Techniques for managing your time and cognitive load as a senior leader

The constant context switch is part of the job for most leaders. If you manage to keep the type of activity similar for a longer period of time it will have less impact on your cognitive load and energy level.

I am a fan of time blocking and bundling up work, as this article suggests. Not so sure about doing all the 1:1s on the same day, though, I find that too draining.

(via Pat Kua’s Level Up newsletter)

Cal Newport on time blocking

Sometimes people ask how time blocking can work for reactive work, where you cannot tell in advance what obligations will enter your life on a given day. My answer is again simple: periods of open-ended reactivity can be blocked off like any other type of obligation. Even if you’re blocking most of your day for reactive work, for example, the fact that you are controlling your schedule will allow you to dedicate some small blocks (perhaps at the schedule periphery) to deeper pursuits.

Did you know there are two schools of thought when it comes to Test Driven Development? I didn’t until Dave Farley’s video Are You Chicago or London When It Comes To TDD landed in my feed last week. The title piqued my interest and I was delighted to find a great discussion of approaches to TDD and how they complement each other.

If you’re a seasoned test driven developer, or merely TDD-curious, this is a really good refresher.

When Developers Leave - Where Does the Knowledge Go?

Software development isn’t straightforward. Software projects are built to the unique requirements for a unique company. If the software was standard, all companies could use the same, but like the company, the software is unique. Asking a developer to look at software created on a project, isn’t like a dentist looking in a mouth. It’s complex, confusing, and takes months to understand. Building up relationships with other developers/consultants/customers takes a month.

Job title vs job position: What is the difference?

The job title and job position concepts regularly overlap and feed into each other, it’s just that one of them (title) highlights your spot in the company, while the other (position) is more focused on your skill and competence levels. Ultimately, both will play a role in shaping your professional journey.

This clip popped up in my Youtube feed and piqued my interest. A snippet of a longer conversation between Dave Farley and Michael Feathers, in this clip Michael Feathers talks about how OOP and FP can look quite similar, and goes on to talk about the “surface area” of tests and how that relates to the traditional OO concept of separation of concerns. It’s a nice and nerdy 10 minutes.

John Carmack has raised $20 million in order to create an Artficial General Intelligence by way of mad science. I suspect the mad science is mostly going to be a lorra lorra C++ code. I like how raising the money wasn’t to fund the work but a reason to get serious about it.

Stable Diffusion is an open source AI model similar to DALL-E that you can run on an M1 Mac