Let’s talk about the, now almost dead!?, art of blogging…

And not just blogging in the narrow sense of "write articles on your own website", but the broader idea of putting your knowledge out into the world. That could be blog posts, videos, podcasts, open-source projects, documentation, or any other format where you share what you’ve learned.

The TL;DR really is: you should start.

Not when you feel "ready".
Not when your writing is perfect.
Not when you have a huge audience.
Now.

OK, but why!?

Because blogging is not just about building an audience. It’s about improving your thinking, sharpening your writing, documenting your journey, and creating opportunities for yourself that would never appear otherwise.

⚠️ Oh, and just so I address the elephant in the room – using the latest LLM can surely help you, but if you don’t even edit the text and bring in "some of your own spice to it", you’re missing the point.

If you’re more of an audio type, you can listen to the podcast episode on this topic.

Blogging is bigger than "just writing blog posts"

Blogging is part of a much bigger picture. You do not have to publish traditional blog posts only. The point is to share what you know. That can happen through:

• podcasts,
• YouTube videos,
• talks,
• open-source projects (contributing to documentation is also great!),
• and of course, blog posts

The format matters less than the habit.

What matters is that you stop keeping useful ideas trapped in notebooks, local files, or your own head. Now, frankly, notebooks are where I started; I used to carry them everywhere and write down programming-related notes. At some point I wanted to find something in one of them and thought, "Wouldn’t it be amazing if I could just press Ctrl+F (I was on Windows back then) and find what I’m looking for?"

And then it hit me: that’s what a blog is for 🤦

Blog is searchable, public, and useful to future-you and to other people who are struggling with the same problem.

Benefit #1: you become a better writer

This is probably the most underrated benefit of blogging.

When people think about blogging, they often jump straight to traffic, money, followers, or "personal brand". But one of the biggest gains is much simpler: writing makes you better at writing.

That sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how often people miss it.

Writing is not some side skill. It’s a core skill.

You use it in:

• emails
• documentation
• pull requests
• Slack
• proposals, specs, job applications, and conference CFPs, …

And in remote work especially, your writing often is your first impression.

You may be brilliant, kind, and highly capable. But if your writing is confusing, sloppy, or unclear, people may never realize how good you are.

That may sound harsh, but it’s true.

The good news is that blogging gives you a practical, repeatable way to improve that skill. You write, review, re-write, publish, cringe a little later, improve, and repeat. That cringe is actually a good sign as it means you’ve grown.

If you look back at old posts and feel slightly embarrassed, congratulations: you’ve leveled up! 👏

Benefit #2: you get better at the thing you are teaching

This one is huge.

When you try to explain something clearly, you quickly discover whether you actually understand it or not.

A lot of ideas feel obvious in your head. But the moment you try to write them down in simple language, the gaps show up immediately.

That’s why teaching and blogging are such powerful learning tools.

When you write about a topic, you are forced to:

• organize your thoughts
• check your assumptions
• verify the steps
• simplify the explanation
• think about what a beginner would get stuck on

And that makes you better.

So, even if nobody reads your post (and, in the beginning not many people will) you still win because the process itself improves your thinking.

Benefit #3: your notes start working for you

This is one of my favorite practical reasons to blog.

If you solve a problem once and don’t write it down publicly, chances are good you’ll solve it again later.

That’s annoying.

A blog becomes your external brain.

You fix a weird framework issue? Write it down.
You find a neat JavaScript trick? Write it down.
You discover a backend performance improvement? Write it down.
You keep explaining the same thing to teammates? Definitely write it down. 🙂

Once it’s published, you can send someone a link instead of rewriting the same explanation five times. To me, that sounds like a fantastic return on effort.

Spend 30 minutes or an hour writing a useful post once, and it can save you time for years.

Benefit #4: opportunities show up

This is where people sometimes get the wrong idea, so I want to be clear: you should not start blogging because you expect instant money or fame.

But if you consistently publish useful, high-quality content, opportunities tend to appear.

That may include:

• job opportunities
• freelance work
• course offers
• speaking invitations
• guest posting invitations
• consulting work
• stronger credibility in your niche

To be fair though; this will be a slow burn. But, as said, you’re in the game of getting better at writing and sharing useful things with the world. Anything extra is just an icing on the already great benefits.

Start small. Seriously small.

This part matters a lot, because "start blogging" sounds nice until you actually sit down to do it.

Then suddenly it feels huge.

What should I write about?
How long should it be?
What platform should I use?
What if it’s bad?
What if someone already wrote about it?
What if nobody reads it?

All valid questions. None of them should stop you.

The best advice here is: start small and make it a habit.

You may benefit of this simple (but not easy by any means) target:
write 100 words per day.
Not 2,000.
Not "write the perfect article."
Just 100 words.

That is tiny enough to feel manageable, but meaningful enough to compound.

At the end of 30 days, that’s 3,000 words. That’s about 3 average lenght blog posts.

And most of the time, once you start, you’ll write more than 100 anyway. The hard part is not the volume. It’s getting started.

So, reduce the friction to start. Carve out exact time to work on it daily and make it a habit.

The next you know it, you become a person that writes 100 words daily at 7am.

You do not need a revolutionary topic

This is another common blocker.

A lot of people think:

"I can’t write this. There are already 50 articles about it."

Write it anyway.

It is perfectly okay to write about something that has already been written about.

In fact, that is often the best place to start.

Why?

Because:

• technology changes
• versions change
• tools age
• documentation gets outdated
• beginners still need beginner-friendly explanations
• your explanation may resonate better than someone else’s

Many people specifically search for recent posts because older answers may be obsolete. Others just need the topic explained more clearly, more simply, or from a more beginner-friendly angle.

You don’t need to invent a new topic.

You need to explain something usefully.

Write for beginners, not for your ego

A lot of technical content is frustrating because it skips the exact step the reader needed the most.

It goes like this:

1. Do A
2. Do B
   OK, so far so good, you think…
3. Then some magic happens and you get to C

Yeah… not helpful.

One of the things I always tried to do in my own posts was to fill in the missing steps. Not because I was some ultimate expert, but because I was often learning the thing myself and still remembered where the confusion was.

That’s powerful.

Beginners make great teachers for other beginners because they still remember what felt unclear five minutes ago.

So don’t try to sound overly smart. Don’t reach for big words just to impress people.

Aim for clarity.

If readers finish your post thinking, "Ohhh, now I get it", you’ve done your job.

Documentation and blogging are cousins

People who value blogging often also value documentation.

Why?

Because both come from the same mindset:

"Let me make this easier for the next person."

If you build something and then document how it works, how to run it, what failed, and what changed, you are saving somebody else hours of pain.

Sometimes that future person is your teammate.

Sometimes it’s a stranger.

Sometimes it’s a future You 🙂

Find your niche, then grow from there

When you’re starting out, it helps to narrow your focus.

Don’t try to write about everything.

Pick a niche.

That could be:

• a language
• a library
• a framework
• a tool
• a workflow
• even one small part inside a framework

The narrower your focus at the beginning, the easier it is for people to understand what you’re about.

Over time, that consistency helps you build recognition and trust.

And later, once you have momentum, you can widen the scope.

But at first, being specific (aka niching down) is the way to go.

Numbers are not the goal

This is another trap worth avoiding.

You publish a post. You refresh analytics. Nobody cares. You feel silly.

That’s normal and expected.

The numbers should not be the main goal.

Because early on, you simply don’t know what people will find valuable.

Sometimes the post you think is brilliant gets ignored.

Sometimes the post you almost didn’t publish becomes the one that keeps bringing in readers for years.

That’s why consistency beats prediction.

Publish useful things. Let the internet decide.

Your job is to keep showing up.

Final thought: just start

If I had to boil this whole post down to one sentence, it would be this:

Start sharing what you know.

That’s it.

Not perfectly.
Not at an expert level.
Not after another six months of preparation.

Start now.

Write small posts.
Explain things simply.
Document what you learn.
Help the next person.
Help future You.
Repeat.

Over time, you’ll find your voice. You’ll write more clearly. You’ll think more clearly. You’ll understand your craft better. And yes, opportunities may come too.

But even before they do, the practice itself is worth it.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, take this as your little nudge.

Open a blank page.
Write 100 words.
And voilà, your blog has begun.

Full podcast transcript

Nikola: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the DevThink podcast with your hosts, Nikola and Shawn. Today we’ll be talking in more detail about blogging. Should you start your own blog? Should you publish on some other platform? Or should you not even bother with it?

You probably already know my stance on the topic: you should definitely blog. But I’m curious, Shawn—how do you feel about it?

Shawn: Definitely. You should absolutely get out there. I’m going to mix blogging together with podcasting, YouTube videos, and similar forms of sharing content. So you don’t necessarily have to blog in the traditional sense, but if you do one or more of those things, it’s definitely good for you.

It’s good for personal growth, good for your career, and it’s simply a nice thing to do—sharing your experience with others who can use it to get closer to where you are.

Nikola: Indeed. I totally agree.

For example, I always carried a notebook with me. We laughed about that before, especially when you said you also carry notebooks around. At one point I was trying to find something in my notebook and couldn’t locate it. I remember thinking, "Man, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just press Ctrl+F and search this?"

And then it hit me: that’s what a blog is for.

So I started putting programming-related things from my notebooks onto my blog. What I found was that problems I had were also problems that other people had. They came to my blog and found answers there. That got me thinking: maybe I should write more.

Especially when I got deeper into the Ionic Framework, I started blogging a lot more. Not daily, but at least weekly—I’d put out two or three posts.

And it helped unbelievably.

Not only did I become a better writer—and writing is a skill you can use everywhere, even in email—but I also improved simply because I was doing it regularly. If for no other reason, blog so that your writing improves.

With that also came traffic. I’m nowhere near the giant sites, but even something like 20,000 views per month got me somewhere.

By "somewhere," I mean it led to writing for sites like HackHands, which Pluralsight later bought. And in hindsight, that helped lead me to write two books. Not printed books from a traditional publisher, but I can still say I wrote and self-published two books.

So yes—definitely blog.

Because here’s the thing: you can be the best programmer in the world, but if you’re not sharing what you know—through a blog, through forums, through Stack Overflow, through anything—then nobody will know.

Shawn: Exactly. And even if you think you’re the best, you’re probably wrong. You might be the best in your team or company, but until you expose your ideas to the outside world and let them be challenged, you’re missing out.

You may be fantastic, but you can always improve. Maybe there’s one thing you’re doing that was correct five years ago, but there’s a better approach now. When you share publicly, someone can say, "Hey, have you considered doing it this way?" And then you improve.

So this isn’t just altruism. Don’t think of it as "I’m helping the less knowledgeable people." You do it because it benefits others and yourself.

Nikola: Exactly. I have more than 300 posts on my blog now. When I look back at the first few posts, I’m embarrassed by them—and that’s actually a good thing.

The same goes for code. If you look at a project you wrote a year ago and you’re not thinking, "Whoa, why did I do it like that?" then maybe you haven’t progressed as much as you could have.

Blogging is good practice.

And if we’re talking specifically about writing, that skill is massively undervalued. So much of our communication today happens online, often with strangers, and much of it is written. Your ability to express ideas clearly, structure sentences, and communicate professionally matters a lot.

For some people, the only interaction they may ever have with you is through your writing.

Shawn: Right. You could be the nicest and smartest person in the world, but if your writing makes it look like you’ve been hit in the head with bricks every day since childhood, people are not going to take you seriously.

They won’t respect your opinion, and they may assume you don’t know what you’re talking about—even if you do.

So poor writing is a real disadvantage.

Nikola: I laughed at that image because I’m such a visual person, but yes—that’s not a nice picture.

Another good thing about blogging, making videos, or publishing anything useful is that it can lead to opportunities.

If someone Googles you while you’re applying for a job and sees that you clearly know what you’re talking about, that helps. I’ve also been approached by course companies because I published content on certain topics.

So maybe you write a blog post, then record a video, and suddenly you have a course with your name on it in some online store. That looks great on your resume and helps you get accepted to speak at conferences or be taken seriously in a community.

It gives you confidence too. If you know something but never package it into a course, blog post, or video, you may not feel accomplished. Publishing makes the knowledge concrete.

Shawn: Absolutely.

So now the question becomes: how do you actually start?

And really, the answer is simple: it doesn’t matter how you start—just start.

Also, make it a habit. That advice works for reading, writing, exercise—everything.

