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.

By Tauseef Fayyaz60 posts90K+ readers

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9 posts tagged “productivity”

career growth
Left Your Job to Learn? How Experienced Developers Should Use the Gap
Left your job to learn? What to learn as an experienced developer: pick a direction before topics, set a runway and time box, build proof, explain the gap well and start applying at the halfway point.Sep 15, 202637
git
Git, Properly: The Model Behind the Commands You Use Every Day
How Git works underneath the commands: three places your code lives, commits as snapshots, branches as pointers and HEAD. Then fetch vs pull, stash, reset vs revert, reflog recovery, force-with-lease and what Git 3.0 changes.Sep 13, 202638
career growth
The Habits That Make an Engineer Worth Routing Work Through
The habits of great software engineers are mostly about reliability, not brilliance. Fifteen learnable habits, from estimating in ranges to labelled review comments and weekly notes, that make you the person work gets routed through.Sep 8, 202641
algorithms
Fifteen Problem Shapes and the Move That Solves Each
Fifteen LeetCode patterns written as signal plus move: hash maps, two pointers, sliding window, prefix sums, heaps, backtracking, dynamic programming, BFS, DFS and Dijkstra, with a recognition table and a way to practise so they stick.Aug 13, 202614
career growth
What to Do When You Are Stuck Learning to Code
Stuck learning to code? The problem is rarely the material. Sixteen things to do when you hit a wall, a stuck timer to pin by your editor, how to use AI without losing the learning, and a four week reset plan.Aug 3, 202644
career growth
Engineering Newsletters and Blogs Worth Your Inbox
The software engineering newsletters and company engineering blogs actually worth reading in 2026, sorted by what you would read each one for, plus the weekly routine that turns reading into skill.Jul 28, 202652
career growth
Ten Books That Fill the Gap a CS Degree Leaves
Ten books for software engineers that a computer science degree skips, from Ousterhout and Kleppmann to Feathers and Brooks, grouped by the problem each solves and when in your career it will land.Jul 23, 202635
career growth
GitHub Repositories Worth More Than a Star
Ten GitHub repositories for developers that are worth opening, not just starring: system design, projects to build, practice sets and free CS foundations, each checked active, with how to use it.Jul 20, 202638
code review
Six Rules That Keep a Codebase Worth Working In
Six clean code principles, separation of concerns, DRY, KISS, YAGNI, test-driven design and writing for the next reader, each with what it protects against, where it came from and how it goes wrong.Jul 2, 202656

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