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I started Developer Tea in 2015 to help engineers find clarity, perspective, and purpose in regular short bursts of high-value content.

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System Design - Limiting the Responsibilities Of A Given Actor

Everything around us is primarily governed by some kind of system. The question is, are you designing your systems intentionally, or just letting them emerge? In today's episode, I give you one piece of advice when designing your systems: limit the responsibility of a given actor in the system.

Published: 5/20/2023
Length: ~12m
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Focus on Process Orientation for Goal Setting

If you don't have agency over your goals, how can they help you to begin with?

Published: 5/12/2023
Length: ~11m
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How to Give Better Feedback - My Single Biggest Piece of Advice to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Feedback

Good feedback isn't about getting something off of your chest. It's not about sharing your feelings (though that doesn't mean your feelings aren't important). It's about finding a problem that you and the person you are sharing feedback with both care about, and working towards a solution.

Published: 5/5/2023
Length: ~12m
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Planning is About Creating Clarity, Not Certainty

Planning will give you the illusion of certainty. What you really need to execute on your plans is clarity. The reality is that the future is impossible to predict, and the further away from now that you get, the more difficult it becomes to predict at an exponential rate. Focus on creating the best pathways for present decision-making.

Published: 4/28/2023
Length: ~14m
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Process is Primarily for Managing Critical Moments

You may hate hearing the word "process." You aren't alone if you do. But, what feels like a slog today is really in place for when the most critical things happen in your career. Have a process, even if it feels useless on a standard day.

Published: 4/20/2023
Length: ~9m
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Taking Advantage of Hedonic Adaptation

The psychological phenomenon of hedonic adaptation can seem like the enemy of your happiness, but once you understand how it works, you can use it to create lasting habit change and focus on what matters most.

Published: 4/11/2023
Length: ~6m
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Weber's Law and Contextual Framing

Today we look at a mental model from the field of psychophysics called Weber's Law. This concept is a great analogy for a lot of problems we face as engineers and people leaders, and can help us understand just how deeply humans depend on context to understand the world.

Published: 4/3/2023
Length: ~8m
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What Defines a Senior Developer? - You Won't Use All of Your Knowledge

A senior developer understands that they have to be very selective about how they apply knowledge. Know matter how vast your knowledge may be, you are limited in how you can practically use it in a given circumstance.

Published: 3/31/2023
Length: ~6m
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The Pitfall of Control and Antidote of Trust

Your intuition says that control is the ladder you climb to improve your career. But most great leaders tend to do one thing: the opposite of increasing control.

Published: 3/20/2023
Length: ~10m
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Working Balance - Confronting Reality with Optimism

In today's episode we explore the duality between confronting difficult realities while maintaining optimism. Specifically, we discuss a critical question: what does it mean to be optimistic?

Published: 3/17/2023
Length: ~4m
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What Defines a Senior Developer? - Choosing the Right Granularity Level

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In today's episode, we'll add more detail to the commonly recommended skill of "work breakdown." Sometimes this extremely valuable skill is the opposite of what you really need to practice. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

Published: 3/9/2023
Length: ~8m
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What Defines a Senior Developer? - Difficult Does Not Equate To Valuable

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In this episode, we'll discuss the fact that difficulty does not equate to value, and hazard a guess as to why we can easily confuse this, especially as we begin to grow from junior to senior roles. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

Published: 3/4/2023
Length: ~6m
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What Defines a Senior Developer? - Systematically Communicating Value

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In this episode, we'll discuss the importance of systematically communicating value to various audiences. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

Published: 2/27/2023
Length: ~12m
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What Defines a Senior Developer? - Dynamic vs Static Understanding of Situations

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

Published: 2/24/2023
Length: ~9m
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Long Game, Short Game

We play the short game so we get the chance to play the long game. Early in our careers, we imagine the best way to play is always focus on the long game. But in reality, we need both. Be aware of leaning too far the opposite direction, and accidentally abandoning the long game entirely.

Published: 2/22/2023
Length: ~13m
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The Rate of Change for Change Itself

We can become accustomed to the rate at which we experience change, and imagine that that rate will continue to increase linearly. Eventually, change will level off. We accumulate fewer skills later in our careers, our network of connections might seem to top out, or our salary bumps slow down. If we know that change tends to follow a logarithmic shape, we can prepare and plan better for the changing rate of change.

Published: 2/15/2023
Length: ~6m
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Protecting Flow State - Setting Your Session Feedback And Goal

At the beginning of any work session, practice, performance, or any other activity you want to achieve flow during, you can give yourself the best shot at getting into flow by controlling a few simple variables. We talk about two of them in today's episode: Session Feedback and Session Goal.

Published: 2/13/2023
Length: ~14m
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Protecting Flow State - Plan Now, Pause Later

Protecting your flow state may help you have more "peak experiences" - whether in your career or in your personal life. This is your opportunity to make the biggest strides and highest achievements. In this episode we start a conversation about what it takes to protect your flow state.

Published: 2/10/2023
Length: ~10m
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Golden Advice - Always Leave Margin For Extra

Sometimes I hear advice that is worth its weight in gold. In today's episode I share one piece of advice that is almost universally applicable across life and career efforts.

Published: 2/6/2023
Length: ~7m
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Your Purpose is A Projection of Your Complex Identity

If your identity is complex, your purpose is by extension complex. In this episode, we talk about purpose as an expression, rather than a regulator, of your identity.

Published: 2/2/2023
Length: ~11m
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Developer Tea was a part of Spec and is hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering manager at Guild Education.