Tag: #growth
Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 42 posts
Fourteen Things Table Tennis Taught Me: Skill Makes the Relationships, a Title Blocks the Growth
Fourteen principles from years of playing table tennis, and how they carry over into work and life. The structure that turns skill into an entry ticket to relationships, why playing only for fun never makes you better, a
2026-08-16 · 11 min read #mindset#growth#deliberate-practice#sports#careerThe Structure of Being Good — Self-Assessment, Feedback, and a Narrow Scope
The wish to be good at something runs strong, yet what being good is actually made of is a question people ask surprisingly rarely. This is a map post that lays out the structure of skill in three pillars: calibrated sel
2026-08-16 · 10 min read #mindset#growth#deliberate-practice#self-improvement#2026-08How Not to Lower Your Standards: A Structural Problem, Not a Willpower One
Standards do not collapse because you decide to let them go. They slip quietly through unnamed exceptions, renegotiation while exhausted, and convergence on the median of what surrounds you. This piece covers the five me
2026-08-16 · 7 min read #mindset#standards#discipline#growth#2026-08Being Visible Inside the Organization — Work Does Not Announce Itself
There is almost always a gap between the work you did and the work that is known. That gap is not a problem of modesty but of how information travels inside an organization. This post explains why good work does not anno
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#visibility#communication#one-on-one#growthThe Mid-Career Plateau — A Flattening Growth Curve Is Normal
Somewhere past the five-year mark a stretch arrives where growth seems to have stopped. This post does not console that feeling; it explains why it arrives. Early growth had tick marks and later growth has none. The stan
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#mid-career#plateau#growth#engineering-managerWhen to Leave and When to Stay — The Problems a Move Solves and the Ones That Follow You
Changing jobs works well on problems caused by the environment and fails on problems whose cause travels with you. Without that distinction, you repeat the same situation with a different company name on it. This post la
2026-08-15 · 5 min read #career#job-change#decision-making#growth#retentionWhat Do You Want to Be Known For — Positioning Grows at a Different Speed Than Skill
Skill grows a little every day; positioning updates only when someone has a reason to re-file you, and that reason arrives a few times a year at most. That lag produces much of the resentment in an engineering career. Th
2026-08-15 · 5 min read #career#positioning#career-strategy#growth#personal-brandTurning a Side Project Into a Career Asset — A Definition of Done, a Ship Date, and a Retro
Most side projects die not from a shortage of talent but from having no definition of done, no ship date, and no retrospective. Projects that turn into assets meet three conditions: other people can see them, your judgme
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #career#side-project#portfolio#growth#productivityHow to Judge the Timing of a Job Change — The Question That Separates Running Away From Levelling Up
When you are torn about leaving, what you need is not courage but a standard. One sentence — would I stay if the problem vanished — separates the escape move from the growth move; a learning curve gone flat is a signal w
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #career#job-change#decision-making#growth#job-searchGrowth Mindset, Between Hype and Truth — From the Praise Experiment to a Nation-Scale Test
Growth mindset — the idea that believing ability can change makes grades go up — swept through education, and the hype grew just as fast. This post restores the starting point, the 1998 praise experiment by Mueller and D
2026-07-20 · 6 min read #psychology#paper-review#mindset#growth#educationWhy 10,000 Hours Alone Will Not Make You Better — The 4 Real Conditions of Deliberate Practice
Why do some people have ten years of experience but the skills of a third-year? The 10,000-hour rule is a popular distortion that Anders Ericsson, the original researcher, himself called a misreading. This post restores,
2026-07-20 · 7 min read #mindset#self-improvement#deliberate-practice#learning#growthThe Art of Loving Failure — Amor Fati and the Psychology of Resilience
Nietzsche's amor fati sounds like a heavy demand — affirm your fate, failures included — but through the lens of psychology it turns out to be a surprisingly practical skill. Drawing on resilience research, growth mindse
2026-07-20 · 6 min read #mindset#philosophy#resilience#stoicism#growthFrom Senior to Staff: What Actually Gets Evaluated
Plenty of engineers believe that shipping more, faster, is the path to promotion. But open an actual public engineering ladder — Dropbox, CircleCI, Rent the Runway — and there is no axis called output. There is scope, co
2026-07-12 · 12 min read #career#software-engineering#growth#staff-engineerWhere Confidence Really Comes From
Durable confidence is not the product of positive thinking — it is the residue of evidence. Drawing on Bandura self-efficacy theory, the Dunning-Kruger effect, impostor syndrome, and Dweck growth mindset, this post expla
2026-07-03 · 12 min read #psychology#confidence#growth#learningBuilding a Career That Compounds — Don't Chase Passion, Build Skill
A good career is not built by "following your passion." It is built by compounding rare and valuable skills, reputation, and relationships over time. Career capital theory, deliberate practice, leverage, and a repeatable
2026-07-03 · 13 min read #career#growth#skills#productivityMistakes Are Better Than Fake Success
Fake success, where you copy an answer or pass by luck, stops your growth. Honest mistakes, by contrast, are the most accurate learning signal. This essay covers the real learning that mistakes provide, psychological saf
2026-06-19 · 44 min read #learning#failure#psychological-safety#growth#self-improvementThe Power of Environment and Role Models — Why Watching Others Teaches Us So Much
I used to think the saying environment shapes people was about willpower. Then a strong colleague and a high-level table tennis club taught me otherwise. Drawing on social learning theory and environment design, this ess
2026-06-19 · 36 min read #environment#role-models#social-learning#growth#careerNothing Appears Suddenly — The Compound Interest of Consistency
Skill does not appear suddenly. Abilities like coding, English, Japanese, and table tennis are built from time spent honing a little each day, accumulating like compound interest. This essay covers the buildup of small h
2026-06-19 · 30 min read #consistency#compounding#habits#craft#growthFacing Reality First, Then Growing — Stop Daydreaming and Start Colliding With the World
A reflection on why facing reality, instead of escaping into happy fantasies, is the true starting point of growth. It covers guarding against self-flattery and optimism bias, using metacognition to see yourself objectiv
2026-06-19 · 30 min read #culture#growth#metacognition#self-improvement#mindsetMotivation Comes From People — Turning Desire Into Drive
More than half of any work is motivation. This is how I learned to connect healthy desire to learning and growth, why people move people, and how to design my own motivation system without becoming over-dependent on exte
2026-06-19 · 30 min read #motivation#self-determination#growth#habits#career