Try writing 100 words per day. Make that the minimum. Usually you’ll end up writing more, but even if you stop at 100 words, that’s okay. At the end of the month, you’ll have 3,000 words, which is roughly three solid 1,000-word blog posts.

The answer is simple, but not easy: start small.

Nikola: Yes. And to put that into perspective, think about National Novel Writing Month. The goal there is to write a 50,000-word novel in November. That’s about 1,666 words per day.

It may not be a masterpiece, but plenty of people with no special novelist background manage to write a book in one month.

So if that’s possible, then surely writing a blog post is possible too.

A lot of columnists and journalists write around 1,000 words regularly. So writing a blog post a week is absolutely doable.

And it doesn’t even have to be 1,000 words.

If you learn something cool and turn to your coworker and say, "Hey, check this out," that can be a blog post. Instead of sharing it with just one person, you can share it with many.

If you’re a team lead and you discover a useful code review pattern, that’s a blog post. If you find a neat JavaScript DOM trick, a mobile development technique, or a backend performance tweak—that’s a blog post too.

Every one of those things you write in your notebook or save in some folder can become something valuable for others.

I’ve also found myself wanting access to things I wrote down privately and realizing I never published them. So blogging helps you, too.

And one more thing: I enjoy teaching. There have been many times when I’ve explained the same thing to multiple people—coworkers, people at conferences, whoever—and eventually I realize: I should just write this as a post.

Then instead of explaining it again for ten minutes, I can send someone a link in five seconds.

Nikola: Exactly. And let’s be clear: we’re not saying, "Start blogging and you’ll make money right away."

That wasn’t my motivation at all.

But if you keep publishing quality content and give your best effort, opportunities will come. I really believe that.

For example, one way to get your name out there is guest posting on sites that already have an audience. Some bigger sites accept guest posts. You usually write for free, but in return you get exposure to their readers, and if your post is good, some of those readers will come check out your blog too.

Other sites might pay you, but then the content usually belongs there and not on your own blog.

The point is: there are many options if you’re willing to put in the work.

And that reminds me of something else—documentation.

How many developers are going to frown when I say I love writing documentation?

I think a lot of them will be surprised.

But I honestly think blogging helped make documentation enjoyable for me. When I build something, I want to explain how it works so the next person doesn’t have to guess.

I’ve had unpleasant conversations with people who didn’t understand the value of documentation. And honestly, I think a lot of that comes down to being poor writers.

We should probably do a whole separate podcast episode about documentation, but I do think there’s a connection: people who like writing posts often also appreciate writing documentation.

Shawn: Definitely. When you build something you’re proud of, you often want to document it because you want to explain the thinking behind it.

Sometimes people only see the final solution and say, "Why didn’t you do it another way?" But the documentation lets you explain, "Actually, I tried that. It was attempt number two, and it failed for this reason."

That context is incredibly useful.

Sure, there are ways to make money from writing—ads, paid articles, getting paid by the word—but don’t get hung up on that.

If you refuse to write unless you get paid, you probably won’t write enough to get good. And you won’t get paid until you’re good enough. So you almost certainly need to write a lot for free before anyone is willing to pay for it.

At that point, your choices are either to publish your work for free or throw it away.

So why not publish it?

And here’s one more important thing: it is completely okay to write about something that has already been written about many times before.

If you’re new to Rails, Django, Go, React, Bootstrap—whatever—and you want to write about beginner experiences or solving a common problem, do it.

Technology changes. Versions change. Advice ages. People search for more recent answers all the time because they don’t fully trust a post from eight years ago.

Also, your explanation may simply be clearer than someone else’s.

Don’t try to sound smart. Don’t use big words just to impress people. Use simple, accessible language so people understand what you mean.

If your reader walks away thinking, "Oh, now I get it," then you’ve done your job.

Nikola: Exactly. One thing that frustrated me about many tutorials was that they’d go step one, step two, step three—and then suddenly jump over the exact part where the difficult stuff happened.

You’d get something like, "And after twenty minutes, you arrive here."

Wait—what happened in those twenty minutes?!

So what I tried to do was write true beginner-friendly posts. For example, when I was learning AngularJS back in the day, I would literally write step by step what I did and how I solved each problem.

And it turned out a lot of people found that useful, because they were also beginners.

Sure, some of those posts are outdated now, and I may not have the time or energy to update them. But that’s exactly why new people should write new versions now.

Don’t be afraid to publish because you’ve never done it before, or because you’re worried what people will think.

You shouldn’t care what people think—assuming you’re honestly trying to write something helpful and of good quality.

If only one person reads it and benefits from it, that’s already worthwhile.

And numbers should never be the main goal.

For me, especially in the early days, the goal was often simple: "Put this somewhere so I can find it later."

Shawn: Right. And if you write one blog post a week, every week, then five years later you’ll have 52 posts from your first year alone.

Some of those will have much higher traffic than others, and I guarantee they won’t always be the ones you expected.

The ones you think are your best, most timely, most clever posts may not be the ones people value most.

So publish the work. You don’t actually know in advance what others will find useful.

Nikola: Yep. So I think we’ve beaten this horse enough.

The too-long-didn’t-read version is: people, start.

You’ll see quickly that writing a good post takes effort. It requires revisions and care. But as you keep doing it, you’ll also start to find your voice.

That’s important. Over time, you become unique. And that matters because there’s a lot of competition out there, but not every style works for every reader. Maybe your voice will resonate more with some people than someone else’s.

One great piece of advice I got was to find a niche first.

Pick a specific topic—maybe a framework, or even one particular area inside a framework—and write about that. Build your community around that niche.

And no, it won’t happen overnight. There’s no overnight success on this podcast. Sorry, guys.

But what will happen is that you’ll get better.

Not just better at writing, but better at the things you’re teaching, because clearly expressing your thoughts forces you to think more deeply and often research more carefully.

Shawn: Agreed. Totally.

Nikola: Anyway guys, I hope this was useful. And as always—keep progressing.

See you next time.

"Double your reading speed in as fast as one weekend. Only $399
_paid in 4 manageable intallments_"

Lol, sounds like a cringe comercial. And, well, a bit of appealing, right? I mean, who wouldn’t want to read more books in less time? 🤷‍♂️

But as with many self-improvement ideas, the reality is a bit messier.

In this blog post I’ll explain what sparked the experiment, the techniques from Tony Buzan’s book, the early test results, where the skepticism comes in, and what actually matters more than chasing an impressive words-per-minute score.

The fun part is that this wasn’t just armchair theorizing. I actually started testing the techniques myself and quickly ran into the classic trade-off: higher speed, lower comprehension. Shawn (my podcast co-host), on the other hand, came in with a more skeptical lens and a faster baseline, which made for a pretty interesting discussion. You can listen to it here if you’d like.

If you’ve ever wondered whether speed reading is worth exploring, this blog post will probably save you a few hours, and maybe also nudge you toward the more boring but more effective tool: just read consistently.

The big idea

The main question is simple:

• Can you read faster and still understand what you read?
• And even if you can, is that the right goal in the first place?

That sounds like a tiny distinction, but it’s really the main point.

Because reading faster is only useful if comprehension stays high enough to make the reading worthwhile. Otherwise, you are basically turning books into a timed obstacle course. Great for your ego, not so great for actually learning something.

Same goes for those 15-min book summaries – it’s only good for deciding if you actually want to read the book or not.

My experiment: faster… but worse?

What got me interested in this topic in the first place was pretty straightforward: I love reading, but I often feel like I read painfully slowly.

So I picked up an old Tony Buzan book I had lying around and did the built-in reading tests.

My first result:

• 194 words per minute
• 73% comprehension

After revisiting some of the techniques, I did another test and got:

• 267 words per minute
• 21% comprehension

And yeah… that’s not exactly a glowing endorsement.

Technically, the speed improved. But if comprehension falls off a cliff, then what exactly did I win? Bragging rights with a side of confusion?

So, a rough conclusion may be: improvements that look good numerically may be useless in practice.

There may be something there, but don’t worship the number

Shawn had a shorter English edition of the book, tried the basic chunking idea, and already had fairly high reading speeds in his own informal tests. But he was pretty skeptical of the more extreme claims—especially the kind where people say they can read at absurd speed with near-perfect comprehension.

And honestly, I get it.

There probably is some value in reducing unnecessary eye movement, using a guide, avoiding regressions, or becoming more intentional about how you read. But once the conversation moves into miracle territory, my internal nonsense detector starts blinking like a Christmas tree 😬

The part I still like

Even though we were skeptical about the grand claims, I still think there are a few useful ideas here:

1. Reading with focus matters more than reading fast

If you’re distracted, tired, multitasking, or mentally half somewhere else, your effective reading speed is terrible no matter what the stopwatch says.

2. Some techniques may help for skimming

Using a finger, pen, or visual guide can genuinely help in certain cases—especially with tiny print or dense layouts.

3. Audiobooks are a valid multiplier

Listening at 1.5x speed during a commute can add up massively over time. That’s not "speed reading" in the classic sense, but it absolutely helps you consume more material.

4. Ten minutes a day beats fantasy productivity

This may have been my favorite practical point from the whole discussion.

You don’t need to become a 1,000-words-per-minute reading machine. You just need to read regularly.

Ten minutes a day doesn’t sound dramatic, which is probably why it works. Compound interest is sexy only in hindsight.

So… is speed reading worth it?

My answer after this episode is:

Maybe for skimming. Probably not for deep learning. Definitely not a silver bullet.

If you’re curious, experiment with it. Try the techniques. Measure your own results. See whether they help you read articles, non-fiction, or general material more efficiently.

But for anything deep like:

• technical books
• philosophy
• difficult non-fiction
• material you actually want to remember

I still wouldn’t bet on speed over attention.

And that’s probably the least glamorous conclusion possible, which is exactly why it may be true.

Final thought

The best reading system is the one you’ll actually stick to.

Not the coolest one.
Not the most extreme one.
Not the one with the wildest marketing promises.

Just the one that gets you to sit down, pay attention, and turn the next page.

And voilà, suddenly you’re the kind of person who finishes books 💪

Full podcast trancript

Shawn: Hello, and welcome back to the DevThink podcast with Shawn and Nikola.

Shawn: Today, we are talking about the topic of speed reading, which is a bit controversial. Nikola suggested we do this topic, and we both have a book. Mine has a blue cover, his has a red cover, same author. And I will let Nikola explain why he forced me to do this.

Nikola: So why I forced you, Shawn, to do it is because I wanted to force myself to do it. Because it’s actually also as in exercising, you’re determined. You wanna do it. You’re like, okay. You know what?

Nikola: As of next week, I’m gonna exercise. And then you go about it. You do it for the first week, the second week. And then, you know, you start skipping blah blah blah, and all of a sudden, you’re not doing it anymore. What I found is that having a workout partner is an awesome thing because one day you may not feel like it, and then the guy just comes to your house and you have to exercise because, you know, you had an agreement, and there’s no backing out of that.

Nikola: Right? And then next day, maybe he’s not, you know, quote, unquote, feeling it, but then you’re like, you call him up. Hey, dude. You know, no skipping. And that’s why I think doing this and, of course, other things that we’ll be doing is good to have a partner in crime, quote, unquote.

Nikola: So that’s why I made you do it. And the other reason is obvious. Like, I really like as in love reading, but my reading speed is so freaking slow or small that it’s embarrassing and yeah, so I have this book by Tony Buzan, I hope I didn’t pronounce this wrong, for a very long time from like, I think it’s from 02/2009 that I have it, but back in the day, then I got maybe even halfway through the book, and I do remember that my reading speed improved, but since I didn’t practice it in that way, it just, let’s say vanished. Anyways, long story short, I read first four chapters of this book, and so I did my first intro test of that actually tests what’s your reading speed and comprehension, and my first result was 194 words per minute with the comprehension of 73%. And then I went to learn about these few techniques, which of course I remembered, because, you know, I read this part of the book several years ago.

Nikola: But the funny thing happened, was that my reading speed on the second test was 267 words per minute, but the comprehension was remarkably low, 21%. So I don’t know. There’s that, honestly. So I am gonna, as with other things, I’m gonna go through this whole book and then see how my reading speed improves or not but, you know, I’ll see. I also can’t say that when I read claims that some people read 1,000 words per minute with 80% or higher comprehension, all I can say is: hey, I believe you, but I kind of envy you more than I believe you.

