Software developers do more than writing code all day long. Look at the job as a whole and you’ll find many orthogonal ways to improve. What does it mean to be a software developer? What does a software developer do? A software developer writes code to create digital products. …

Your work is embedded in a network of context and knowledge. If you want to collaborate efficiently, leave breadcrumbs for your collaborators to access the context supporting what you shared. Knowledge work is a creative and collaborative effort. The collaboration that goes into shaping a piece of work might not…

Knowledge work is open-ended. For every task you finish, there are two more you could start. Deadlines, competition, and genuinely interesting problems conspire to keep you working but rest is paramount for long term performance. …

Many knowledge work activities have a way of requiring you to feed more time into them. Timeboxing offers a way to keep these time-hungry activities at bay so you can move on with your work. In 1955, Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote in The Economist that “[i]t is a commonplace observation…

Want to enjoy your work more? Take a page from the lumberjack’s playbook and do more of it outside. Who are the happiest, most satisfied workers in America? Lumberjacks, apparently. Andrew Van Dam from the Washington Post crunched the numbers from thousands of time journals from the Bureau of Labor…

Being stuck on a problem is the commonest trouble of all. It’s the default state, the starting point. It’s a sign you found something worth solving. There’s a passage in Robert Pirsig’s modern classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where Pirsig is helping his son Chris write a…

This is a re-blog from giolodi.com. Checkout the original for more links and posts. When the Twitter board accepted Elon Musk’s bid to buy the social network, the whole of Twitter exploded. At least, the timeline I was served seemed to. Every tweet I saw was either outrage or celebration. …

This is a re-blog from giolodi.com. Checkout the original for more links and posts. “You need to teach the comfort with ambiguity,” ex-Red Hat CEO and IBM president Jim Whitehurst told Michael Gladwell in a podcast interview, “and that’s a tough thing to do.” It’s tough but necessary because most…

This is a re-blog from giolodi.com. Checkout the original for more links and posts. Pick any book from the self-improvement and productivity categories, and I bet there will be a section dedicated to flow. Flow is a state of optimal experience where you are engrossed in the activity, time dilates…