"I hope this newsletter finds you well" ;)

Aspaldiko – This untranslatable Basque word describes the euphoria and happiness felt when catching up with someone you haven’t seen in a long time. I miss that - hopefully soon we can all experience this feeling once the lockdowns end.

Habit-forming advice of the week: Reward yourself after completing challenges, even badly.

Short Fat Engineers Are Undervalued

No, this one is not about body shaming :) The author argues that we tend to overvalue skill depth and undervalue skill breadth. A short (pun intended) and sweet take on the famous T-shaped engineer profile.

Use Active Listening to Boost Your Career

There’s listening and then there’s active listening. The art of effective listening is essential to clear communication, and clear communication is necessary for career success. Learn how to get better at it.

When costs are nonlinear, keep it small.

A writeup on how to approach maintenance, tech debt and its friends. The main point is that when costs increase nonlinearly with delay or batch size, larger batches are not more efficient.

Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies

Supply chain attacks are not new and are really scary. Be honest with yourself - how often do you make sure your 3rd party libs are legit?

This is a really nice walkthrough of how such an attack works and looks like.

Applied Compositional Thinking for Engineers

Finally, let me recommend a free course - it is open to everyone interested in learning how concepts from applied category theory can be useful for tackling engineering problems.