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20 entries · 9 articles · 11 notes
Senior developers often say they don't know much, then spend 15 minutes explaining the auth and caching behind their 'simple' API. Run it recursively: what do you do, and what do you need to know to do that? The lessons you've forgotten are gold to everyone behind you.
A guitarist friend spent a week chasing a take he'd already nailed on day one. Developers do the same with posts about their work: the first honest draft is usually the best, and polishing it for days kills the habit. A recording lives for years. A post doesn't.
Developers with 10+ years in one codebase often treat it as a liability: old stack, short resume, behind on the latest. It's depth most developers never get. Write down the 3 hardest problems that system taught you to solve. That's your story.
Developers move from problem to problem, so at review time the only wins we remember are the recent ones. The Receipt Gap is the distance between the value you delivered and the value anyone can point to. Close it with one line every Friday.
AI lets me write an order of magnitude more code than by hand. When it breaks at two in the morning, the model isn't the one responsible. More output means more ownership, not less.
One LinkedIn post turns into seven sections and two hours because you're trying to make a movie. Make sitcom episodes instead: one queue that was the wrong choice, one boundary developers get wrong. The larger story tells itself.
The easy trap in a job search is thinking you just need more interviews. If the right people don't understand what you're good at, more applications get the same result. Opportunities come from being understood, not just qualified.
You spend six months of nights and weekends on a side project to prove you can do more than CRUD, then it becomes one resume bullet. The finished app isn't the proof. The decisions are, and you can share those before it's done.
The moment a job posts, hundreds of people hit the same door. If the hiring manager already knows your name from a post, a talk, or a project, you're not in that line. The time to become visible is before someone needs a developer like you.
Good developers assume the code will speak for itself. Then fewer bugs and fewer escalations turn them into the person nobody has to think about, and the company guesses their value low. Make the decisions visible, not the output.
You don't post on LinkedIn to become a content creator. You post so that when someone asks 'do you know a developer who can handle this?', somebody thinks of you. It's a long game, and it beats the resume line.
When the job search stalls, developers build a side project and vanish for three months. Build it, but post the decisions and the bugs along the way. Those are the stories that get you hired.
NDA, clearance, or a company that won't let you talk about the product? You don't need to. Every project is full of decisions that aren't the project, and how you made them is what a senior dev or hiring manager actually wants to see.
The most common thing developers tell me is they don't know what to post on LinkedIn. You fixed something this week, made a tradeoff, screwed something up. That's the post. Write five sentences and hit publish.
Developers are upset about the job market, but hiring managers are drowning in hundreds of AI-written resumes and would rather interview someone they already know. Become known before the job opens.
Developers prep for the next job with more certs, more side projects, more LeetCode. If the real problem is that the right people don't know what you can do, more skill doesn't fix it. Ask who needs to know what you already know.
Most developers don't need another framework, they need better judgment. Architecture is less about memorizing patterns and more about knowing how much complexity the problem has actually earned.
If an interview comes down to how many LeetCode problems you ground through beforehand, it's testing the wrong thing. I want to see how you tackle a problem, and the questions you ask are the answer.
Dozens of developers in three weeks told me they're considering leaving the industry, not for a new calling but because they think there's no room left. The resume game is broken. Go around it.
Most developers define themselves by their tech stack, and that's incomplete. Six questions (what you build, who for, with what, what you're known for, your philosophy, where you're going) give you a position and a direction.