How good are your estimates?
Learn how to fight overconfidence and Parkinson's Law when estimating projects
If you are reading this newsletter, you are in some way connected to software engineers and thus you probably know how bad software engineers are with estimates. Properly estimating a project is hard, and things like Parkinson’s law even make you question if there is a “proper” estimate at all.
To avoid overthinking and analysis paralysis on this, read the below article that will give you a practical checklist you can use to inform your estimate better.
Estimating Invisible Work (8 min)
This article reminds me of this quote:
Even a perfect estimate, if it existed, would be too low 50% of the time.
We are usually terrible with estimates; there is no news there. This article will give you some structure you can use to fight estimates' two worst enemies: overconfidence and Parkinson’s Law.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to make better estimates
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How to optimize for career growth - Engineers who win know this is holding them back (5 min)
Imagine this situation: you are coding, and you want to run a unit test, but it does not work locally due to some weird error. You don’t have time right now to fix it. You just push the change to Github and wait for the whole pipeline to complete to give you feedback on whether the test is good or not. You lose some time, but that’s ok 🤷. After a few days you are in the same situation. Again, you don’t have time, and use the whole pipeline to get the feedback. You lose a bit more time. Next thing you know you wasted 10x more time than the time it would take you to fix the damn tests on your local machine. Not only that, but you also compensate for the time lost by putting in extra hours.
This article talks about the huge compound value of small optimizations you can do in your development workflow.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn why optimizing how you work matters
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How GitHub engineers learn new codebases (5 min)
github.blog
If you want to grow your impact and influence as a software engineer, chances are you will need to operate with many different codebases. Getting your head around new code is not easy and it takes time and effort. This article will give you strategies you can use for learning new code (+ a markdown template for discovering new code).
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to learn new codebases
ToT Rating: ⭐
All done for today! 👏