Nikola: So I don’t know. What’s your take on this, Shawn?

Shawn: Well, I did a shortened version because, unbeknownst to either of us, the English version of the book, you have the Croatian copy, that I bought, which was published we we chose one for me that was closest in publication date to yours. And it turns out I got an abbreviated book of under a hundred pages that only has one timed exam with comprehension questions, so it doesn’t really make it possible for me to measure my comprehension before and after. But it probably does have all the techniques, even if it doesn’t go into as much detail. And I went through the book, and I had already read about speed reading years ago, and the main thing that I took away from it was the idea that instead of running your eyes across the whole line, that you look at the whole line in one or two or three chunks, depending I guess depending on the width of the the line of text. And when your eyes stopped, you can read all the words that are directly in your vision.

Shawn: And that when you’re moving your eyes, you’re not seeing. It’s only when your eyes stop. So if you look at every single word and there are 10 words, your eyes have to stop 10 times. Whereas in most books I’ve seen, you can easily stop three times, like a little bit past the beginning, around the middle, and a little bit before the end, and see them all. So and I even did that technique initially.

Shawn: This book told me to read something. It didn’t specify what and record my reading speed, so I did it with multiple articles, just stuff I had in my bookmarks that I’d been meaning to read anyway online. And my scores ranged from four twenty to 455 words per minute. They were actually 420, 506, 540, and 555. And I basically went through the whole book, didn’t bother to practice any of the weird things that he recommended, which are like trying to scan multiple lines at once and move across the page in like a diagonal back and forth pattern where sometimes, you know, for about half the text, you’d be kind of looking at the ends of the sentences on one or more lines, and then the middles and then the beginnings and kind of putting them together backwards, and that just seemed silly to me. So I didn’t do that.

Shawn: So I didn’t do that. And I just kind of flipped through the rest of the book. I did the official test in here, which was a 1,871 word challenge. And I did that in 428 words per minute, and my comprehension score was 66.666 on a multiple choice quiz, which probably isn’t that great, but I was rushing through it because, you know, I was concerned more about my time than anything else. But in doing a little bit of separate research, looking into some things he said, for example, he said you should have kind of a pointing device, a a card or a ruler or something that you put down under the line you’re reading line by line because the less because that’ll draw your eyes focus.

Shawn: And the less movement of your eyes, the more efficient you will be and the faster you’ll be able to read. And if you your eye has to also pay attention to where it is vertically on the page, it’s a little more effort, it might make you take longer. And he mentioned in the book that aside from your finger or a ruler, there are also specialty devices made just for this purpose. And I did a Google search looking for it and did not find any such product because as soon as I Googled for it, I found a whole bunch of blog posts and articles about speed reading and these techniques written by various people and kinda made it sound like, to a certain extent, it’s really a sham, that it doesn’t really produce, anywhere near a thousand words per minute with comprehension and that it’s just basically, you know, those it’s like snake oil. It’s it’s like a weight loss, thing.

Shawn: You say, hey. Here’s a trick for losing weight. And then if you fail, you think, I’m just, you know, a loser. And I think it’s a lot of things like that. People who struggle say, "Oh, I want to learn how to read really fast."

Shawn: Or, "I want to learn a language." And then they do it, and they try this technique, and they maybe pay money, and then they fail. And then they think, well, it’s because I’m bad at languages, or I’m stupid, or I’m lazy, when they don’t realize a lot of these techniques are just snake oil. So I think in this case, this guy Tony Buzan, who I knew of previously because he’s very involved in memory challenges and championships, and he is a shameless self promoter who is eager to write and sell books on any topic that can make him money. So I think this is just, you know, there’s a little something to it, you know, if you learn the chunking and you maybe read over the techniques if they help you.

Shawn: But I would not get hung up on a number. I would say that probably for you, for each individual, you have some kind of range where you can read comfortably and have comprehension. And it’s possible that because of the way you were taught to read, things like sub vocalization, which you can read about if you look up speed reading, it might be possible you can improve it a bit. And if you like to do that, go ahead. But in reality, I mean, let’s take running for example.

Shawn: I will never be able to run as fast as Olympic athletes, and I have a range, which I my body can run due to my length of my legs and my height and things like that, even if I lost a bunch of weight and got in shape. And we’re just not all equal. It doesn’t make us insufficient. It still makes us it doesn’t make us average. There’s a difference between average and normal most people don’t think about.

Shawn: And I think that reading speed is not something that I would get hung up on, especially, as Nikola has drilled into me. If, for example, you want to read, but you say, "I don’t have time to read a book." A book’s long. He would say, well, read ten minutes a day, which doesn’t sound like a lot. But if you do all the math, how many pages a day, how many pages a month at the end of the year, you could have read 10 or 15 books that you wouldn’t have read otherwise.

Shawn: And if you think about probably most people listening to this are at least adults who might look back over the last five or ten years, they wish they had read more. And if they had read ten minutes a day for those, you know, five or ten years, they would have read, you know, close to a hundred books or more by now, extra on top of what they did. So I say, who cares about your reading speed? Just read.

Nikola: Oh yeah, indeed, indeed. So this concept of compound interest is unbelievable, right? And also, so you said ten minutes a day, but here’s like of course, don’t know the exact numbers. I believe Brian Tracy is where I first heard that term. I mean, the idea is listen to audio books in your car when you’re driving.

Nikola: And he had this amount of hours that you listen to. And if I’m not mistaken, the amount of hours that an average person spends in the car per year amounted to a number of hours that a full time student would spend in the full year. So imagine that, for example, my commute before when I was commuting was one hour in both ways. So one hour per day of listening to a book. And of course, if I mean, I’m not a native speaker, but I could listen to most of the books on 1.5 x, so that’s like even faster, right?

Nikola: And for a native speaker, I mean, I bet that you can listen to two X speed without losing any comprehension or anything. Some people claim that they do three X, but honestly, I mean, come on. Let’s be real. Right? Again, it depends on the speed, of the narrator because some books were literally narrated very slowly. So it could be that there you could listen to three x, but I found that in my case, it was 1.5 in, for most of them. So, yeah, you mentioned, for these techniques, you mentioned using the finger or something to track. Sure, that I think it’s a good one, especially I found this to be useful in books that have very small print or that they are very you know you know those pocketbooks. Right? They are found that useful.

Nikola: So that jumping thing that you mentioned, they actually, in the literature, they call it, saccades. In the literature, they call it saccades, in case someone wants to look it up. And also one important thing that at least I took away from, this is never go back. You know? Make it a conscious effort that you’re reading with your mind what you’re reading, but don’t ever go back because that will kind of, let’s say signal to your brain, hey, you know what, pay freaking attention.

Nikola: So I mean, as I said, I’m, like, nowhere near the end of the book still, but you did mention, going, like, in zigzag through the page, and I did, like, scroll through the book, and I saw that. And like, honestly, to be honest, that sounds like way woo woo to me, but then again, you know how in general, yeah, yeah, yeah. In general, am that I will give it a go and then I will see if it works for me or not.

Shawn: Yeah, maybe. Like he does say and I don’t have I have a little bit of experience reading music but only on the bass clef not on treble or on two simultaneously like a piano player would. But he does mention that it’s similar to this zigzag pattern is similar to the way that a musician reads music. So maybe there’s something that I am not aware of. And yep.

Shawn: So, yeah, it looks like your book and mine both have the same graphics. Mine has it split across two pages, and yours has it on one. But yeah. And then you did say something about paying attention to what you’re reading, and that was definitely a big deal. Like, if you’re distracted, if you are hearing the TV in the next room or you start thinking you read something that gives you an idea and you start thinking about something you wanna do or something you wanna email or some other book you wanna buy, then of course, it’s gonna slow you down.

Shawn: So but I mean that goes for anything that requires any concentration.

Nikola: Yeah. And you know what? When you mentioned that you didn’t find any tools for the actual books, I would say that, you know, the only tool is maybe a pen or a sheet of paper that you kind of slowly scroll down as you’re reading, but actually, since both you and I are using computers for the majority of our time each week, I actually used a few of the apps, actually they weren’t even apps, they were Chrome plugins or even Firefox. I mean, if you have it for one browser, they probably have it for another browser too that you take a sheet of, I mean, of, you take some article or whatever, and for this plugin, you just click Start and you then determine what kind of a reading speed would you like to read this text through?

Nikola: Do you want to be shown two, three, four words at a time or just one word? And you can literally specify things like that, and that may help if you’re really getting into this speed reading thing. Don’t know, have you tried this kind of thing?

Shawn: Haven’t done that but what I have done on many occasions is I wrote a little script that if I take some text and save it to a text so I’ll like highlight the text out of a blog post or something, paste it into a file and run my command against it, it will create a text-to-speech recording using an open source tool, and then I convert it to a FLAC file and then I’ll listen to it and I can listen to it at a higher rate of speed. And another thing I do is this: it’s an open source tool. It doesn’t have as good of, voice selection as you might have like on the Mac for example. You know, it’s not as clear as Siri. So but it does have multiple voices, and I selected, I think, three or four of the ones that I thought were easiest for me to listen to.

Shawn: And my code makes a separate recording for every paragraph with a different voice. So it alternates over the voices for every time there’s a blank line, you know, a white line between, paragraphs. So that also helps it be less monotonous and maybe a little bit easier to listen to or keep your focus. Because it’s also very easy with audiobooks and podcasts and with this to put it on. And then while it’s on, you’re, like, browsing other websites or checking your email, in which case you’re not really hearing it.

Shawn: So you could certainly listen to audiobooks for two hours a day and not get much out of it because your attention will be wandering.

Nikola: Yeah, indeed. So this whole idea of multitasking has been debunked over and over again.

Nikola: We’re going to talk again when I go through the whole book. Hopefully my speed at least stays where it is, but comprehension, please go higher, and we’ll see.

Shawn: Or you could try to intentionally read a little more slowly and see where your comprehension is because I’m sure you’d give up, you know, 10 or 20 words a minute for increased comprehension.

Nikola: Yeah. Although, like, to be perfectly honest, I was probably not as concentrated or whatever because this week, I don’t know how I sound, I was quote unquote kinda sick, I was actually sick. So maybe that had a thing to do with it. So the next reading challenge that I’m going to have, and I have 60% comprehension, I’m going to be, oh, yes, this works. I’m kidding.

Nikola: Of course. We’ll see.

Shawn: Yep. Alright. So, gonna wrap this one up.

Nikola: Sure. Sure. So, anyways, I hope that, you know, those of you who are at least toying with the idea of speed reading, hey. My advice is always, you know, if you want to check something out, don’t listen to us. Check it for yourself, you know, and you will see.

Nikola: Maybe you will be blown away. Maybe you will be doing 1,800 words per minute, and thus being, if I’m not mistaken, the best, person on the planet that can do that. Anyways, let us know, And good luck.

Shawn: Yeah. Just to reiterate, yeah, I I went through the book, but I did not do I spent zero minutes practicing any of the techniques, so I’m not basing my I’m not dismissing it based on the fact that I think it doesn’t work. I’m because I tried it, I’m basing it because I don’t I think it doesn’t work because I looked around and it seems like that’s the consensus of people and who have put some thought into it and who have attempted it. So, just because I poo poo it doesn’t mean that it’s something you should ignore.

Nikola: Oh, yeah. So, like, you’ve totally nailed it because even from 02/2009 when I first tried it, and I was like really into it, the thing is if you’re not deliberately, so again we’re mentioning the term deliberate practice, so if you’re not deliberately reading a certain material in this kind of way, you will just lose the technique and you will lose it. You know? And then again, I have to say: you would most probably never want to use this kind of technique to learn something deeply. Honestly, I don’t think you would.

Shawn: Yeah, it’s good for skimming and then you know what you when you’re done going through the book, you can put it to yourself and say I’m going to refer to this and now I know exactly when I’m going to need it. Or you can say, can get rid of this book because it really didn’t have that much for me and I could use the space on my shelf for something else.

Nikola: Awesome. Agreed. Anyways, that’s it guys. Hope you liked it. See you next time.

Shawn: Alright. Bye bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to the DevThink podcast. To reach us for feedback, show suggestions, or any other comments, email us at info at DevThink.

Shawn: That’s d-e-v-t-h dot I-n-k.

Let’s talk about something most developers feel at some point, but not many enjoy admitting out loud: impostor syndrome.

