Efficiency. It is sought after by many people and companies. You might have heard, watched, read, talked, or thought about it recently. And that is understandable. Efficiency defines the ability to get the best possible result with the minimum waste of energy and resources. It directly affects ones own (or a company’s) time and money. However, there is another concept that is not that popular and discussed, but that defines far better the ability of a person or team to achieve its goals, and that is efficacy. Read more

Problem-solving is an increasingly necessary skill for knowledge employees these days. For instance, software engineers have to deal with problems of various complexity on a daily basis. If you have the proper experience as a developer, you can quickly solve the problem by implementing the right solution. However, sometimes you deal with a problem that is novel to you, and you don’t have the relevant experience to solve it. The good news is that the problems are rarely unique and never encountered before by anyone else. Read more

Sometimes it looks like the world is going crazy. All the unimaginable events happening in different parts of the globe trigger various movements: some positive, some negative, some adequately useful, and some extreme. Try to recall the most recent event that you know when a person went into an extreme, and I bet that wasn’t more than two weeks ago. Generally speaking — making the right choices and decisions is hard, especially when the concepts you reason about are abstract. Read more

There it is — the end of 2020. The year is slowly but steadily coming to an end. It was a challenging and, overall, a very unusual year. It is time to look back and analyze it, as there were some nice things and some lessons to learn. Read more

The end of 2020 is near, and soon, a lot of people will make resolutions and set their goals for 2021. Sadly, some of those goals will stay just that — a written intention on a piece of paper abandoned in the first weeks of the new year. There are many strategies and tactics for goal setting, and in this article, I’d like to describe one such approach. The Habit That Chases You Sometimes, we set a goal to get rid of a bad habit. Read more

Recently, I had a discussion on Twitter about how a developer becomes senior. The main idea is a paradox, though. To be considered senior, a developer (or some other worker type for that matter) should have experience in a set of areas required for the job. However, to get that experience, the developer should be given a chance to work on projects that provide that kind of experience. And here is the tricky part — nobody wants people who do not know how to do their job. Read more

Take a moment and think about one thing that you do not do, but you wish you started doing 5, 10, or some other number of years ago. Think about all the things you would have learned and all the experiences you would have had in those years. And you would naturally acquire all that knowledge and expertise because you have put in the effort during an extended period of time, even though you might not see any difference on a daily basis. Read more

Some time ago, I stumbled upon this quote: Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. — Arthur Schopenhauer As with any good quote, it feels right and obvious, and you don’t ponder on it too much. It’s because today, we seek for something extraordinary, something unique and different. But if to take some time and think about it, some interesting insights can pop up. Below is the one I had. Read more

How many times have you found yourself overwhelmed by the number of commitments you said “yes” to previously? Maybe you even wished you didn’t take some opportunities in the first place. Not because it is not worth doing or is not attractive, but because you don’t have enough time to dedicate to it and thus you have to allocate time from other activities, and that hurts those commitments? Read more

One finalized side project is better than three abandoned ones. This is the premise of the article you are about to read. A finalized, working project can be placed on your resume, be showcased to other people, offer you more learning opportunities, and potentially become your income source in the future. An abandoned project is a little bit of learning and a plus one to the number of your abandoned projects. Read more