Six principles for accelerated career growth
Learn about career growth, public speaking, building trust as a manager and much more.
It was quite tough to create this week’s Top of the Tech digest. It is a holiday season, with a lot of traveling and I even got sick a bit which made everything harder. But hey, I made it somehow! 🙌
This week felt a bit low on good content. It could be that other authors had the same fatigue as I did. However, there is still some excellent advice on growing your career, public speaking and many other topics.
I am in the phase where I am building an audience for my newsletter. Any share is super valuable for me to reach more readers. If Top of the Tech is valuable to you share it among your circles.
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Happy holidays! 🎄
New Grad to Staff at Meta in 3 years: Evan King
The Developing Dev
In this guest post, a former Meta engineer talks about crazy fast career growth from new grad to Staff Engineer in 3 years 🤯 Modestly, Evan attributes a big part of his speedy career growth to luck 🍀. He continues to share some excellent advice on strategies/mindsets that are in your control and will help your career growth.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn six principles to boost your career growth
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
How Public Speaking Accelerates Your Engineering Career
Path to Staff Engineer
In this guest post, Fran shares his experience doing a public external talk. He shares why presenting publicly (especially externally) can boost your career through increased visibility. Then he also shares some good advice useful for anyone open to improving their presentation skills.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Improve your public speaking
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
The 3 top mistakes of managers under 30
Leading Developers
This one targets a niche audience of young managers and shares examples of mistakes to avoid when being a young manager yourself. There is a great story about a young manager of truck drivers 🚚 that shows how to gain trust first before managing people (aka “You can’t ride a horse 🐴 until he trusts you).
Audience: (Young) Engineering Managers
Value: Tips for young EMs
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
2024 benchmarks for the DX Core 4
Engineering Enablement
Last week Abi introduced DX Core 4 framework. It is a pragmatic attempt to establish four very concrete productivity metrics you can use to asses how effective is your organization. In this week’s episode, he goes one step further. He shares benchmark data for DX Core 4 where you can see how other companies are performing against these metrics.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Learn about engineering productivity measuring
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Euro Top Tech Jobs - Week 28
The European Engineer
Brief article on how to effectively apply for jobs. Nicola shares the Skills Pattern Analysis (SPA) Framework that you can use to align your skillset with the pool of jobs you find most interesting.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to align your skills to jobs on the marker
ToT Rating: ⭐
Using GenAI as a Senior Software Engineer
The Hustling Engineer
Hemant shares four ways to use gen-AI as a software engineer to boost your effectiveness. This will help you to write code, debug, document, and design systems faster.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Use gen-AI to boost your productivity
ToT Rating: ⭐
EP142: The Fundamental Pillars of Object-Oriented Programming
ByteByteGo Newsletter
Many short learnings as always in this week’s ByteByte Go episode. If you never thought Kafka could be explained in under 5 minutes this one has a video that attempts to do that. It goes on to explain:
fundamental concepts in OOP,
how different programming languages work,
9 types of testing you can do and
the difference between REST API and GraphQL.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn about interesting software concepts
ToT Rating: ⭐
LinkedIn guide for engineers and managers
Engineering Leadership
Great post on how to use LinkedIn to your advantage. This one is quite relevant for me as a newbie newsletter author. I already used the advice from this article to utilize my profile page as a banner for promoting my newsletter 🙌
Audience: Software Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Become a LinkedIn pro
ToT Rating: ⭐
Hypergrowth, the power of love, and agile values
Refactoring
This article contains 3 byte-sized topics.
A great podcast with Facebook’s employee number 10. In it, Aditya Agarwal argues that we might not see hypergrowth ever again.
Author of Trillion Dollar Coach gives some great advice on the power of building meaningfull (not just professional) relationships with your peers/reports.
Finally, great summary of the evergreen Agile Manifesto. This one reminded me of the (equually evergreen) flawed need of both engineers and product managers to deliver software in huge chunks with long feedback loops.
Audience: Software Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Good tips for EMs
ToT Rating: ⭐
How Statsig Streams 1 Trillion Events A Day
ByteByteGo Newsletter
There is a booming A/B testing tool called Statsig (used by OpenAI, etc.). This article does a walkthrough through Statsig’s architecture. Somehow the content of the article feels too generic and I did not get the gist of the architecture use case of the system at hand.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn system design from industry examples
ToT Rating: ⭐
How Shopify Built Its Live Globe for Black Friday
The Pragmatic Engineer
Shopify has this cool tradition of building an interactive experience showcasing their site traffic during Black Friday week (see 2024 one here). This article tells a story of building such experience for 2024 Black Friday week.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Shopify Black Friday trivia
ToT Rating: ⭐
Open prison theory
Alex Everlöf Notes
This article reminded me about a concept called “Cosmic Perspective” that is being popularized by figures such as Neil deGrasse Tyson. It is going completely sideways to what Alex is usually talking about (which are SRE topics) and I like it.
Audience: Anyone
Value: Learn about the cosmic perspective
ToT Rating: ⭐
Build Your Best Year Yet
Besides Code
If you want to build some New Year’s resolutions for 2025 this article is for you. It aims to get you excited about thinking about the next year and about all the things you can achieve in it.
Audience: All tech professionals
Value: Improve yourself in the New Year
ToT Rating: ⭐
Shipping projects at Big Tech with Sean Goedecke
The Pragmatic Engineer
In this podcast we get an interview with a Staff Engineer from Github - Sean Goedecke. One idea that caught my interest is that “software projects want to fail - unless you intervene”. I love this statement, as it reflects the amount of hustle needed toget things done all the way to the end.
Audience: Staff Engineers
Value: Learf about important soft/hard skills of a Staff Engineer
ToT Rating: ⭐
Coaching vs Software Engineering
The European Engineer
If you ever considered coaching, this is an article for you. It goes through some details on what coaching is and what are good and bad things about it.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Introduction to coaching
ToT Rating: ⭐
Thanks for the share Jovan, a great collection of articles! :)