Most productivity advice fails engineers, and the reason is measurable
Advice built for shallow task-switching inverts when the task takes forty minutes to hold in your head.
practices
42 posts
Writing my own performance review honestly, for once
Listing what I shipped is not the review. Listing what changed for other people is.
The meeting that should have been a pull request, and vice versa
Decisions need synchronous time; proposals need written artifacts.
I measured my own tooling for a month and deleted half of it
Most of a toolchain is habit rather than measured benefit.
The rate conversation I kept getting wrong
Quoting a day rate invites a comparison to salary. Quoting against the outcome changes the question.
Scope creep is a contract problem, not a communication problem
Being clearer about the scope does not stop it changing. A written change process does.
The fixed-price project that cost me three weeks of unpaid work
Fixed price transfers all estimation risk to you. Price it or change the contract shape.
I wrote 400 lines to avoid learning one SQL feature
Window functions replaced a hand-rolled grouping pass. The cost of not learning was paid in code.
The onboarding doc that doubled as a test of our own setup
If a new engineer cannot get running from the doc in a day, the doc is not the problem.
The bug was in the requirements, and three people implemented it faithfully
Correct code against a wrong spec passes every test.
The dependency with one maintainer, and the week it went away
Bus factor is a property of your supply chain, not just your team.
It was not a timezone bug, it was a day-boundary bug
Storing UTC is necessary and not sufficient. Any report bucketed by day needs a declared zone.