absolute100

I don't think so. If the owner monetize it, it's very likely ...

Yeah making money from such website can be dangerous. You would get lawsuit from Valve

Nidhi Sadanand provides helpful tips when joining a new company in a (very) senior role as Individual Contributor. Read everything Nidhi wrote under "Impact" section multiple times. Put reminders in your calendar to delve deeper and take notes when talking with your teammates to understand the business and organization dynamics better.

Writing is still an undervalued skill worth practicing in our industry. You can influence how the company works or what the company works on by becoming a better writer. "In every creative process, there's a moment when you have to grab the subject by the scruff of the neck and lift it up, like an animal carrying its young." -- Justin Mikolay shares a few tips to consider when you're communicating with others (or future self).

Short and insightful post by Evan Meagher. Knowing how to build momentum is a skill worth mastering. Easier to start with smaller projects and fewer people (but not easy, e.g. writing a blog post) and much harder to do when you need to lead multiple people. "A good way to generate early momentum in a project is to prioritize quick wins and explorations that tighten the feedback loop" -- the latter is a great framing when picking the work to start with. What can be done to understand the problem better and reduce the project's risk?

I'm a big fan of The Huberman Lab Podcast, and Juan Pablo Aranovich captures many insights that can be practical when designing your office space. What would you adopt to change your work environment at home? What about your office? Do you want to mark spaces for creative work? Maybe recommend them to move rooms when working on a different type of work?

I enjoyed Tim Reynolds's framing for how he leads as a Tech Lead for the team (focus on Time, Skills & Technology): "At the beginning of the project, I will direct my activities towards drafting a feasibility analysis report. This gives me a document where I can record answers to questions like the ones in the previous sections, and share the outcome of my research with the team and any stakeholders."

"When I notice that I’m all stressed out about something or driving myself to exhaustion, I remember that bike ride and try dialing back my effort by 50 percent. It’s been amazing how often everything gets done just as well and just as fast, with what feels like half the effort." -- Listen to Derek Sivers.

I always enjoy Joseph Jude's writing. This post goes well with last week's "Being visible" -- doing great work, in a great way, in public, will open doors for you. You don't need a lot of wins to make a big impact. You don't need a lot of wins to get lucky.

Using the "Even Over" approach when defining your strategy is powerful. It clearly puts tradeoffs, making it easier for the team to make decisions: "I'm willing to lose this to optimize that."

"I made a pact with myself — I don’t want to be led by fear. When I identify that I’m avoiding a decision due to fear, I stop to think of the worst case scenario, which for me is to be led by chance rather than creating my chances. I tap into that rebellious side we all have and push myself to get out of my comfort zone, because I know that on the other side I’ll be grateful for choosing authentically." -- Wonderful and brave writing by Miri Yehezkel, making a difficult decision to better align with her dreams and goals.

Sahil Bloom is a terrific thinker and writer I enjoy following on Twitter. I often take the first principle of "Draft Fast, Edit Slow" to an extreme - the easiest way to draft fast is to talk and record yourself. Then use a transcription tool (like Otter.ai) to get your first draft quickly in text. This is a trick I experimented with after reading Seth Godin's "Talker's Block" post.

Polina Pompliano got me thinking about leveraging stories to capture and share knowledge inside the company. The story can help retain facts, relationships, formulas, warnings, upside, or anything relevant to doing the necessary work. What is the narrative behind the change you'd like to make? How can you get people to connect to it emotionally? It's working well on kids at school, but it doesn't end there. Most of us learn best when we can connect to the narrative.

Measuring the adoption and usefulness of internal tools to optimize the organization's productivity and efficiency is extremely hard. Share it in your organization and discuss which metrics you'd like to optimize for. How do you know which metrics to focus on? When will you change them?

David Noël-Romas shares 7 practical ways for you to better manage your time and energy. "Paying themselves first" is golden: "engineers who understand the extralinear benefit of continued un-interruption can schedule their focus time first, far in advance of other demands which might come up. (It is never too late to start this practice! If your calendar is full right now, it is probably empty next month or the month after.)"

If you're a technical leader, Tim Reynolds's post will challenge the "autopilot mode" you might have today when reacting to different situations the team is dealing with. Map the type of efforts you're leading today - Do you add energy or reduce energy? What would you like to improve knowing that it hurts the team?

John Cutler with another excellent post that helped me figure out the time horizon to aim for when setting a strategy and thinking of OKRs. Can we use it to set a North Star for the department and not only for the company? Can we define the inputs properly? Should we focus on business inputs? Technical inputs? Who can help us validate it?

