I've used many personality assessment methods & tools in the past. Gallup SF, Transactional Analysis, OCEAN - that sort of stuff (& more). I'm not a professional behavioral psychologist (of course), but I thought nothing would surprise me regarding the qualification of personality types. Yet, I&...
I consider myself a "product person". Counseling, consulting, and other types of mercenary work are cool short-term, but I'm not going to fool myself. In the end, I want to build (organically) something persistent and lasting that will stand out in comparison with the competition and...
It's one of the lessons I've learned the hard way: there's no other resource valuable more than your own time. Why so? * it's hard-capped * it's not transferable (my time isn't directly exchangeable with your time, at least in...
Goals are not rocket science, right? Just make sure they are SMART [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria], confirm the specific objective value, and get yourself busy, striving to get there before the deadline is due, correct? In fact, many do just that. I find it an equivalent of...
I bet that nearly everyone in the software-crafting industry has heard about YAGNI [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it] ("You Ain't Gonna Need It") principle. But what about TAGRI? TAGRI (which is nearly as old as YAGNI) stands for "They...
Living in times of pandemic has a lot of cascading side effects. Keeping the social distance has reduced the number of social interactions within professional communities by a level of magnitude. Some fellows I've used to socialize with every few weeks, I see now twice, thrice a year....
Each time I'm getting interviewed (e.g., while recording a podcast episode, during a conference), I struggle with answering one particular (and relatively frequent) question: > What advice would you give to aspiring programmers when it comes to tech skills? Which programming language, framework, or tech stack should...
We're living with the COVID-19 pandemic for more than 12 months already. And yet, according to my observations, surprisingly many people still do not get it: * why is it considered so dangerous? * does the threat level justify our lives being turned upside down (the issue of personal inconvenience)...
I've read a good book about technical leadership and seniority in engineering recently - "Staff Engineer" [https://www.amazon.com/Staff-Engineer-Leadership-beyond-management-ebook/dp/B08RMSHYGG/] by Will Larson [https://twitter.com/Lethain]. I've already reviewed it here [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3870963321] (feel free...
Have you ever played AD&D [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons]? If so, you probably remember the mechanism its creators used to capture characters' worldviews. The innovative (for those times) alignment system [http://www.easydamus.com/alignment.html] was made of two independent variables: * approach...
Disclaimer (and a short reminder): this blog post represents my personal observations & opinions. It should not be affiliated in any way to my prior or current employers and (in particular) cannot be treated as an unofficial or official statement on their behalf. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Public cloud is everywhere these days....
