Each of my Newsletters will have a theme, plus a grab bag of cool stuff at the end that I call Sage's Bookshelf (scroll to the end if you just want the grab bag, I won't be upset - you are respecting your cognitive load).
To kick things off, the theme is focused on what every knowledge worker needs to build a solid foundation. Over the course of my software & military career, I've learned how incredibly important this is.
Why should I care about this: Burnout comes for us all. Haystack found that 83% of devs will experience burnout, which takes an active effort to address.
"Everything is possible when you have inner peace." - Master Shifu (Kung Fu Panda)
- Physical -> Mental -> Software Dev Effectiveness: Physical health is required for mental health, and mental health is required to be effective at software development. Spend time walking each day.
- Learn how to Learn: I used to struggle to learn things - even failed my first physics with calculus course. Now there are many things I can learn once and retain forever, if I put the correct effort in. Consider investing in this. This skill is fundamental to being a software dev.
- Respect Cognitive Resources and have Boundaries: Many things consume your resources. Be comfortable saying no. Develop a system. Use tools to offload memory. Know about cognitive load. (Pro tip: the users of your software ALSO have limited resources and cognitive load)
- Reserve time for self-development: Your effectiveness at work will follow. If you expend all your energy at a job, you will be overtrained in that role. Effectively deliver results but know that part of this marathon involves self-growth. Check out Bryan Creely:
How to Act like the CEO of your Career
- Who are you: Take the time away from work to find yourself. I've called this 'Identity Work'. A journal helps a lot here. Take the time to document when you feel a particular emotion, or when you feel cognitive resources being consumed. Over time, you will no longer need the journal to become aware of issues in yourself. Having a strong identity means being able to weather the storm of life with stoicism.
Sage's Bookshelf
- Making Badass Developers by Kathy Sierra
- Overview of Small Language Models - "Proposed for resource-efficient deployment, especially on devices such as desktops, smartphones, and even wearables."
- The Unfulfilled Promise of Serverless
- NVIDIA has an Open Multimodal LLM, how does it compare to others?
- How to convince Leaders to adopt CI/CD - Pro tip: It's a lot better than Feature Branching.
- Molmo: Multimodal Open Language Model built by Ai2
- ‘Robot lawyer’ company faces $193,000 fine as part of FTC’s AI crackdown
- There's an Automation tool similar to Zapier, but you can Self Host it: n8n
- Employers doubling down on AI for Hiring
- Did you know you can Generate Servers and Clients from an Open API Spec