My links

As a software engineer, I often work on big tasks that require hours of continuous and focused work. However, we have plenty of meetings, colleagues asking us something in Slack, and lunch breaks. Add a colleague who comes to you and calls you for a cup of coffee if you work from the office. And usually, we don’t really have such a luxury as hours of uninterrupted time. Nevertheless, sometimes we catch the flow of productive and focused work at the end of the workday. Imagine you come up with an elegant solution to a problem you’ve been tackling all day, or maybe even the whole past week. You can’t wait to implement and test your solution. And of course, you are so driven by your idea that you decide to continue working despite your working day being over. “20 minutes more and I will finish it,” you think. Obviously, this is not the case; some edge cases and new issues will inevitably arise. You come to your senses only 2–3 hours later—tired, hungry, demotivated, and still struggling with your problem. You just wasted your evening, with nothing to show for it. Worse, you overworked and didn’t recover that night. Thus, you were already exhausted when you started working.

When a pursuit becomes a drag, here's some questions to help you figure out why, and what to do about it.

Successfully delivering on long-term engineering projects often requires structuring them around stepping stones that deliver concrete value and illuminate “unknown unknowns”.

Looking back on the last four years, what worked, what didn't.

If you're working in a team using the Scrum framework, you use story points to estimate effort on your stories, tasks, etc.

A simple but powerful approach to note taking

The personal site of designer Naz Hamid.

When an engineering manager tries to sell you on developing software in iterations, it sounds like a scam waiting to happen. You pay them money to write software for some number of hours, but the developers offer no guarantee that they'll finish the features you're asking for. It's not even like getting your bathroom renovated; sure, the…

My personal Obsidian vault template. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in.

In this blog, PST Joshua Partogi shares his insights on the mechanisms in Scrum for handling urgent requests from stakeholders.

Overwhelmed by a long to-do list? Having trouble finding time for your most important work? The secret to overcoming both is learning how to prioritize tasks.

Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.

An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog

I'm a web developer and designer. I build websites & interfaces with JavaScript, CSS and PHP.

I like to think that I get a lot of stuff done.  Other people have noticed this and asked me how I'm so productive.  This essay is where I try and "s…

What did you do at work today? How about last week? I spent a couple of days in quarterly business reviews, and wrapped up yearly planning activities for AWS Data Exchange and AWS Marketplace. I also added some unit tests to a project that I am onboarding into.

I wonder what would happen if you tried really hard.

My endless battle with the "Project Hydra": why I can't seem to finish projects, and the strategies I'm exploring to finally complete what I start. A personal journey through productivity's thorniest challenge.