Kaamos

Kaamos is more than just Polar Night when there are 24 consecutive hours of darkness, kaamos describes the longing for sunshine, and a feeling of depression and lack of motivation and enthusiasm. It signifies long dark days and bad weather, no social life, and a lack of inspiration. It seems the Finnish people created the perfect word to describe our COVID era ahead of their time.

I'd like to warmly welcome some of Kenneth Larsen's subscribers - sadly, he decided to shut down his newsletter which I really enjoyed reading and he was kind enough to suggest his subscribers join this newsletter. Welcome, folks, it's great to have you here, please do tell me what you'd like to read more and less about - just say hello at [email protected].

🐕‍🦺 Leadership

​Cost of Attrition​

What if we could visualize the cost of attrition?

​Why Emotionally Intelligent Leaders Follow the Rule of Zero Off-Hours Email, Backed by Science​

Research shows formal policies designed to create boundaries between work and personal time don't help reduce employee stress and anxiety. But this will.

​Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering​

An opinionated list of things that are worth pondering about a bit.

​9 multipliers for boosting your team’s productivity​

Good points about certain levers for productivity.

​The CTO Journey: Mark Porter of MongoDB​

You can love and hate MongoDB, but understanding leadership journeys is super useful.

💻 Tech

​What's in a Good Error Message?​

Error messages are much more about UX than anything - this article gives a nice summary of what to watch for.

​The senior engineer career hump​

As a software engineer approaches or reaches the senior engineer role, the things they need to show to progress further become very different. Many engineers don’t explicitly plan for this, and get stuck at what I call the “experience hump”. Here’s how to move past it.

​Redesigning Etsy’s Machine Learning Platform​

Exactly what it says on the tin :)

🤔 Philosophy

Now... bear with me :) I'm trying this new section, please give me feedback whether it's something you like or not.

​Why Kierkegaard believed it’s lazy to admire our moral heroes​

After reading this, I wonder what comes to your mind when you think about behaviors in tech.