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July 9 - July 12, 2025
writing software is a team sport,
the “soft skills” of engineering,
Linus’s real achievement was to lead these people and coordinate their work;
High-functioning teams are gold and the true key to success.
By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires.
relationships always outlast projects.
If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, “I am going to do it my way,” you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career.
By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small, undeclared war, for the whole of your life.
your self-worth shouldn’t be connected to the code you write
Put yourself outside your comfort zone now and then; find a fishbowl with bigger fish than you and rise to whatever challenges they hand out to you.
The team cultures that are most successful are those that focus the majority of the team’s effort on shipping great software.
Having a strong team ego6 is good; a team totally eclipsed by individual egos is a recipe for disaster.
if your team isn’t in agreement or is uninformed, there’s no way to know if you’re writing the right code in the first place.
It takes considerable effort to make sure everyone on a team agrees on the team’s direction and understands exactly what the team needs to do.
Every time you interrupt someone’s work it will take some amount of time for them to get back up to speed — always be conscious of when you’re doing this.
if you don’t expend any effort on good communication, you’ll waste considerable effort doing work that’s either unnecessary or already being done by other members of your team.
writing a mission statement is a way to concisely define the direction and limit the scope of your product.
Comments should be focused on why the code is doing what it’s doing, not what the code is doing.
A project is just like that boat: if no one pilots it, you’re left with a group of geeks just sitting around waiting for something to happen.
valuable time pulling the low performer along and team morale leaks away into the ether.
“I won’t lie to you, but I will tell you when I can’t tell you something or if I just don’t know.”
It’s the behaviors you want to filter out, not particular individuals.
If your starter team builds a strong sense of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, these expectations will endure.
What’s specifically at risk is your team’s attention and focus.
Attention and focus are the scarcest resources you have.
As companies grow, they develop bureaucracy and processes in an effort to manage profit, reduce risk, increase predictability, and support the massive weight of the organization itself.
a team should never spend more than one-third to one-half of its time and energy on defensive work,
How does a new user feel after a minute?
They trust you because the cumulative set of interactions they’ve had with you add up to an overall emotionally positive state.
