Personal blog

Tag: soft skills (Page 1 of 2)

Don’t automate everything. Go Elon instead.

If you “automate everything” you end up with cargo-cult of your process.

What you should do instead is employing Elon’s 5 steps protocol (“the Algorithm”) that consists of in order:

  1. Question (requirements)
  2. Delete
  3. Simplify / Optimize
  4. Accelerate (cycle time) 
  5. Automate

Always. In. That. Order.

If you automate something that meets unnecessary requirements – you’re doing it wrong.

If you automate something that shouldn’t even exist – you’re doing it wrong.

If you automate something before you try and simplify it real hard – you’re doing it wrong.

If you automate something prior to accelerating it’s cycle time – you’re doing it wrong.

Every such automation helps cultivate current pathology.

Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimise a thing that should not exist,

Elon

What a waste it is to automate “everything”!

Automate aggressively but first own the progress and make sure you automate the right thing.

Making sense is overrated

Test first? How do I test something that is not yet written? And before all, why? It makes no sense.

Try it a few times and you’ll see how powerful it is!

Open–closed principle? The more I close my code to modification, the more closed it gets for extention. You can’t have both. It makes no sense.

Only until you realize that it’s actually possible – with interfaces or other dependency inversion techniques.

The best code comment is the one that never existed? Comments are the only thing that allows me to navigate my messy code. You want me to stop writing them? It makes no sense.

Yes, stop writing comments and delete all of them. But only after you clean up the code to the extent that comments are not needed. There are ways to do it.

Continue reading

Communication benchmark – number of questions

If you want to be a good communicator, you should practice communication. This requires feedback and questions from your recipients make great feedback. You don’t have to ask anybody for anything extra – questions happen anyway.

You write something -> by the hardness of communication, you aren’t sure if it’s clear or not -> somebody is indeed unclear on something -> they ask for clarification -> you answer, then you improve for future

How to use questions as feedback?

Continue reading

Why I don’t like working remotely

People are so excited about working remotely.

My experience is 4 month of working remotely on daily basis a few years ago, plus an occasional home office for the last 2 years. It’s enough to realize that it’s not my thing. At least when speaking about working from home, which doesn’t exhaust the possibilities.

Continue reading

« Older posts

© 2024 Bartosz Krajka

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