You know the feeling: someone calls you a senior and asks for your opinion. Or, even worse, trusts you with an important task, and your brain immediately goes: "OK, OK, act cool… but what if they find out I actually have no idea what I’m doing?"

That’s exactly what my friend and I discussed in our podcast episode. We dug into what impostor syndrome looks like in real life, how it shows up for developers specifically, and why it may not be entirely bad news. In fact, a bit of that healthy discomfort can be the thing that keeps us learning, improving, and not turning into complacent keyboard zombies.

You can listen to the episode here if you’d like, and below is the TL;DR for folks that still read in "this day and age" of summarization tools and whatnot 😅 🤗

1. Most of us compare our backstage to everyone else’s highlight reel

One of the most useful ideas in the episode is this: we often assume that other developers know everything, while we only see our own gaps.

But in reality, each of us has a different box of knowledge. Mine isn’t identical to yours. Yours isn’t identical to mine. The problem is that when someone talks confidently about the things they know well, it’s easy to conclude that they’re operating on some superhuman level.

Usually, they’re not. They just have a different box.

2. Seniority does not mean instant mastery

Another important point: being experienced does not mean knowing everything on demand.

Sometimes a task looks programming-related on the surface, but once you start pulling on the thread, you realize it depends on three other topics, and each of those depends on three more. Classic software development stuff. A tiny rabbit hole turns into an underground metro system 🚂

Not knowing something immediately is not proof that you’re a fraud. Often it just means the problem is deeper than it first appeared.

3. A little impostor syndrome might actually be useful

This was probably my favorite part of the discussion.

Instead of treating impostor syndrome as something we must completely eliminate, we explored the idea that it can be helpful in moderation. It can push us to keep learning. It can keep us humble. It can stop us from getting too comfortable and assuming we’ve "arrived."

Of course, too much of it becomes paralyzing. But a small amount? That may be the fuel.

4. Deliberate practice beats repetition

There’s a difference between simply doing something over and over and deliberate practice.

Repetition is just repetition. Deliberate practice means paying attention, noticing what happened, correcting course, and improving intentionally. Whether it’s programming, music, martial arts, or even card magic, the principle is the same.

You don’t get better just because time passed.
You get better because you practiced with intent and feedback.

5. Start small, stay consistent, build the habit

Improvement usually starts in a very unglamorous way: slooooooowly.

Not with some heroic, life-changing burst of motivation.
Not with "this time I’ll practice four hours a day forever."
Just small wins. Repeated.

That may be boring advice, but boring advice is often the stuff that actually works. Annoying, I know. But works with everything.

Final thought

If you’ve ever felt like everyone else understands more than you do, welcome to the club. You’re very much not alone.

And maybe that feeling does not mean you’re failing.
Maybe it means you still care.
Maybe it means you’re still growing.

That’s not such a bad place to be.

Take care 🤗

Transcript

Hey, guys, and welcome to another show of the DevThink podcast with you, your hosts, Nikola and Shawn. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that, let’s say, in my opinion, a lot of people don’t want to talk about. It’s the topic of the impostor syndrome. So how do you like today’s topic, Shawn? Oh, I don’t know why anybody would avoid talking about it. I love talking about it, and I love pointing it out in others on a regular basis. It just doesn’t occur to me that it afflicts me just as badly, if not worse.

Yeah. It’s actually funny because, you know, I mean, I would say that both of us, like, output quite a lot. Right? I mean, of course, we’re not, you know, as they say, 100 x developers or anything, but I’d like to think of myself that I actually do meaningful work, my output is quite a lot, I would like to think. But there’s this thing that’s by actually defining the impostor syndrome is that I kinda, like, feel that I’m still not living up to the expectations. Whose expectations? Well, honestly, mine.

And that’s kinda like the definition of impostor syndrome, meaning that you’re always kinda like lagging behind. Although, maybe your even your peers are saying, hey, dude. You’re awesome. Right? Yeah, actually my understanding of it is a little different. Is actually not your expectations, is other people’s perception. If people say oh yeah, you’re a senior developer, you must know what you’re doing and you’re like oh my god I’m really not that good and I got lucky. Or, you know, the people who hired and promoted me weren’t programmers, and they don’t know how bad I actually am.

And I’m kind of, you know, I’m pretending. And that’s what I think that’s what I take impostor syndrome to be. Maybe thinking that you’re not living up to your own expectations. Yeah. That’s a whole that may be related. It may be part of it. But my main thing is other people’s image of you and you thinking that that’s not true. Okay. Okay. I get it. So, basically, how do we fight this? How do we I mean, you know, how do we deal with it? Well, see, that automatically let me I wanna go back to something you said before about how you like to think that your output is, you know, pretty the quantity is better than, like, a one x developer or somewhere near your standards.

And that’s interesting because I don’t care at all about the quantity of my output. I care about the quality of my output. And the way I see it is, if you and I do the same task and or maybe that’s not a good example. If a junior developer and I do the same task, even if it takes us the same amount of time, I would like to think that mine would be less likely to have bugs. If it did have bugs, it would be easier to understand and fix and maintain. And that the junior person’s attempt, even if it worked, would be harder to read or would show some obvious signs of not getting some underlying principles or even little things like not knowing the best way to use the tools and language that they were using.

So, I mean, it could be both. Maybe it’s different for different people. I mean, the biggest thing for me with impostor syndrome is there’s a a really funny picture I saw. It’s what I know versus what I think other people know, and it shows, like, my everyone else’s circle is huge. And then it says the reality, and it shows, you know, my circle and everyone else’s circle, and we all have the same size circle. The difference is they all they don’t overlap completely. So if if you could if you could somehow take everything I know and put it in a box and take everything you know and put it in a box, we’d have the same size box.

But 90% of the stuff in my box, you don’t know. And 90% of the stuff in your box, I don’t know. We have that 10% overlap. So if I talk to you 10 times and I tell you about ten, fifteen, 20 different things that I’m interested in or know about and you know none of them, you’re gonna walk away thinking, oh my god. I’m I’m not even smart enough to talk to this guy. He knows, like, everything. But, no, I just know the same as you. I just don’t know the same list of things as you. And I really think that’s the biggest one of the biggest pieces of impostor syndrome.

So, so I wanna go back to your your question about fighting it, but since I just said a lot of stuff, do you wanna jump in with anything? Yeah. Sure. So one thing, to, let’s say, correct myself, By output, I actually meant so the good proper output. So everything so for example, you said junior developer. He would probably never add unit tests and anything like that. You know? When I set my like, when I use me as an example, I meant all of that. So let’s say, you know, output if you compare the senior devs, then I would say, more output on that kind of level.

But, anyways, one thing that actually so kinda like in the defense of this impostor syndrome, I would kinda think that by thinking the whole time that you’re, you know, kinda like not good enough or that you’re basically faking it, it’s actually kind of good because that somehow keeps you going. You never rest. And let’s be honest, if you kinda, like, live on your laurels or what’s the exact expression, you will, in software development field, just be become obsolete sooner or later. That’s what I think.

Yeah. It’s funny because, literally, the only thing I had left to say on my notes from what you said in the beginning, how do we fight it, is I’d argue that it’s it’s a good thing and we shouldn’t be fighting it because if you, as you say, you know, rest on your laurels, you don’t improve, but also you just become you and you become complacent. But when you’re not trying, you’re not striving, you’re just phoning it in. And, you know, if you wanna do that, you know, you should be working in a factory.

Because there, you go through the motions, then you can go home and play your video games or write your code or play soccer or whatever it is you do. But to be a developer, it’s a very it’s a special kind of field. And I forget if we talked about this before, but I notice a huge overlap. There’s a lot of similarities among these things. Programming, martial arts, music, and magic. And by magic, I mean, sleight of hand, card tricks, coin tricks, this kind of stuff. And they’re all the same, and I find that if you find someone who’s into one of those, they are probably into two or three of the other ones.

And the way that they’re similar is that in each of those, you will never be done. You can never be the best. You will never know everything. And the more you know, the more you realize there is to know that you’ll never know. And so it just gets deeper and deeper the more effort you put into it. So it’s a journey. It’s a mentality. It’s something that you have to be passionate about to do well. There are plenty of developers that aren’t passionate. They go to school. They take a Java class. They apply for a job as an entry level developer.

And if they get it, they use whatever tool set, whatever stack, whatever programming languages that employer uses, never learn anything new, do their job from nine to five, and go home. That’s not the kind of people that I consider to be a true developer, just like if someone, you know, learned three magic tricks and did them for the rest of their life, or someone took one year of a martial arts class and then said that they were, you know, self defense expert. You know, it’s I I just see all of them having this huge or, you know, musical instrument.

If you play an instrument for a year, you take three lessons and then you decide to, you know, put yourself on stage and charge money for it. It’s people are gonna be able to tell the difference. And you may be able to make a living, but I just don’t see it as something that, you know, is good for you or the industry. Awesome. I agree. And, actually, through, through kinda, like, materials that I read about, they use the term craftsman. So you should improve daily in your field, and that kinda, like, makes you a craftsman.

Although, like, the actual term may vary, from the source to source. However, what I would like to say here is, okay. So we’re in it. You know? We’re in it for the long term. We really want to improve and everything, but how do we do that? And I came across a term called deliberate practice. Meaning, how do you, for example, golf? How do you improve your swing? Well, so that you literally nail down this one particular swing, not one, not two times, let’s say thousand times, and so that it base basically becomes, muscle memory.

So okay. How do we okay. Cool. Right? So that’s kinda, let’s say, something that some kind of a sports thing. But how do we do that? How do we devs do that? Well, here’s the thing. There’s a thing called, KATAS. I may butch be butchering this term, but software KATAS, where also goes, as you said, very funny thing, a parallel to the martial arts, right, where you basically complete these steps of, steps, in lack of better words, over and over again. And, literally, you can see when the master does it and when the student does it, that only started, you know, and learned this kata, you will see such an immediate difference that it’s unbelievable.

So software devs, what do we do? Well, you have a set of certain problems that, let’s say, you can solve in, let’s say, half an hour. But what it helps is that you tend to solve these kind of problems on their, let’s say, semi regular basis because you know? So you let’s say, for example, you learned the factory pattern, but then you haven’t used it in, let’s say, two years, right, because whatever reason. And it would be good that you actually you know, every, let’s say, you know, few months, you revisit and, like, for example, you come to work in the morning, and first thing that you do, oh, let me let me write a test, driven development kind of Kata for, you know, whatever.

Of course, this takes time and preparation, but I would believe so. I didn’t do the research on that, but I think I saw somewhere that there are katas like that that you can already, you know, go in and try and do them. So as a summary of this, deliberate practice is the term if you want to, you know, explore more. And in terms of software programming or software engineering kinda like field, try to do the so called katas. Yeah. So I have also heard the term deliberate practice and an important thing that I am sure you know and meant, but you didn’t specifically say is, a deliberate practice is not simply repetition.

Oh, yes. Yeah. It’s not repetition isn’t good enough. What you have to do is you have to observe what you’re doing And correct the course. Observe the outcome and modify your, you know, your actions. And I read a really good book that I have never mentioned to you before. It’s called First Learn to Practice by a guy named Tom Heaney, who was a is a lifelong musician and as well as he tunes pianos for, like, orchestras for, like, major stage productions and things like that. And he talks about a lot of things.

He gave one example of archery that in the Olympics, for example, if you were to watch an American archer take a shot and then miss, you can clearly see that they’re frustrated or disappointed or upset about it. Whereas if you watch people from other countries, us particularly Asian countries, and I forget exactly which one whether he said it was like South Korea or something, that they they do what they do. They look at it. Look at it. They take that knowledge in without judgment without judgment, and then they go again.

You know? And if you do that, the frustration doesn’t help you. It doesn’t teach you. It only makes it worse. So I definitely recommend the book. It’s first learned to practice by Tom Heaney. I bought it on Kindle. When you mentioned Yes. Sorry. When you mentioned, the archers, I remembered one post by James Clear. We haven’t mentioned him before. I don’t know if I mentioned him to you before. I really like his writing. The guy literally takes, let’s say, a complex topic, and he kinda, like, explains it in a very simple way.

