Do you struggle with soft skills? Perhaps you do but don't even know yet
Learn what to do and what not to do to communicate effectively, what happened with developer experience/productivity in 2024, and how to make engineers love your meetings
Hello fellow readers! ⛄
As 2024 is coming to an end, a lot of self-reflection is going on. Some authors are composing digests of their best articles of 2024. This is a great opportunity for you to get amazing summaries of top tech newsletters in the last year 🙌.
I decided to experiment with sending out Top of the Tech digest several times per week. For now, I will add Tuesday and keep the Friday digest. This means you will get two Top of the Tech digests each week, which will be more concise. Having a digest with 10+ articles is probably too much. My goal is to optimize your newsletter browsing and reduce scrolling. The bet is that having smaller but more frequent digests will help with that.
Above is a bet I believe will help you get more value from the newsletter. However, if you have something else in mind that will make Top of the Tech more valuable for you, drop feedback here.
6 reasons why the senior leadership doesn't take you seriously
This is an amazing summary of soft skills improvements you can do to become a more effective communicator. What makes it so good is the collaboration between two great authors -
and . The focus areas and the solutions are coming from Wes, who is an expert in communication & influence. This is then layered with Anton’s real-life examples of how he messed up in these areas. The high degree of expertise + vulnerability is what makes this article very easy to identify with and learn from. Additionally, Anton links relevant (free 🙌) articles from that turn this one into a soft-skills digest gem 💎 Pure gold.Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Learn how to communicate better through real-life examples
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
The best of engineering enablement in 2024
reflects on 2024 by providing a digest of the best articles from his Engineering Enablement newsletter🥇 This makes this article a recursive digest-within-a-digest ➿🤯. On a serious note, if you want to get an overview of what happened with engineering enablement in 2024, even reading just summaries in this one will give you great indicators.There was a huge adoption of AI tools, and benchmarks showed a big impact on productivity 📈. However, a DORA report recently showed AI hurts software delivery performance 📉 🤔.
Learn when to invest more in developer productivity and how to measure it.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Learn what happened with Developer Experience/Productivity in 2024
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐ (🌟 if you are focused on developer experience/productivity)
Why engineers hate meetings and how to fix it
Meeting efficiency is an evergreen topic. This article provides seven rules for making engineers love your meetings.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Improve your meeting facilitation
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Euro Top Tech Jobs - Week 29
Nicola once more reminds us of the benefits of being a freelancer or having your own business versus grinding in Big Tech until you reach high compensation. As getting into Big Tech can be quite hard, he shares a list of “less competitive” big tech roles in Europe you can pursue.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Options for reaching high compensation in Europe
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
From Code to Words: How to Write Well for Software Engineers
Very brief but quite useful article on improving your writing skills as a Software Engineer. As you get to tackle more complex challenges and align with multiple stakeholders, you start writing a lot (think RFCs, design documents, etc.). This article gives you three steps you can use to boost the quality of your written documentation.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Improve your tech writing skills
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Handbooks, customer calls, and company mission
I like
’s advice for crafting your mission and vision statements in this one. I always found defining vision harder and mission easier. He shares prompts that help you derive your vision from your mission. He also gives a great template for an engineering handbook your team can use right away. Finally, he breaks down talking to customers, which is a topic unfortunately so often detached from engineering.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Learn three things EMs often overlook
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How a BBC navigation bar component broke depending on which external monitor it was on
This is a brief story about a very weird, super edge-case bug on the BBC’s website. If you like reading about esoteric frontend bugs 🐛 this article is for you.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Bleeding edge-case bug
ToT Rating: ⭐
EP143: DNS Record Types You Should Know
Lots of byte-sized wisdom again from ByteByteGo. Primer on DNS records reminded me to set up a proper domain for my newsletter (in progress 🚧). Great comparison of polling vs webhooks and APIs vs SDKs. You will also get Ultimate Kubernetes Commands Cheatsheet 🙌. What more you can ask for?!
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Print the k8s cheatsheet and stick it next to your screen
ToT Rating: ⭐
Thanks for the mention Jovan, glad I finally got those 3 stars! :)