yourself. #2. Rest isn’t the same as stillness. Rest is inactivity that recharges you for later work. Industries profit from…
These days, I’ve been fighting my inner voice and its self-doubt. I needed to reread my own advice: From change starts in your mind, I remembered, action alleviates anxiety. From write like no one’s watching, I remembered, signal takes time and there’s always a chance tomorrow. From do nothing, I remembered, when overwhelmed, pause instead of doing more. A blog leaves breadcrumbs and success clues for yourself. That’s the real advantage and a good reason to keep writing. Find some of my best…
Some days, the daily post is a piece of cake. Other days, not even walking seems to help to hit publish. But just a few lines count as writing. Anything longer than a tweet works to mark the day in the calendar. Better a small rep than a broken habit. Like a high-performance sport, every day you don’t write you’re practicing not writing.
Yesterday, a friend asked me, “How does writing a book feel?” She had just bought a printed copy of 10 Simple Ideas That Changed My Life. Well… The first days are full of excitement. I use 10-idea lists to come up with a title, subtitle, and outline. I come up with cover ideas. The next few days are full of doubt. It’s when the inner critic speaks louder. “Is anyone going to like this?” The next few weeks are quiet. Like a marathon, it’s one foot after the other. It’s doing something small…
You know something is happening when Hacker News features a Who Is Quitting instead of a Who Is Hiring. Bad managers, unrealistic expectations, AI, toxic culture… Every response shared a different but similar story. I’ve wanted to quit more times than I can count. After a layoff in 2024, I stopped coding for almost a year. That breaking moment came after a “good job” that broke me, left me sick, and burned me out. The time between jobs became a mini-sabbatical. I couldn’t find a job and nearly…
Yesterday, it happened again. I had an error message that made me scratch my head. For a moment, I thought, “God, why am I doing this? I should start a garden or something.” I copy-pasted the error message into Google. StackOverflow didn’t help that much. I was tempted to go to Copilot. But I held my horses. A few moments later, “Oooohh, here it is!” A one-line code change fixed it. Stupid Entity Framework Core! I was in a rush a few days before and I missed a small detail: I used a collection…
Hey there. Before this week’s links, a quick update: After a couple of rounds of editing, I recruited a couple of friends as beta readers for Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. It’s not the first time someone’s read these ideas, but I like honest feedback before launching—to quiet the inner critic. As usual, here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Keeping a blog showed me a corner of the web outside the big platforms. But I didn’t know about the smolweb and its protocols…
Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham using only 50 words. Amazon limits team size to what two pizzas can feed. Virgil Abloh challenged himself to tweak only 3% of an existing design. Inspired by these examples and by this David Epstein’s YouTube video, here’s my 10-idea list of writing constraints—pair them with these fun blog post challenges: Write a book first draft in one month Share only 10 main ideas, one idea per chapter, in a book Spend no more than one hour writing and editing a post…
From Derek Sivers’ Useful But Not True, you can always choose your next thought or reaction. But yesterday, I failed to choose my next reaction after a frustrating purchase over the phone. Then I hit a roadblock with a coding task. I felt how my energy was depleted. To change my mood, I switched to writing, something I enjoy. Hoping to find something to steal, I opened my RSS reader and checked my favorite blog aggregators. But scrolling only made things worse. It ended up draining the…
My sister showed me her phone with some hotel Instagram accounts. “They all look the same. I wonder if it’s AI,” she told me. She was visiting profiles of two small hotels in our city. Same colors. Same layout. No way to tell one from the other. The day before, a friend showed us a thank-you note from a community campaign. It looked just like the hotels’ Instagram posts. It’s not just Instagram or our friend’s picture. Open LinkedIn and you’ll see the same infographic all over the feed. Same…
“How many tables did you use?” “One or two…I don’t know.” A coder said that while demoing a feature to a client. C’mon! You wouldn’t forget that detail unless you had memory issues. While screensharing, I noticed he had Codex open—another coding agent. It wasn’t a memory issue after all. Someone has been prompting, right? I remembered that quick exchange when reading Yegor Bugayenko’s Couriers, Not Coders. He wrote, Working code is now the minimum. We expect discipline, speed of delivery, clear…
In 2025, his book sales dropped by 46%. That’s what Tim Ferriss discovered when he looked at his spreadsheets. The smoking gun: ChatGPT’s release around 2022, when his sales started to decrease. And that’s the landscape for a best-selling author. Now imagine being a mere mortal without Tim’s reach. Here are some of the changes Tim is making—and how I’m stealing them: Rely on personal stories “For my books, at least, the secret sauce is in the sequencing—the logical ordering of things—plus the…
Art is stealing. Stealing means blending your sources into something new: an artistic smoothie. Not that I consider my writing “art,” but here are 7 writers I’ve stolen from: #1. James Altucher. He’s the writer who has inspired me the most. I read almost all his books and hand-copied his posts to practice. Some of the ideas that have changed my life came from his bankrupt stories. I’ve stolen his storytelling-heavy style and the obsession with opening lines of books. #2. Seth Godin. Before…
Hey there. Quick update before the links: The first draft of Street-Smart Coding Manifesto is done, at 4,880 words. I already did a first pass of editing, looking for typos. (No matter how often I reread a draft, I always fear typos.) Next pass is to remove duplication and simplify ideas. As usual, here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. A manager reveals what truly sets high performers from average performers (3min). Spoiler alert: Not their code. #2. Generative AI is…