You know? But it’s still the guy does a lot of research. He links to a lot of additional research. I’m gonna share that link with you. I can’t remember the exact name of the post, but it was definitely something with these archers. And I believe that that term is for martial arts, the zanshin, kinda like the focus to whatever you’re doing. But, yeah, it ties into this deliberate practice, which you’re right. I did not mention the very, very important part of not just you know, you don’t you’re not supposed to just come to practice as in, you know, whatever practice, soccer practice, basketball practice, but actually see yourself how you do that’s actually that’s actually why, teams, when they lose or when they win, they rewatch the whole, like, video, and the trainer or the coach then tells and points out the weaknesses or why they lost or why they won and how can they improve.

Yeah. No. That’s definitely, you know, a great technique. And I think the hardest part of that is not judging yourself because you failed. Because, of course, you’re not gonna make a three point shot every time you make it. Of course, you’re not gonna deploy something in production with zero bugs every time. And it’s so easy to take it personally and feel like, well, clearly, this is evidence of me not being good enough for being a failure. It’s not. It’s just evidence of you not being a robot. Oh, yeah. So with this, I very much bought into the this thing called this is from John Sonmez.

He calls it trust the process where he says so this is how he explained it to his, daughter. He said, okay. So you want to draw a butterfly. Right? Here’s what trust the process means. If you try to draw a butterfly, you’ll probably do a very bad job for the first time, second time, third time. But I promise you this, if you go and you dedicate your mind to it, that you you’re gonna do it for 100 times, somewhere along the process, you’re gonna get so good and you’re gonna, draw it so nice that you won’t even realize that you actually do it.

I mean, you will realize it. But somewhere along the lines of, you know, you doing it for seventy seventh time, you will actually do a good job. So Yeah. You know, whatever is the topic and that that’s how I kinda, like, approach everything, every, let’s say, task. If it’s something that I never did, I’m not gonna say, hey. I never did that. That’s actually a very, very big red flag for you know, if any software dev tells tells you that, I would question his motives of being actually in this software development kind of thing.

You know? So I say, okay. I never did it, but here’s the thing. I am willing to spend nights on this weekends, like, a lot of days until I get it. But here’s the thing. There is no way that I’m not gonna get it. I just may need more time or less time if I’m, supposed to be comparing myself to someone. Although, I don’t care. I know if I put enough work in it, I’m going to do it. And that’s a very, in my opinion, very good mentality to have. Yeah. And you can’t, like there’s so much pressure. It’s like, I’m a senior dev.

And, you know, my boss asked me to do this thing, which is something I don’t know anything about, but it’s programming related. So, you know, I should be able to figure this out and, you know, get it done by the end of the reality, it might take weeks or months to learn enough about because what we do is so deep. Right? It’s a spider web. As soon as you go to learn a topic and that’s the center of that new web for you, you realize you need to understand two or three supporting topics. And for each one of those two or three supporting topics, you might need to know two or three supporting topics.

So it may just be that it would take months, or maybe the best solution isn’t to waste your time on it. Maybe you should hire a contractor. Maybe you should ask someone else to do it who’s already done it. Or, you know, whatever, because you can’t be expected to you know, don’t don’t feel like, oh, here here’s the proof. I’m an impostor. They’re gonna find out now that I’m overpaid or should be fired because I don’t know how to do this one thing. Because I’ve experienced I may have experienced that in within the last year here.

And this kinda goes back to something we talked about. I won’t repeat the whole thing because we did it in a previous podcast, but the whole thing about never telling a child that when they’re successful that it’s because they’re clever. You say it’s because they worked hard. Right? Because if you tell them that they’re they’re smart or clever or hey. You’re you’re good at drawing. So then if they try to draw a horse now and they can’t draw a horse, they can draw a butterfly, they think, oh, yeah. I’m not really a good artist.

No. You know, you tell them, wow. It’s a great butterfly. You must have practiced. You must have you must have, you know, worked really hard on that. So then when they can’t draw a horse, instead of saying, I suck at drawing horses, they say, I guess I need to practice my horses more. And Yeah. One of the things that is so important that people don’t either don’t know or, you know, it it seems counterintuitive is that if you can practice you said, I’ll practice evenings. I’ll practice weekends. I’ll practice for a long time.

Right. But what’s implied in that is you’re not gonna say, I’m gonna go home this weekend, put on headphones and blinders, and look at this for forty eight hours straight and not sleep and come in on Monday an expert because you can’t do that. You need time. You need rest. You need sleep. You need a lot of things in between segments of learning. So if you spend five minutes a day on something for a month, that’s way better than trying to do three hours a a week. Like, the weekend, you just won’t absorb it.

Especially for something with that requires dexterity, like playing an instrument or doing sleight of hand in magic. That’s not some you you can’t practice for five hours straight. I mean, you can, but what you’ll do is it will become not deliberate practice, but repetition. And you will train muscle memory, and you will train incorrect muscle memory. So not only will you not be able to do it correctly, but you’ll have difficulty teaching yourself the to not do it in the bad way that you’ve developed.

So you’ll almost need physical therapy and, you know, doing the the motions. And and, one other thing that I really like the idea of, if you talk about, like, you know, the evolution of humans, how we got to where we are from, you know, say our you know, the ancestors we share with apes. If you had every single skeleton or every single being from then till now, you would never be able to point to one particular one and say, hey. See right here? This one right before here was the last ape, and this one right after it was the first human.

Because it doesn’t work that way. You you’ll never have, like, say, a mother and say, yeah. This mother was an ape, but then she gave birth to the first human. There is no transitional fossil where this one skeleton is the missing link between x and y because it’s just a smooth transition. And your your butterfly example made me think of this. If you say, hey. Go draw a butterfly every day for a hundred days, Then if the hundredth butterfly is beautiful, you will not be able to go back and say, hey. Look.

You know, butterflies one through 67 sucked, but 68 was really good. You know? It’s each one is gonna be a little bit better, but there’s no line you’ll be able to draw there where they somehow magically you know, the last one sucked, and this one was amazing. That that actually reminded me of something. A friend of mine that’s very much into bodybuilding and everything, He told me this. If you if you take the, Mistress of Olympia winners and if you take them, let’s say, five years apart. So let’s say Mark A is one guy.

Right? And then five years later is another guy. They will they will look okay. So maybe I mixed my, you know, five years, two years, three years, whatever. But the point is, if you take one guy and the second guy after him, they will look more or less the same. But if you take the first guy and then the third guy, they will look very much different. Yeah. There’s I mean, this isn’t a weightlifting podcast. Neither one of us are bodybuilders, but there is a lot of stuff. I happen to be a fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I’ve watched a few videos about him, people have talked about, you know, what would he look like if he would he be able to even compete today with today’s standards where it’s nothing but size, where he was about perfect, you know, symmetry and perfect ratios of each muscle to each other muscle and even a computer generated graphic of what he would look like if he trained and used the chemicals that they use today.

So, yeah, that’s just ridiculous and yeah. Completely unrelated, but I I think that the the way it is today is not only extremely unhealthy, but, you know, crazy, unattractive, and just dangerous. Yep. I would have to agree here. Frank Zane, that was the golden era. What what year was that? Like, the seventies? I honestly don’t know the dates. You know, it’s funny because you said Mark one, and I’ve heard the term so I’ll I’ll show my impostor syndrome. I’ve always heard, you know, Mark one, Mark two, like, that tells you which version it is, which edition, which release, or whatever.

And I’ve never in my life understood where that came from, why it’s used. I just kind of hear it and I say, okay. And so I just decided to look it up and I found it on Wikipedia while you were talking. So I don’t yet see the origin of it, but it seems to be very old. So yeah. I mean, I think I first heard about it in the context of, like, a vehicle, like a mark two or mark three, some kind of a racing car, and I thought it had to do with race cars. And then I heard it, you know, in Iron Man about the versions of his suit.

And it’s like, oh, yeah. The Mark 14, you know, and it’s okay. The fourteenth version of the Iron Man suit. And, apparently, it’s just a general term that’s used for everything. So, maybe some people listening to this knew that, and that’s just a clear example of how a very common day to day thing that everyone knows and everyone uses, someone who you would think knew what they were doing would be able to tell you the whole history of it. Nope. Yeah. Cool. Honestly, like, I didn’t even know it. As you know, I tend to pick up phrases that I hear are used, then I just try to fit and use them since, of course, English is not my first language.

But, yeah, I’m glad to have found that this fit in perfectly. Yeah. Fits perfectly, and you have every excuse because, you know, it’s a colloquialism in English, and you can’t be expected to know the origin of, you know, even common there are plenty of phrases that we say day to day that, you know, like if I say, hey, you know, if you wanna have lunch, let me know. Like, let me know? It means, like, literally, allow me to know or and that’s probably not even the worst example that people use every single day that just make no sense in English.

And we just say it like it’s normal. I mean, I know that Croatia Croatian has other crazy I mean, I know German does for sure. I assume Croatian has some really crazy ones. Any British, they say Bob’s your uncle. Or is that Australian? I don’t know. I don’t know. Anyways, we’ve gone off the topic. Off the rails. Again, yep, right? Basically to sum up, honestly, if you ask me, imposter syndrome, if you have it, if you know that you have it, I would just say go with the flow. Just just just ride the wave because honestly, in my case, it’s just gonna keep you keeping on.

Yeah. It holds you back. You know, I when I talk to junior developers, when I mentor people and they they are exhibiting it, I explain it to them. Most of the time, they’ve never heard of the topic. And I try to tell them that it’s it’s artificial. It’s fake. And just because you’re gonna limit yourself, you’re gonna say, okay. I’m only this good. I’m only going to hope to one day reach this plateau that’s way below you because you’ve been doing this for you know, you’re obviously really smart or whatever.

And no. It’s just I’ve been doing it longer is the main thing. I’ve been doing it longer, and I’m curious. That’s it. Those are the two things. Awesome. With this, I would just like to announce another topic that we’re gonna do, which ties into the so recently, I read a book. Actually, I’m still reading the book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You, where, Carl Newport goes to argue that, you know, as people say, hey. You know what? You should first find your passion, what you’re passionate about, and then find a job in that that deals around that.

Whereas he said that’s bullshit and that you should actually first start working somewhere and work at it good and try to get very good at it. And as he says, so good that they can’t ignore you. And what you will very much so in very a lot of cases, you will find out that, wow, that’s actually your calling. So, basically, number of years doing something, but in a way that we’re trying to do it, meaning progressing and not just, you know, clocking in the hours, you will find that that was actually your, you know, kinda like calling or what you were quote, unquote put here on earth to do.

And the second thought yeah. If Shawn, if you want to add something here. I just wanted to throw in that that is deliberate practice, like you said. And the other thing is that if you wait to be inspired or you wait to have the eureka moment, you will probably never it’ll never have it. If you have something you want to do, do it every day at the same time or, you know, every three times a week when you have time after your busy schedule of doing a job you hate coming home and doing programming or whatever your passion is at night playing an instrument.

And if you show up and you sit down, try to keep yourself from getting frustrated and just work on it a little bit over time, you will get everything that you’re looking for and hoping for. But don’t go to the music store, buy a guitar, look at it, and expect to become over consumed with an overriding passion that I must practice this day and night until my fingers bleed. Because That’s not going to come until after you sit down day and night and play until your fingers bleed. Indeed. This whole deliberate practice thing, here’s the thing.

If it would be easy, everybody would do it, but it’s not. And that’s why they say it’s lonely in the top at the top. See, I I would argue that it is easy. It’s very easy. It’s just that I think I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing or what. People like, we’re not taught in school important things. We’re not taught how to stay out of debt, manage money, save for retirement, how to, you know, find people that are not toxic for your life, how to find someone, you know, a good mate, how to, you know, when to be generous and when to be cautious so you don’t get scammed.

And they don’t teach you how to learn. They teach you what to learn. And you could argue I mean, I’ve heard it. I’m American, obviously. I live in The US. I was born here. Lived here my whole life. And there seems to be a kind of stereotype that Americans are raised to be employees. Our school system and our government is are designed so that we can have a steady stream of employees to industry. And our own best interests and our own entrepreneurship is not encouraged or even considered. And you have to find a mentor or you have to get lucky and, you know, get inspired by somebody at some point in your life to realize that.

So the idea of deliberate practice, if I said, you know, here, ten minutes a day, here’s your instrument, here’s your deck of cards, here’s, you know, your martial arts class you’re gonna go to an hour a day, three days a week. You do that for five years, you’re gonna turn around, and you will be unbelievably better than you could have imagined on day one. Anybody. It’s not hard. You just gotta put in the time. So Okay. Yeah. So then I have to say this. It’s a a wordplay. So it’s, easy but not simple, or would you say it’s simple but not easy?

