Do you ever feel like a million tasks are looming over you at any given moment? How about that you can’t concentrate because it feels like you should be doing something more important? I used to have these feelings all the time. I call this “brain clutter”, though I’m sure there are many other names for it. That’s a problem that hurts work productivity more than you might realize. Not to mention your peace of mind.

Disclaimer: This blog post was written by a human, with no AI-generated text Have you ever considered the concept of the proof of concept? I bet you’ve been asked more than once in your career to prove something works before committing fully. It could have been anything - a change in UI, a performance optimization, or a new feature. The underlying contract is that if you prove the concept works, you’ll get the resources to develop the new thing.

After going through a bunch of code interviews, here's some things I learned from coding problems that I never use in my day-to-day.

I've been developing software for 10 years now. Every now and again I wonder what it is that makes me tick. What's the element that makes me come to want to go work in the mornings. In other words, what is it that motivates us as software developers?

We've all been Junior developers at some point. Do you remember that long ago? I sure do. I remember the excitement when I could make something work. I remember the fear when faced with a task I had no idea how to even start.

I’m sure every software engineer with a long career had this dilemma: Should I join a startup or a big corporation? It’s a good question since your professional development, the working conditions, life-work balance, and career development will be very different according to the choice you make. There are many differences between a small company and a big company and it’s important to understand them in order to make the right decision for you.

Office politics always sounds kind of negative, right? Like that bad side effect that you have to suffer in your job. Or like a constant obstacle to any good thing that you can achieve. I don’t think I ever heard someone say “I enjoyed the office politics in that place”. Somehow, when a company surpasses a certain amount of employees (say 30), office politics becomes a thing. All of a sudden, instead of every employee in the company having the same goal in mind, the various teams develop individual goals.

In software we have to learn new technologies all the time. I mean, every day there are probably a couple of additional JavaScript frameworks born into the world. The amount of languages, frameworks, 3rd party libraries and tools is staggering. And every place of work uses a unique permutation of those. As developers, we have to stay on top of things, no two ways about it. Once we’ve decided we want to learn a new technology, we have a lot of ways to approach that.

How the annual review scores are formed in the eyes of managers always fascinated me. I have five years of experience with annual reviews myself, and I was always able to do well on them. As a tech lead, I got to give recommendations and participate in some discussions with managers. I formed a pretty firm and possibly naive point of view on them now. The process The way the process went in my last company, and I suspect in most big companies, is like this: At year’s end, the employee is asked to fill out a long form about his achievements and goals.