Saudade
“Saudade” is an untranslatable Portuguese term that refers to the melancholic longing or yearning. A recurring theme in Portuguese and Brazilian literature, “saudade” refers to a sense of loneliness and incompleteness.
“Saudade” can more casually be used to say that you miss someone or something, even if you’ll see that person or thing in the near future. It differs from nostalgia in that one can feel “saudade” for something that might never have happened, whereas nostalgia is a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or period in time.
💡 This week’s wisdom: When a child asks an endless string of “why?” questions, the smartest reply is, “I don’t know, what do you think?”.
🐕🦺 Leadership
10 Golden Rules of Team Leadership
Ten observations on team leadership from a seasoned team coach and manager.
Measures of engineering impact
Advice on how to think about engineering impact. Hint: it’s really not trivial.
Can senior leaders make friends at work?
You won’t find any spoilers here, go and read ;)
Advice: Keep A Sabotage List
Rands, as usual, has some great ideas: It’s a list of important projects I’m currently not doing for… reasons. I’ll explain some of the reasons as best I can shortly, but the majority of the hard work is honestly building and maintaining this list.
🈺 Career
Expecting More from Your Career (and Less from Your Job)
The first point in the mentality of taking the management of your career into your own hands is expecting more from your career and less from your job. Your current work situation – good, bad, or fine – is just a moment in your career.
Career Advice: Be Confidently Uncertain
The balance between fake-it-until-you-make-it and being completely uncertain is hard to get right. The article distinguishes between types of confidence and gives actionable advice on how to handle being uncertain.
Is the Great Resignation in tech real? If so, why?
An insightful Hacker News discussion on “the great resignation”, its reality, and causes. Lots of theories, opinions, and anecdotes.
🧠 Mind matters
On the origin of minds
Cognition did not appear out of nowhere in ‘higher’ animals but goes back millions, perhaps billions, of years. Evolution had laid a foundation of capacities considered cognitive well before nervous systems appeared.
The Link Between Wandering and Sleeping Minds
Researchers discover that when the mind wanders or goes blank, some parts of the brain behave as they do during sleep.
💻 Tech#
New HTTP standards for caching on the modern web
Two proposed new caching headers designed to update HTTP standards to match the reality of the CDN-powered web that exists today, creating specifications that formalize existing practices from popular CDNs (like Fastly, Akamai & Cloudflare, all of whom have been involved in the writing the standards themselves).
How We Design Our APIs at Slack
Sensible tips on designing APIs from a company with 885,000 active developers using theirs.
Python stands to lose its GIL, and gain a lot of speed
A new project to change the CPython runtime to boost multithreaded performance has drawn the attention of Python’s core development team.
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