How would you say it? Okay. If you wanna play the word game like that, I would say it’s simple but not easy because Okay. It’s like weight loss is simple. Eat fewer calories than you consume. Exactly. But it’s not easy, which we all know. Right. So yes, I was conflating simple and easy there. So yes, it is simple, but not easy, but it’s not that hard. And it’s the same as anything else. If you develop it as a habit, then it becomes automatic, and then it’s free. Then it is simple and easy. It’s gonna be simple and hard, and it’s gonna become simple and easy.

And the best tip to actually start the habit, start very slow. And okay. So, like, I promise what I mean by this start very slow, you you at at first, you have to get these, let’s say, small successes, which will compound to more successes, and you just doing the work. Right? Yeah. That’s gonna have to be a whole another podcast about that. Exactly. Although Start with the fundamentals. Yeah. To just announce another one that we’re gonna do. So basically, I concluded that I read. I like to read. I love to read.

I read quite lot, I would say, but I read very slow. Like, slow as very, very slow. And what me and Shawn are gonna do is we’re both gonna take the same book. However, I’m gonna take the Croatian edition. He’s gonna take the English edition, and we’re gonna go through it. And we’re gonna record our, let’s say, weekly reports and then make them into a one podcast in the end to see how our speed has or hasn’t improved. That’s right. Yep. Okay. So, again, we dragged this one a bit too long, but I hope it was useful.

And till next time. See you, guys. Bye bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to the DevThink podcast. To reach us for feedback, show suggestions, or any other comments, email us at info at DevThink. That’s d-e-v-t-h-dot-i-n-k.

Let’s talk about improving one’s memory…

No, not the RAM kind. Sadly, no extra gigabytes for your brain today 🤷‍♂️

The fun part? A lot of what looks like "wow, this person is a genius" is actually technique, practice, and a few surprisingly simple mental tricks. Here you’ll learn about practical methods like chaining, memory palaces, and the person-action-object system.

You can listen to the podcast episode that sparked this post: DevThink Episode 004 – Memory

The big idea: memory is trainable

One of the most encouraging takeaways from this conversation is that memory is not some fixed trait that only a lucky few are born with.

Sure, some people seem naturally better at remembering names, lists, dates, or card sequences. But the techniques discussed in the episode make a strong case for something much more useful: memory can be improved on purpose.

And that’s good news, because it means you don’t have to wait for talent to show up. You can work on it. 💪

Why weird works

A theme that keeps coming up in the episode is this: normal things are forgettable, weird things stick.

If you try to remember "milk" by imagining a carton of milk, your brain shrugs and moves on.

But if you imagine milk exploding out of your mailbox like a tiny dairy waterfall 😂, now we’re talking.

That’s because vivid, strange, emotional, exaggerated images are easier to remember than plain abstract words. Our brains are much better at holding onto images and stories than isolated bits of information.

This is why so many memory systems work: they convert boring information into visual nonsense. Beautiful, useful nonsense.

Technique #1: Chaining

This is probably the easiest technique to try immediately.

The basic idea is simple: every item leads to the next one in a ridiculous mental scene.

So instead of trying to remember a list like this:

• tractor
• light bulb
• stork
• button
• table
• skier
• gorilla
• boat
• bicycle
• bottle

You turn it into a sequence of connected images:

• a small tractor, as he plows, the giant light bulbs jump out of the soil
• a stork flying past that light bulb
• the stork holding a sack closed by a button
• the sack landing on a table like a tablecloth
• the tablecloth becoming a snowy hill with a skier
• a gorilla tripping the skier
• the gorilla jumping into a boat
• the boat growing wheels like a bicycle
• the bicycle smashing into a bottle of a size of a skyscraper

And voilà, now the list has a story.

It may sound silly, but that’s exactly the point.

Once the first image is in place, each one cues the next. Shawn demonstrates this beautifully in the episode by recalling a ten-word list after hearing it only once.

Technique #2: The memory palace

This is one of the classics.

You take a place you know well—your home, your childhood apartment, the route to the store, your office—and mentally place items along that path.

For example:

• your mailbox is overflowing with milk
• eggs are frying on the driveway
• the porch steps are made of bread
• popcorn explodes when you open the front door

Because the place is familiar, your brain gets a reliable structure to walk through later. Instead of trying to remember floating items in space, you revisit a known route and pick them up one by one.

That makes it great for shopping lists, speeches, ordered points, or anything you want to recall in sequence.

The important catch is that one memory palace is best used for one set of things at a time. Reusing the same exact path for different lists too quickly can get messy.

Technique #3: Person-Action-Object

This one is especially fun if you like cards, mnemonics, or anything that feels a little bit like mental engineering.

The idea is to assign every card in a deck a:

• person
• action
• object

Then, instead of memorizing each card individually, you combine three cards into one image:

• first card gives the person
• second card gives the action
• third card gives the object

So instead of storing three separate items, your brain stores one bizarre scene.

For example, in the episode Shawn gives examples like Edward Snowden swinging a door, or Steve Martin lifting a microphone. That single image encodes three cards in order.

It does require prep work up front, but once built, it becomes a very powerful compression system for memory.

The deeper lesson: tricks are just training wheels for attention

One insight I really liked from this discussion is that memory techniques are not just about "hacks."

They force you to actually pay attention.

Take names, for example.

Most of the time when we meet someone and immediately forget their name, it’s not really because our memory failed. It’s because we never truly encoded the name in the first place. We heard it, but we didn’t work with it.

A memory trick helps because it makes us do something with the information. We create an image, a link, a pattern. In other words, we give the brain a reason to keep it.

That’s a useful reminder far beyond memory competitions.

Memory, effort, and mindset

Near the end, the conversation shifts into something I think matters just as much: the relationship between effort and ability.

There’s a powerful idea here:

Memory skill is not the same thing as intelligence.

And more broadly, natural talent is rarely the full story.

We talk about practice, hard work, and the danger of praising people only for being "smart." That ties in nicely with Carol Dweck’s work on mindset: when people believe success comes from effort, they’re more likely to persist through difficulty. When they believe success is supposed to come naturally, challenges can feel like proof that they’re not good enough.

That’s not just relevant for kids. That’s relevant for all of us.

Whether you’re learning memory techniques, coding, writing, public speaking, or anything else really, the principle is the same:

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.

A practical takeaway

If you want to try one thing today, try this:

The next time you need to remember a short list, don’t write it down immediately.

First, turn it into a chain of ridiculous images.

Start with 10 items. Not 3. Not 5. Go a little bigger than feels comfortable.

You may be surprised by how well it works.

And if you want to go further, try building a simple memory palace using your home or daily walking route. Once you get the feel for it, you start noticing that your brain is much more capable than you probably gave it credit for.

Final thoughts

This episode was a fun reminder that a lot of seemingly extraordinary skills are learnable once you understand the mechanism behind them.

Memory techniques are not magic. They just feel like magic when you first see them in action.

And honestly, that’s my favorite kind of topic: something practical, a bit nerdy, surprisingly powerful, and immediately usable.

If you haven’t listened yet, check out the episode here:

DevThink Episode 004 – Memory

Full transcript

Shawn: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the DevThink podcast with Shawn and

Nikola: Nikola.

Shawn: Yeah. Today, we have one of my favorite topics to think about and talk about, which is memory. Human memory, how to improve it, tricks for memorizing things. And I probably first got involved in learning about memory techniques from being interested in magic and hanging out with magicians and going to lectures and seeing mentalists and things like that. And one of the things that I learned was to memorize a deck of cards, the purpose of which would be to do magic tricks by knowing the order of the complete deck. And so that’s something that I did for fun. However, I memorized one specific order. And if I wanted to do any of those tricks, I needed to take the deck of cards and put them in that particular order, and then I could do any number of of little tricks. And there are people though that can for real in under a minute memorize a legitimately shuffled deck of cards, actually multiple different decks of cards, and then recite back in order the, you know, multiple decks, even if the multiple decks are shuffled together. So it’s not even, you know, there could be more than two two of hearts, you know, within three cards of one another. So remembering faces, remembering names, remembering dates, remembering phone numbers. Just all these things are possible, and they’re actually not difficult to do. They’re just tricks. There’s a book called Moonwalking with Einstein that I have recommended to Nikola recently. And it’s about a guy who’s a reporter, a journalist. He went to a memory championship, and he observed people performing these feats and befriended a couple of them who then trained him. The very next year, this author goes back to the same memory competition and wins first place. So the point is, all it is is tricks. It’s training. And if you can learn the techniques, which are very simple some of them I can describe to you in under a minute and you can immediately go use them. And others require some preparation. You have to pre memorize certain things so that later it’ll be much easier to recall them. So, Nikola, do you have any experience or big thoughts on this?

Nikola: First of all, yeah, that’s like awesome. It’s I think it’s very good to invest time to learn some of these, as you call them, tricks. Because, of course, more things that you can remember, I think it’s better, right, in any case. Right? Is it maybe you’re not remembering the syntax or whatever? Okay. With the syntax, to be fair, you probably just go online. Right? But, you know, other stuff. And, actually so I was interested in it as well, which is not surprising that we’re interested in the same thing. Right? Although, definitely not as thorough as you did. And as we were talking about this, I have a book called by Ramon Campayo that I started reading some time ago. And to be honest, that didn’t go get far. It’s actually, I believe that the title the original title is in Spanish. I’m gonna butcher this because I know zero Spanish. Maybe. I don’t know. Oh, excellent. So all those soap operas that I watched in my mom paid off. Nice. Anyway, so in, like, maybe just first fifty pages of this book, I learned few techniques that I honestly use till this day. And now as I mean, as you mentioned that we’re gonna do this talk, I really have to question myself why I never went through this whole book.

Shawn: You forgot.

Nikola: Because, I mean, I see the value. Yeah. Go figure. Right? Mean, I see and I know the value of this. So I definitely I mean, this year, quote, unquote, New Year’s resolution was to finish all the books that I started but haven’t finished, which I usually don’t do, but, yeah, you know, life happened. And what I’m gonna do actually so I’m gonna ask you, have you so I know you mentioned that you have, but, you know, please go more into detail. So you mentioned that you’re kinda like remembering the sequence of the cards. But can you tell me, could you remember if I give you a sequence of totally random words? Do you have a system for that?

Shawn: Yeah. So there’s a technique called chaining, and you and I have talked about it earlier. You actually read me a list of words, and I think I asked you to give me two or three seconds between each word so that I could try to remember, you know, use this technique. And know, we went through I think it was was it 10 words?

Nikola: Yes. 10 words.

Shawn: And this is just from what was it? A half hour, forty minutes ago that we did this?

Nikola: Yes. And just just so that we do this, how are you gonna do it? Do you want me to read these words and then you’re gonna say how you kinda, like, remember them? Or are you just gonna go and tell me all those I’m gonna

Shawn: try to recite the words now from memory, even though I spent zero time trying to memorize it from when we first did this, you gave them to me. I repeated them right back immediately. And then I have spent no more time thinking about them. Right?

Nikola: Awesome. So Spotlight. Watch it.

