Writing on Productivity
Articles on Productivity from Tauseef Fayyaz: practical writing on engineering, AI and tech careers, drawn from leading a team and mentoring engineers.
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9 posts tagged “productivity”
The Habits That Make an Engineer Worth Routing Work Through
Every team has one or two engineers other people route work through, and what they have in common is not raw technical strength. It is that when something is given to them it comes back, and when it will not, you hear about it early. Fifteen habits that build that reputation, none of which require a title or permission.
Fifteen Problem Shapes and the Move That Solves Each
The usual way to learn algorithms is to work through a long list of problems and hope something generalises, which leaves most people with a hundred solutions memorised and no idea what to do with the hundred and first. There are perhaps a dozen shapes of problem, each with a move that usually works. Fifteen of those shapes and how to recognise them.
What to Do When You Are Stuck Learning to Code
There has never been more good material for learning to program and the failure rate has not improved, which tells you the bottleneck is not access to explanation. It is that watching someone else solve a problem feels exactly like learning and is not. Sixteen heuristics for the first year, mostly about what to do at the point where you are stuck.
Engineering Newsletters and Blogs Worth Your Inbox
Most engineers subscribe to fifteen newsletters, read none, and feel vaguely behind, because a full inbox produces guilt rather than learning. A shorter list sorted by what you would actually read each one for, why company engineering blogs beat most newsletters, and the weekly routine that makes any of it stick.
Ten Books That Fill the Gap a CS Degree Leaves
You can finish a computer science degree without reading a word of Kleppmann, Feathers, Fowler or Brooks, and leave knowing algorithms but not how software is actually built, debugged and maintained by teams. Ten books grouped by the problem each one solves, with the thing that matters most: when in your career each will actually land.
GitHub Repositories Worth More Than a Star
Everyone has forty starred repositories and has opened three of them. Twenty three worth keeping, grouped by what each is actually for: system design, things to build from, things to practise against, computer science foundations and things to look up, each with a note on how to use it properly and the three habits that decide whether any of it turns into learning.
Six Rules That Keep a Codebase Worth Working In
Every one of these gets quoted as an acronym in code review, usually by somebody who read the expansion and not the reasoning, and applied without judgement they produce worse code than if nobody had heard of them. Separation of concerns, DRY, KISS, YAGNI, test driven design and writing for the next reader, each with the thing it protects against and the way it goes wrong.
How to Use AI as a Companion, Not a Crutch
One rule decides whether AI tools make you faster or hollow you out: use them for work you could do yourself but would rather not, and for work you are actively trying to understand, never for work you cannot evaluate. Where they genuinely excel, where they quietly damage your skills, and the verification habits that separate engineers who benefit from those who accumulate debt.
The Fundamentals Worth Learning as a Software Engineer
Frameworks are the fastest moving and least valuable part of what you know. This is the layer underneath: how a computer runs your code, data structures as trade offs, complexity at conversational depth, storage, networks, concurrency, version control, testing as a design tool, and the two skills engineers skip that decide how far they get.
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