#251 – July 20, 2025
The compound interest of your engineering career
Social capital: The compound interest of your engineering career
7 minutes by Rafa Páez
Social capital functions as a crucial professional asset for engineers. Rafa discusses how this social currency enables critical problem-solving when formal processes fall short. Built on three pillars (trust, credibility, and relationships), it requires consistent deposits through helpful actions and can be strategically withdrawn when needed. When combined with high agency, it transforms engineers from lone wolves into organization-changing forces.
Build Apps Faster with AI-Powered UI
sponsored by Progress Telerik
Tired of repetitive UI code? Now you can build sleek, functional Blazor apps faster — and smarter. With 120+ ready-to-use components and an AI Coding Assistant built right into your IDE, you’ll spend less time tweaking and more time shipping.
Accountability
9 minutes by Jeff Foster
Jeff challenges negative views of accountability in business, especially for software teams. He suggests a compassionate approach based on clear preconditions: structural clarity about tasks and ownership, psychological safety to prevent blame culture, and strong relational foundations between parties.
Knowledge flows like heat
8 minutes by Dirk Jan Swagerman
When knowledge moves freely, teams innovate faster; when blocked, even simple innovations stall. Dirk challenges the quality-versus-speed tradeoff, arguing quality actually enables speed. He describes how organizational decisions like outsourcing, acquisitions, and system rewrites often fail because they disrupt accumulated knowledge, and suggests treating engineering talent as capital investments rather than expenses to build sustainable competitive advantage.
Leadership lessons from Star Trek
4 minutes by Benji Weber
In this post Benji analysis Jean Luc Picard and his effective leadership through his distinctive communication style. By using the phrases such as "Make it so!", "Oh yes?", "Suggestions?", "Nicely done!" he empowers his crew, demonstrates curiosity and active listening, shows humility and trust in his team's collective intelligence and acknowledges good work.
Going on the offensive with creative strategy
10 minutes by Roger Martin
Innovators often fail by accepting the dominant business premise that the future can be accurately predicted through data analysis of the past. This approach is fundamentally flawed and instead of defensively trying to forecast revenues for innovations we should challenge the logical assumptions behind status quo forecasts and using "What Would Have to be True" questions to create fair logical comparisons between innovative ideas and current approaches.
Ratcheting to zero: How incremental constraints eliminate technical debt
sponsored by Test Double
You know you need to fix tech debt. But how? And how long will it take? Have you ever used a tool to ratchet a thing that’s stuck? It moves a little bit at a time until it’s unstuck. Staff software engineer Dave Mosher has an iterative approach for incremental progress on tech debt. ‘Measure what we want to improve > automate it > make a change’ can make working on crufty legacy tech enjoyable.
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