Articles on Self-Improvement

How to Transition from Average Engineer to 10x Engineer

Can an average engineer develop technical skills that surpass 10x the abilities of his or her peers? Unlikely. (more)

Master Adjacent Disciplines

“Should I focus on becoming a generalist or a specialist? Which route better sets myself up for career success?” Engineers who already know the importance of learning and of investing in themselves often ask these questions and wonder where to best spend their time. (more)

Taking Ownership Is The Most Effective Way to Get What You Want

In 1967, American psychologist Martin Seligman discovered that our perception of control greatly shapes our choices and behavior. (more)

What Research on Happiness and Motivation Can Tell Us About Finding Meaning in Our Work

In The Upside of Irrationality, behavioral economist Dan Ariely describes an experiment he conducted to measure how the meaning of work impacts the motivation for work. In the experiment, he recruited Harvard students who loved Legos to build Lego Bionicle robots and paid them decreasing amounts … (more)

The Single, Most Valuable Lesson I’ve Learned in My Professional Life

I worked long hours at Ooyala, the first startup that I joined after leaving Google. There were weeks where my team and I would work 70-80 hours and hardly any weeks where we worked fewer than 60. Like many teammates, I’d work in the office during the day and then continue to work from home after… (more)

There’s More to Learn and Grow Than You Might Think

Are we all born with a fixed amount of intelligence? Or is our intelligence a malleable quantity that can be improved upon through experience and hard work? It turns out that our belief systems about intelligence impact the types of goals that we set for ourselves and our attitudes toward learning. (more)

10 Ways to Leverage Resources at Your Company to Improve Your Programming Skills

An engineer who works at a well-known tech company asked me anonymously on Quora for some advice on how he or she could improve his or her programming skills. If you’ve ever wondered something similar and are looking for some new ways to become a more effective software engineer, you might find t… (more)

“A comprehensive tour of our industry’s collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

Read a sample chapter

“A comprehensive tour of our industry’s collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

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Grow Your Skills Beyond the Book

Listen to podcast interviews with top software engineers and watch master-level videos of techniques previously taught only in workshops and seminars.

Consistently deliver business value — become the key person your team trusts to ship business-critical initiatives.
Study in-depth interviews with leaders from Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Stripe, and Instagram — double down on their highest-leverage investments, and avoid their most costly mistakes.
Pick the right projects most likely to propel you up the career ladder — including the nuances of how the criteria change as you get more senior.

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