Developer Tea

Joel Beasley is the host of Modern CTO, a podcast with guests coming from IBM, Microsoft, Nasa, Reddit, and hundreds of others. Joel and I have wanted to have this discussion for a long time, and we …

What if the best thing you could do was nothing?

Not indefinitely, of course - but often, we intervene in the world when the right choice is to do nothing.

This is uncomfortable because it is unfamilia…

Are you acting on impulse? How would you know? One door to understanding this "acting without thinking" is to investigate our hypotheses. Implicit hypotheses are expressed as instances of our beliefs…

Model Manager episodes of Developer Tea are dedicated to helping engineering managers find models of thinking that improve their approach to management.

Great managers don't attempt, in vain, to contr…

Discipline is not about punishment or punctuality. It's about perseverance in the face of changing circumstances.

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Model Manager episodes of Developer Tea are dedicated to helping engineering managers find models of thinking that improve their approach to management.

Processes create uniform approaches and uniform…

We all have 24 hours in a day. How can you compound your time? In many ways, this is what "spend it wisely" means. In this episode we classify different types of decisions and actions, and provide a …

If you are progressing slowly in your career, it might be because you are working in the bowl of mediocrity. This is where you are taking very little risk, but are also disconnected from the fundamen…

The execution phase of any work you do is where you find the most satisfaction. But it's possible that you aren't finding flow because you have a broken working process.

It's difficult to stop working…

Everyone has the tendency to procrastinate.

Is there something you're putting off? It seems simple, but finding the first step and putting it on your calendar in as much detail as possible is a proven…

Should you live every day like it's your last? What about preparing for the future? Chasing your goals and dreams? How can you both be mindful of the present moment and plan for the future? We don't …

When two smart people or groups disagree, what is happening? Sometimes one is plainly wrong about the facts. But more often than not, these two people are arguing from a local rationale. We'll talk a…

We intuitively imagine our skills and capabilities to be one-dimensional and permanent. However, what goes into whether we can actually execute on our skills is multi-dimensional. In today's episode,…

Call it luck, serendipity, or chance - all of these unexpected moments of life require entropy to occur. On the other hand, if we don't control our lives to some extent, we'll never be able to make m…

When you think about probabilities, you likely think in one of two ways. We'll talk about both of these models for probabilistic analysis, their drawbacks, and decision-making in the face of uncertai…

Humans are driven to resolve cognitive dissonance as efficiently as possible. We pay little regard to whether our solutions are accurate or correct, but rather we only seek harmony in our minds. Unfo…