"Instead of looking for a mentor, just find somebody who can answer some questions you have. Then, if you think they can answer some more, ask them again. In reality, a mentor is mostly just somebody that answers questions more than once. That’s it. It’s not cinematic." -- Love it. Perfect framing. It's okay to call that person your mentor, if the two of you think it's the right way to define the relationship. Don't let the lack of an official mentor hold you back from asking people some questions, and then again.

"In practice, your rating in this system is not a rating of your work performance, it is a rating of your manager’s storytelling in these calibration meetings." -- Kent Beck will get you to think about how you run Feedback (or Performance) Reviews today and the incentive structure people have to do the right things. Incentives design is a tough problem, so you shouldn't seek easy or quick solutions.

Dan Shipper wrote a post that resonated strongly with me. It's as if I wrote it myself, suffering for the same things Dan writes about and finding ways to manage my energy better. What did you find out about yourself recently that made you change your ways? Who helped you spot it? Who gave you some tools to try?

Tomasz Tunguz with an interesting question that will make you pause and think. It's a question that you need to answer often in a particular context: is it wartime or peacetime? What's the stage of the product? The company? How's the team structured, and which leader complements them the best? What do you think makes a great leader in each setup? What is unique about you? What will others say?

An important reminder from Candost Dagdeviren: "Assuming consensus in the absence of objection leaves out the good, bad, and diverse ideas—all of them. Many companies work hard to create a diverse culture yet fail to take advantage." -- consider asking during and after meetings how people feel about the decision made or the process that got us there.

Being promoted to Staff Engineer levels and above has to be around the impact you're working on and producing visibility around it - where are we heading, can we feel the confidence we need when you lead it, how others around you feel about it. Will Larson wrote a post I believe all software engineers should read: "Find the right mix of activities that leverage your strengths, aren’t already overburdened with volume, and feel authentic to you. If you’ve never done much communication of your work, it may feel awkward to self-promote your work. You never want to wholly lose that sense of awkwardness–restraint helps–but you will have to get comfortable with some of it."

A great way to grow is to be around people who can help you push your limits in areas of interest (where they're the experts). Even better is to find mentors who can devote the time to teach you and help you build shorter feedback loops. Do you have a mentor (or a few)? Do you want to discuss that in your next 1:1 with your manager? Can you help others by mentoring them?

"The real magic of connections at the office was that we were having these connections without trying. It’s not that they were better, it’s that they were effortless. But they didn’t work for everyone in the same way. They often reinforced status roles and privilege." - I don't know if I agree with Seth Godin's perspective, but it's interesting to think about. To me, what gets worse is not the "effortless connections," but rather the low latency of communication - both verbal and visual aspects. The technical tax makes video calls (or audio) less exciting and fun. "Can you hear me? Now? You're on mute!" or "Zoom fatigue" are real problems. I wonder how much of our lack of intentional connections is due to technical challenges that will eventually be resolved, and maybe enhanced with VR/AR.

Annie Duke's approach to decision-making is helpful as most of our decisions when building software or a team are not falsifiable. It's not math. Often, we'll need to collect information, explain our reasoning, and use our intuition before deciding. Having a method will help us increase the probability of hitting the target, and maybe sometimes hitting the bull’s-eye: "The beauty of approaching each decision by first examining what you know is that little bit of knowledge can go a long way toward improving your aim. The more you know, the better equipped you are to counter uncertainty in your decision-making."

https://productcoalition.com/product-thinking-vs-project-thi...

Kyle Evans with an excellent reminder that by default, our mind is optimizing for delivery of projects (features). Products also have unique traits that projects don't encapsulate well: SLA, measurement of success, observability, roadmap, clear long-term ownership, and more: "While project thinking focuses on coming up with solutions up-front and then delivering against a schedule, product thinking keeps the focus on the outcome. That involves some level of comfort with uncertainty and learning, which can be pretty hard. But if we want to get to the right outcome, and not just an on-time output, it is really the only way to work."

Ashley Whillans wrote a post I needed to read and remind myself how powerful and negative inertia can be: "Stress spurs busyness, which creates stress, which spurs busyness. [...] No matter what time affluence looks like for you, the happiest and most time affluent among us are deliberate with their free time."

It's often the words we use that shape the culture we build. Very much like "postmortem" (we use BetterNext), you should consider your language and using the term "best practice" in your team. I love this framing: "We should regard best practices as provisional, not optimal, as a floor rather than a ceiling."

As I plan to give a talk about "how to find growth material and learn X2 faster", this post by Saron Yitbarek cannot come in a better timing. Improving the way I make transitions between what I say my your visual aid (my slides) can help keep the audience more engaged. Definitely going to practice it this time.