Shawn: Yes. So, you know, if I get nine out of 10, we’re good. So the words were tractor, light bulb, stork, button, table, skier, gorilla, boat, bicycle, bottle. Awesome. Was that is that alright? Just

Nikola: a sec. Let me

Shawn: So see. I I’m sure it was. So so here’s the thing. There’s a very simple technique, and you can use this every day. This is something great you can just use even for memorizing memorizing a shopping list. And it’s such a simple technique. I promise you, you could learn this immediately. I was on vacation with my brother and his family last year, and we were sitting in the car waiting for our wives who were in the grocery store. And I told him that, and he didn’t believe me. So I said, okay. Why don’t we do it right now with just, like, five items? And he said, okay. And I told him the technique. I listed some random things. I was just looking out the window and I picked, you know, some stuff I saw. And then I actually gave him more things than I told him I was going to. And he remembered them all perfectly. And then weeks later, we were talking on the phone and I prompted him and he still remembered them all. And it’s great because, basically, people are bad. Humans are bad at remembering words and numbers. We’re amazing at remembering pictures. Actually, I just actually heard of a a study recently where I don’t know if it was a study. It’s more research. They would take some people and put them in a room, and they would flash a bunch of pictures on the screen for, like, less than a second each. Say it’s a hundred pictures. Then they could hand them a book or a slideshow. I don’t know how they did it, but they asked them to identify any pictures they had already seen. These they had less than a second per picture. Right? And they had, I think, something like an 80 or 90% accuracy of remembering whether they had seen it or not. So this technique is called chaining, and it’s ridiculously simple. All you need to do is each word leads into the next word. And the way that you do that is you make a series of pictures in your mind, each one linking to the previous. You if I tell you to remember milk, like for your grocery list, do not imagine a glass of milk. You will not remember a glass of milk if I tell you to do that. What you will remember is if I say milk and you imagine, you know, pouring milk in in someone’s face at work or someone slipping in milk or something. You need something. The more outrageous, the better. As a matter of fact, anything that provokes emotion, especially violent or disgusting or sexual images are much more likely to stick with you. So, you know, anything completely off the wall. So for this list that we did, the first word is tractor. And I remembered that here’s here’s another trick. All you have to remember is the first word. The first word will remind you of the second. The second will remind you of the third and so on. A little trick you can use to remember the first word is if you are talking to someone and you’re demonstrating this little trick, you can use them to remind you of the first one. So the first word is tractor, and I’m looking at Nikola on a video chat right now. And I just pictured a little tractor just mowing his hair. So then I picture I’m seeing the tractor in profile. And as it turns toward me, I see the front of the tractor is a giant light bulb. So the tractor, you know, tractor having a huge light bulb on the front is novel. The next word is stork. And what I picture is the light bulb is now basically the moon and flying in front of it in is this bird flapping holding a sack the way that, you know, in storybooks, they have, like, a baby in a, you know, in a piece of cloth. And then the next word was button. So I picture the stork is holding the cloth, and the top of the cloth is held together with a button, but the button flies off and the sack falls down. The next word is table. So I picture the white cloth sack falling flat and landing on a table and becoming a tablecloth. The next word is skier. So this the tablecloth obviously becomes a snowy hill with a skier going downhill at full speed. The next word is gorilla. So right at the bottom of the hill, I imagine a gorilla jumps out from behind a tree and trips the skier who goes flying. The next word is boat. So a gorilla throws on a sailor hat and jumps into the boat and sails into the water, which is, of course, ridiculous. The next word was bicycle. So I imagine the boat going really fast and running into the shore and running up on land and two wheels appearing at the bottom of it. Now the boat is competing in the Tour de France with the other bicyclists. The last word was bottle. So the gorilla in the boat bicycle smashes into a giant bottle. I can’t really explain why I thought of this more. It’s like a a celeb celebratory bottle of champagne at the end of the race or kind of like the bottle that you break on the bow of a ship during its naming. And all you have to do is that you don’t wanna use if you ever have to think of gorilla, don’t use what I use. You have to use something that you come up with. Just the first thing that pops in your mind that’s ridiculous and silly, come up with it and try it with a shopping list of, I’m not kidding, 20 items. You know? Don’t even you can try it start with 10. Don’t start with five. That would just be silly. Five you know, start with 10 or 20 at least, and you will be amazed at how well this works because that’s the way our brains operate.

Nikola: Yeah. Because so I read somewhere that our brains kinda, like, don’t care about normal stuff because if it would be always on, we would go crazy. So it’s looking for totally weird stuff that are not usual. So if you as you you basically thought of, a tractor running on my head, which kinda, like, makes no sense, that the brain kinda, like, captures that as an important thing because it’s different from usual patterns.

Shawn: Yep. So like, that’s why I said, if you try to remember a glass of milk to remember you need milk at the store, you are not going to remember milk. Although one silly thing, if you only need to buy five or six things, I’ve actually personally found, I haven’t learned this anywhere. It’s something I figured out myself. If I remember that I need six things, I’m much more likely to be able to go, okay. I remember four of them. What were the other two? Okay. And then figure out what the other two are. Whereas if I just say, okay. I need milk, bread, eggs, cream, whatever, then it’s very easy to get home and realize you forgot one of them. But somehow, I don’t know why knowing the number of things I need to remember will help me remember the missing items.

Nikola: Cool. Cool. This actually reminded me of when you said five things. I remember that one thing that I was doing in, you know, high school slash university, when you had to remember a stupid thing of stupid list kind of like, I would take the first letter of each item, and if it well, when it made some acronym that was cool, I remember that without a problem.

Shawn: Yeah. You know, mnemonics. Were you

Nikola: doing something like that?

Shawn: Well, yeah, we were taught that. Like, for example, to memorize the order of the planets and other things like that. What was the, I don’t know. Think there was there were a couple times we learned something about the way that, the order of operations in some algebra problem were done. But yeah. Because if you couldn’t remember that or or RoyGBIV. Right? Did you have RoyGBIV? Well No? You didn’t learn the the rainbow in English, but Roy G. Biv. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Those are the colors of the rainbow. Interesting. And it had that happens to spell Roy G. Biv, which doesn’t make sense, but at least it’s pronounceable. Whereas Yeah. Yeah. When I was in the grades of school where we learned about the planets, for example, they still considered Pluto to be a planet. So one of the techniques people use was my very my very excellent mother just served us nine pizzas, which is a nonsense sentence, but you can remember it. And the beginning of each letter is the beginning or the beginning letter of each word is the beginning letter of one of the, you know, nine planets at the time. So Awesome. Yeah. Those are common things. And another one that I learned from the book Moonwalking with Einstein, which I I found to be really interesting, especially with my background in card magic, is something called the person action object method. And it’s a really cool method because what it lets you do is instead of memorizing cards the hard way like I did, where I know exactly one deck in one order, and that took me, I don’t know, weeks to learn. And I also have to practice it every once in a while, or I mostly forget. I can pick it up really quickly when I go back to it, but I may need a little refreshing. But this lets you memorize an entire deck of cards way easier in way less time in a matter of minutes, and in some people’s cases, well under a minute. Some people can memorize cards, a whole deck of cards in under a minute and memorize many decks of cards, sometimes a dozen or more decks that they can then repeat back. And oh, before I get to that, I have to do I do have to mention the memory palace, which is one of the oldest memory tricks. And by oldest, I mean, you know, BC, like, many thousands of years ago. A memory palace is it’s a very simple concept. Imagine a place you know well. It could be your house, your school, the house you grew up in, your parents’ house. If you walk to the corner store and on the way there, you know, every driveway, every neighbor’s mailbox, every lawn, whatever, what just a series of steps in a journey, or a series of locations in a house. So for example, in your house, it may be you may imagine your mailbox, then you may imagine your driveway, then the steps to your porch, then your porch, then your front door, then the floor just inside your front door. And then, you know, going on so on and so forth. Like maybe if your stairs have a landing, you imagine the first set of stairs, the landing of the second set of stairs, and then the top floor, just divide a location that you know, and you could visually in your mind, walk through and recognize many details. All you need is anything like that. Then say you want to memorize something like a grocery list. You would start off with a mailbox. Let’s say you wanted to remember to get milk. Imagine you open your mailbox and just milk starts pouring out all over the place like a waterfall.

Nikola: You’re not gonna forget that. I’m gonna just Yes. Awesome. I’m just gonna stop you here. It would again be wrong to imagine a, like, a proper box of milk or whatever in there because that would be normal. Correct?

Shawn: Yeah. I mean, not that people get deliveries of milk in their mailbox. Yeah. But you don’t wanna imagine a carton of milk. You need it pouring out. You need Yep. Something crazy. Like, maybe in front of your house, if you have a storm sewer, like, just milk flowing down the road like rain. Then on your drive say you need eggs. Maybe the driveway, you’ve got eggs frying on the driveway, way, and maybe there are squirrels or some creatures trying to eat them. And then for bread, maybe the the stairs to your porch are made of bread. And as you’re trying to walk up them, you know, birds are eating them or it’s being toasted or something crazy like that. And if you wanted to get popcorn, imagine that when you opened a lot of places that I’m familiar with have two doors. You have the what we call the screen door, which has got screen or glass in it, it’s very thin. And then you’ve got the real wooden door with the, you know, with the deadbolts and all that. Maybe when you open the screen door, just kernels of popcorn come flying off and hitting you in the face. Right? And you go on like that, and you can memorize easily, you know, dozens or hundreds of things that way. So just going back to what we just said, you know, we did milk, eggs, bread, popcorn, and you’ll remember that for days. So this, person action object takes advantage of that. And, earlier, if you remember, I said a lot of these things are things you can do immediately. That memory palace, you can go use that right now. The chaining, you can go use that right now. Incidentally, there are two separate ways of remembering something, both of which give you the ability to remember things, not only remember them, but also in a specific order, which might be handy as well. So the person, action, object requires you to, in advance so here’s the hard part. Here’s what you have to actually prepare. A person, an action, and an object for every single card in the deck. So I have six cards in my hand. I have, I’ve been working on this myself. I’ve only gotten halfway through the deck, so I have a person action object for 26 out of the 52 cards. So here I have the queen of diamonds, which to me represents Bruce Lee swinging nunchucks. I have the jack of spades, which is Jack Black singing into a microphone. Then I have the ace of clubs, which is Arnold Schwarzenegger lifting a barbell. I have the five of spades, which is Jack Nicholson chopping a door, like breaking through a door with an axe. I have the king of diamonds, which is Steve Martin riding a horse. And I have the seven of hearts, which is Edward Snowden flushing a cell phone down the toilet. And notice that the actions have to take place on the object. Like, I couldn’t imagine Nicolas running. I mean, maybe if I imagine him running on something, but it really helps to have the action and the and the object you know, the the object being acted upon. So now that I’ve named these, the nice thing about person action object is it allows you to memorize three cards with one picture. So I’m gonna go through, and the cards are in a semi order. They’re only six, so it’s not a big trick. This is just for demonstration purposes only. If I lay out three cards here, I’ve got seven of hearts, queen of diamonds, five of spades. So if I wanted to remember that, I would remember Edward Snowden swinging a door. Right? I’m taking Edward Snowden from my seven of hearts, which is Edward Snowden flushing a cell phone down the toilet. I remember swinging from my queen of diamonds, which is Bruce Lee swinging nunchucks. And I take the object door from my five of spades, which is Jack Nicholson chopping a door. Right? So I have Edward Snowden swinging a door. So I need to put him somewhere. I’ll put him, you know, somewhere in my memory palace. And I picture him. He’s got, like, a door on a chain, and he’s swinging it. And, you know, NSA agents are coming to try to arrest him. They’re holding handcuffs, he’s swinging a door around him to keep them away. K? That’s ridiculous. I can remember that. Next one, I got king of diamonds, ace of clubs, jack of spades. So king of diamonds is Steve Martin riding a horse. I won’t go through them all again. So these three cards in order would be Steve Martin lifting a microphone. Okay. So Steve Martin is a well known comedian, and I can picture him lying on stage with a giant microphone that’s, like, crushing him, he’s trying to lift it. And, you know, he’s got balloon animals around him, and the audience is laughing or something. Alright. So going with what I just said, I’ve got Edward Snowden singing a door swinging a door. So that would obviously be the seven of hearts, queen of diamonds, five of spades. So that’s seven of hearts, queen of diamonds, five of spades. Yes. That is correct. And then the next one, I had Steve Martin lifting a microphone. So that would be king of diamonds, king of clubs, jack of spades. So king of diamonds, ace of clubs. Oh, ace of clubs. I actually made a mistake. I said king of clubs, didn’t I? The ace of clubs. So I did make one mistake there, but I’m still practicing this. But you can still see I got five out of six with two images, and that’s all I needed. I I was trying this out last night, and I actually did the full 26 cards, and I got 23 out of 26 correct. So not bad for just starting. And, you know, you can easily see there are 52 cards in a deck, but it would only take you 18 places in your memory palace to memorize an entire deck of cards.

Nikola: Awesome. Awesome. A thought that I had when you said the grocery list, right, and that you said you’re gonna use your home as a memory palace, then I figured out, so let’s say that a lot of times when you go shopping for, you know, groceries, a lot of times you buy, let’s say, the same things. Right? And, for example, you have someone coming over, then you have similar but yet different kind of set of things. And then a thought came, and would it be useful to, you know, store in your memory palace in a box where in on top of that box, says, I don’t know, the name of your movie, for example. And immediately, you would know that in this drawer, you have a stack of things well, a movie, so to speak, for when you have normal grocery shopping. Would this be, you know, useful or not?

