Stay SaaSy

TLDR: Compensate slowness with attention to detail, clear communication and better documentation.

The kind of person you seem to envy are people who are most likely pattern-matching against their past experience. I attribute this quick thinking to having come across those same/similar problem statements earlier. But getting there requires a good understanding of the problem space. This can only be done by spending time in the problem space and paying attention to details.

When working on a new problem these days. I feel like I slow down too. I now tend to go for the details. What I cannot make up in speed, I make up for with detailed solutions, thinking from the user's perspective, staying aware of trade-offs, watching out for unhandled scenarios, etc.

I also document all my work. Whenever I start working on a problem/ticket/issue, I create a new note in my personal note-taking tool. I document the commands, the new findings, etc.

Fun fact: For a limited time, I fulfilled the role of a Product Manager at my recent workplace. The engineers I worked with loved the amount of detailing in my product specifications. This was the result of slowing down and paying attention to the details. The above qualities/choices also resulted in me playing the implicit role of QA for the team. The concept of "implicit roles" is explained pretty well in this blog post on the StaySassy blog [1]

I try to compensate my slowness with attention to detail, clear communication and better…

Hi,

I come across a lot of blogs when I curate for my newsletter Interesting Things [1]. Just looking through the links that have been curated in the past month or so, I would suggest:

Tech

- https://wasteofserver.com/

- https://tonsky.me/

- https://brianschrader.com/

- https://blog.thea.codes/

- https://fasterthanli.me/

- https://jvns.ca/

- https://blog.royalsloth.eu/

Non-tech

- https://www.drorpoleg.com/ - About work and society

- https://staysaasy.com/ - About tech work

- https://www.nateliason.com/ - About life in general

- https://andymatuschak.org/

- https://craigmod.com/

- https://perell.com/

And, of course, shameless plug: https://bengtan.com

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[1] https://bengtan.com/interesting-things

By far the hardest part of writing a blog is finding the motivation to keep going. The best single trick that I've found to combat this is to write with a partner, as it'll keep both of you honest and motivated. The writing distribution doesn't need to be remotely even – just having a teammate is enough. That alone is worth more than any other productivity or motivation hack I've found.

(My coauthor and I write about running product/engineering teams and enterprise SaaS... we actually have indulged in the productivity woodshedding and use a static site generator with CI/CD, but it took less time to set up than it takes to write an average 1000 word post. https://staysaasy.com/)

This is a tech-focused selection from my personal list, with a few more business-y sources thrown in:

- https://erikbern.com

- https://lethain.com

- https://commoncog.com

- https://scattered-thoughts.net

- https://danluu.com

- https://ideolalia.com

- https://staysaasy.com

- https://collabfund.com

- https://blog.nelhage.com

- https://jacobian.org

- https://equalventures.substack.com

- https://defmacro.org

- https://spakhm.com

- https://apenwarr.ca

- https://scarletink.com

- https://benkuhn.net

- https://cpojer.net

- https://brandur.org

- https://zeptonaut.com

Let me know if you want some reading recommendations for any of these!

EDIT:

Paste this hacky snippet into your browser's console to save all of the links into your clipboard:

(() =>
{
let result = [...document.querySelectorAll('td a')]
.map((link) =>
link &&
!link.href.includes('ycombinator') &&
!link.href.includes('javascript:void')
? link.href
: ''
)
.filter(Boolean);
result = [...new Set(result)];
result.sort();
copy(result.join('\n\n'));
})();

Just to help, here's a compiled-list of all of the links shared here so…

This is a shameless plug, but a friend and I have been writing a blog where we discuss a lot of engineering topics since around the start of the covid era.

Sample posts:

* Managing Engineering Managers: A Primer https://staysaasy.com/management/2021/10/14/Managing-Managers.html

* A tech stack should be a well-balanced portfolio https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2020/05/30/Picking-Your-Tech-Stack.html

We also write about product, management, and company scaling in general, but we're engineers by trade and that's one of our go-to topics.