You Don't Learn Helplessness - You Learn Control
A 1967 study gave us the concept of learned helplessness — but the same researchers later reversed it. Passivity is our default state; contr...
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Developer Tea
Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence. With over 7 million dow...
Episodes
20 of 1,313 episodesWhy Reducing Complexity Is A Sign of Seniority
As you grow as an engineer, something counterintuitive happens: the systems you build get simpler, not more complex. In this episode, I expl...
A Pragmatic Definition for Accountability
Accountability is one of the most important concepts in your career—and one of the most frequently weaponized. In this episode, I unpack why...
Using Substition to Make Decisions Simpler
The skills you've built for reading people, reviewing code, and making calls under uncertainty all rely on the same brain shortcut: substitu...
Your Single Most Important Tool for Managing the Uneven Downsides of Risk
The skills you build and the tools you master matter, but they aren't your most important asset when things go wrong — and something eventua...
Why Can't You Go Faster With AI? Focus on the Friction to Find Out
The skills you spent years building are getting cheaper to replicate—but that's not where the friction lives. In this throwback episode, I u...
Software Engineering Principles That Still Hold Up in an Agentic World - Old Lessons Made New
The skills problem isn't going anywhere — it's just wearing new clothes. In this episode, I unpack how the lessons we learned decades ago (l...
Principles Oriented Thinking as a Durable Skill in an AI First World
The skills that survive every industry shakeup aren't the ones you can Google — they're softer, harder to name, and far more durable. In thi...
What the Science Actually Says About Effective Feedback
Feedback is one of the hardest skills in any career, and most of us have only experienced a handful of moments where it actually drove posit...
Rebuilding Your Mental Models In the Midst Of an AI Tech Revolution
If you're a software engineer right now, the questions you're asking about your career probably feel existential. We've been spending a lot...
Practice Isn't Enough for Senior Engineers - Adaptation Is a Key Skill in an AI-First Industry
If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of co...
Senior Skills to Maintain Employment Through the AI Wave
If you've heard that your job in the agentic coding era is to "become a manager of agents," you may have noticed something doesn't quite fit...
You're Wrong All the Time, But All You Need Are Better Explanations
What happens when you discover that a book that fundamentally changed how you think is built on a shaky foundation? In today's episode, I sh...
AI-Proofing Your Skillset - High-Meaning, High-Specifity Vocabulary is the Path to Growth
Why I'm Not "Picking a Fight" on AI: A listener asked if I'm intentionally stoking a flame war by treating agentic coding as a foregone conc...
Building Real Skills During the AI Boom - No, Not That Kind of Skill
The Coding-Is-My-Value Trap: For years, we've treated the ability to write code as the flagship skill of software engineering. It's concrete...
Chaos Doesn't Have to Win - Maintaining Order in the Midst of AI Change
If you're an engineering leader right now, everything around you feels like it's changing at once — new tools, new processes, new expectatio...
Mourning the Loss of Coding, Senior Tooling Mindset, and Shaping Your Environment
Your tool set isn't just a collection of utilities — it's the environment you live in every day, and it's shaping you whether you realize it...
Useful Illusions and Exploiting Heuristics
When Good Thinking Becomes Overthinking: Discover why the pursuit of perfect analysis often undermines good decision-making. Loading every c...
Decision Making is Your New Core Skill, So it's Critical to Avoid These Two Traps of Collaborative Decision-Making
The Bottleneck Is Moving: Borrowing from traditional manufacturing theory, the coding step used to define your team's total throughput. AI t...
What's Brewing, Edition 1 - What Jonathan is Learning, Using, and Thinking
The Power of Physical Checklists: Inspired by aviation, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto , and Daniel Kahneman's Noise , I've been exp...