Shawn: I don’t know. I think it’s if it’s not something that you can mentally walk through, then it might be difficult. So one thing about a memory palace is that you can’t if you have a great memory palace, say it’s your house and say you know the location of shelves and drawers and, you know, countertops and you have a couch with three cushions which you can each use for something an individual item. Say you can store hundreds of things in your house. That doesn’t mean that you only have that one memory palace because you can’t reuse the same memory palace to remember a bunch of different things simultaneously. It’ll become confusing. So you actually need separate memory palaces for separate things. Or if you can come up with 50 things in just your bedroom, you can use just your bedroom to remember one set of things and maybe just your kitchen to remember another. So you will need to come up with additional memory palaces. So another interesting thing, if you memorize something using any kind of trick and you go over it enough times, you’ll actually remember it and forget the trick. Here’s so there’s a book called the memory book. Was written a long time ago, probably like in the sixties or seventies by the name Harry Loraine. And one thing I learned from there is that every single memory technique that you use is only a way to trick your brain into actually thinking about the thing you’re trying to remember. Because I’ll give you the perfect example that every single person can identify with. You meet someone, they say, hi, my name is blah, blah, blah. And two seconds later, you don’t know their name. Now you would say, many people would say, I forgot their name or I can’t remember their name. That’s incorrect. You never knew their name because you never bothered to remember it. You never bothered to put any thought into it. But if you meet someone and they say their name is Dawn and you imagine you look at their face and you see, like, maybe their hair is, you know, a certain color and you imagine the sun coming up behind it. You’re gonna remember their name is Dawn. But here’s the thing. Once you’ve remember use that trick once or twice, you’re gonna remember their name is Dawn. You’re not even gonna picture the image anymore. It’s just the fact that you’re investing any mental power into remembering something that actually makes you remember it. All these tricks are just ways of tricking you into thinking, really.

Nikola: Awesome. So basically, we kind of like a long way of saying we’re not using our potential in terms of we’re not doing nowhere near how what we could be doing.

Shawn: Yeah. And and by I don’t mean any of that crazy, you know, we use 10% of our brain stuff because that’s all, you know, bull. But it’s very important to note, and I learned this from Moonwalking with Einstein, is no correlation between intelligence and memory ability. If you train your memory, you will be amazing at it. If you are below average IQ or above average IQ, it does not matter because these are just techniques. It’s like, you know, depending on no matter what your IQ is, if you lift weights, will become stronger. If you use memory techniques and you actually train your brain and trust your brain, you’ll get better memorizing things. And that’s just a fact.

Nikola: This is awesome. And this goes along with kinda like something that I live by, and that’s always, always, always try to out outwork. I mean, everybody, but the one that you should be outworking is yourself from yesterday. And that’s good. Everywhere where you can, let’s say, excel by doing more work, that’s good. You don’t need you know, you don’t like, you said the IQ. Screw that. I mean, honestly, so what? He has, you know, one sixty IQ. But if you’re willing to put in twenty hours a week more than that person, sooner or later, you will surpass him. But this you know?

Shawn: Yeah. There’s a author many people are familiar with named Malcolm Gladwell who writes a bunch of really interesting books on sociology type stuff. And one of them is called Outliers. And there’s this concept in our culture and probably in many cultures that there are some people, you know, like I mentioned Arnold Schwarzenegger before, people often will refer to Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, or certain people who have become very successful as, oh, there’s something about them. Let me let me study their life. Like, look, Warren Buffett had a paper route when he was young. He was industrious, blah blah blah. And they think that there’s something about some people that they’re just destined for greatness. Because without anyone teaching them, without any pressure or, you know, secret tricks, they were internally driven to become the hero that we see them to be. And this book lays out very clearly that that is simply not true. And one of the examples given was that if you take students of the violin who are all new and you evaluate them, a professional violin teacher evaluates their abilities, they can be ranked into those who have more natural talent and those who have less natural talent. But if you fast forward a couple years and you look at the ones that have put in less work into their practice and those who have put more work into their practice, it is it is absolutely impossible for the ones with talent to be anywhere near as good as the ones who practice more unless those with the talent also practiced. So the the initial talent, the initial discouragement of, oh, I tried this new thing and it was hard and the guy next to me, you know, was better at it than I am. I guess it’s not for me. That’s that’s just all self defeating, and it’s really harmful. What’s true is that if you practice, you’ll become good.

Nikola: Awesome. Like, one of my favorite quotes that I have on my, like, the blog is hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. Because let’s face it, if you have two people that are the same and they work the same, but the other one was, let’s say, talented a bit more, let’s face it. He’s always gonna be number one. But, hey, if you work, you’re always gonna be at least number two, and that’s way more than most people want to do. So work hard people.

Shawn: Yeah, and actually this reminds me of the last thing I wanna throw in. I don’t wanna go too long on this, belabor this, because it’s not about memory specifically, but I was watching a a BBC documentary, several years ago, and the psychologist was saying one of the worst things you can possibly say to a child is you’re so clever. So imagine your child comes home and they’ve won the spelling bee or they got good grades or whatever they were. They made the honor roll. If you say, wow, you’re really smart. Are damaging that child. What you need to tell them is, wow, you must have worked really hard because and this has been proven in research. This isn’t just, you know, feel good stuff. If you tell a kid, wow, you’re really smart. Then they come upon a problem that they have trouble with. They are they’re supposed to be smart. This is supposed to be easy for them. So when it’s not easy, they get discouraged and they quit. But if you tell someone, oh, you must have worked really hard. Then when they come in on a challenge, they just work harder. And so you have some people that were conditioned to think, I’m smart, things come naturally and easy to me, and the things that don’t come naturally and easy to me, either I am not as smart as people think I am, and I should be ashamed and embarrassed and hide it from everybody and let my grades slip and be a disappointment to my parents who are gonna not love me anymore or, you know, judge me more cruel. All this is in their head, of course. That’s not real. Or you have people who realize that there’s a correlation between work and accomplishment. So just keep that in mind for yourself. And, you know, if you have any, children, if you’re in a position to teach or mentor anybody, try to keep that in mind because people are way too hard on themselves. People seem to think that they should be better faster because they’re comparing what they know to what they think other people know. And they way blow out of proportion what how much smarter than them others are. And they undervalue their own value.

Nikola: Yeah. Awesome. Actually, the name of the researcher that made this, let’s say, thinking popular, if I’m not mistaken, is Carol Dweck. Her book is, called Mindset. She also has a TED talk on this topic. I mean, honestly, you summarized it perfectly. And, yeah, this is something that I’m, you know, really working with with my kids to let them know that they made this thing good just because they tried hard or long to do it.

Shawn: Yep. And I I my son, I also try to make sure I choose my words carefully in such a way to encourage him in the same way because, you know, he is really smart and things do come naturally to him, which is a huge disadvantage in some ways because if he falls into the mindset that things come easy to him, then when he has a real challenge, he’s gonna, you know, have a major emotional problem to deal with and, you know, just don’t want that. Yep. So great. Carol Dweck, Mindset is the book. I just looked it up when you mentioned it. And you know what? I have heard of her. Actually, someone else recommended her to me in the book Mindset, a month or two ago. So I should maybe go back and take a look at that.

Nikola: Yeah. I still haven’t read it. I have it, an actual copy. I have a lot as you know, I have a lot of Audible books, but this one, I got, the hard copy as well. And, of course, I mean, if people want the gist of it, they just got it. Or if they want more from the author, they can see her TED Talk.

Shawn: Yeah. And, you know, a last little mnemonic thing. If you’re trying to remember the name of the person, but mindset, her name is Carol Dweck. So maybe you start with Carol, and you imagine, like, a bunch of kids singing a Christmas carol. And you know, Dweck, I don’t really have a good trick for that but

Nikola: Deck, deck of cards, Dweck deck.

Shawn: Yeah, it could be close. Or mindset, maybe you picture like someone has a set of something like on a shelf there are three or four of them in there, you have minds, like maybe some brains in jars, like mindset. If you can remember enough to Google Carol mindset or even Carol mind, you’ll probably find it. So do these little things and associate things with pictures, and you will remember more easily anyway. Awesome. Alright. So thanks, Nicolas. Good show. Any last remarks?

Nikola: Thank you, Shawn. It was a great talk. One thing that just popped in my mind is, okay. All this memory improvement, awesome. Right? Have you tried improving your reading speed? If you have, we’re gonna definitely do another show because we don’t wanna drag this one, but I’m just curious.

Shawn: No. I’ve read about it, I’ve heard mixed things about whether or not it’s actually a real thing and beneficial, so I think that might be a topic for another discussion.

Nikola: Awesome. Let’s do it. Till then, see you guys.

Shawn: Bye bye. Bye bye. Thank you for listening to the DevThink podcast. To reach us for feedback, show suggestions, or any other comments, email us at [email protected].

TL;DR

I started using a simple rule: rate 1–10 without 7.

Because 7 (for me) usually means one of these:

• meh
• I’m being polite
• I don’t want to think too hard about it
• I don’t want to make a decision right now
• I’m thinking of staying home instead of seeing a doc. Will check in with myself tomorrow…
• …

So, now I force myself to choose:

• 6 => not so great actually (wouldn’t recommend / wouldn’t go to the doc)
• 8+ => I genuinely liked it (would recommend / would go see a doc today)

This actually helps me make a decision instead of shrugging it off with a 7 🤷‍♂️

Anyone else using a rating/feedback "trick" like this?

!TL;DR

If someone asks you to rate something on a scale from 1 to 10, you pretty much know right off the bat if it’s something like a 1 or a 2, and if it’s 9 or even a 10.

But, what do you usually do when you’re like:

Well, not bad.
Not great.
Not sure.
Not ready to hurt their feelings…
Let’s just go with … 7

Newer generations might just say:

you know, 67 🤷‍♂️

But, I digress.

The fact is, this shows up everywhere:

• "How was the restaurant?" — 7
• "How was the talk?" — 7
• "How’s the new feature?" — 7
• "How would you rate this candidate we just interviewed?" – 7
• "How do you feel about your own work this week?" …also, 7

If you’ve ever answered with a 7, you’re not alone. Whenever I don’t want to make a decision, I’d say 7. But here’s the thing – most of the time, 7 doesn’t mean "good".

It means: "I don’t want to think too hard about this right now."

So here’s a simple trick that makes your ratings way more useful: rate on a 1–10 scale… but pretend there’s no 7.

That’s it. Remove 7 as an option. Uninstall it from your OS (I know, references are cringe 😬).

Because 7 is the default. It’s what we say when we’re uncertain, polite, rushed, or trying not to offend.

If there’s no 7, you’re forced to choose:

• 6 → "Not so great actually"
• 8+ → "Oh yeah, I genuinely liked this"

And that single "restriction" helps you in actually making a decision faster.

Why this works (and why 7 is sneaky)

A 1–10 scale looks precise, but we don’t treat it that way.

In practice, most people use it like this:

• 1–4: bad
• 5–6: meh
• 7: safe meh, but with a smile 🙂
• 8–10: good / great

So 7 becomes a dumping ground for anything we can’t be bothered to classify.

Removing it forces you to answer one key question:

Would I recommend this… or would I warn someone?

If you lean "recommend", you’re probably at 8+.
If you hesitate, it’s probably a 6.

Conclusion / Recap

• 7 is usually a placeholder for uncertainty
• Pretend there’s no 7 on a 1–10 scale
  • Choose 6 if it’s not actually great
  • Choose 8+ if you truly liked it

And voilà: your ratings stop being polite noise… and start being honest (and sometimes brutal) signal.

Next time someone asks "How was it?" and your brain reaches for 7, just smile and say:

"Well, from 1-10 and if 7 isn’t allowed, then…"

Hope this tip serves you well ✌️

Sure, with all the AI tools we’ve become more productive (or so they say), but there are some old and battle tested techniques that will help you if you’ve ever ended a workday thinking "I was busy all day… but what did I actually do?".

In this blog post I’ll summarize the simple productivity systems that kept me sane as a dev:

• writing stuff down on paper (yes, really)
• keeping a limited "Doing" list (Kanban)
• working in short focused sprints (Pomodoro)
• tracking where time actually goes (RescueTime),
• building habits with discipline instead of waiting for "motivation"

🎧 If you fancy an audio version, feel free to listen to this DevThink episode: https://devth.ink/e002_productivity/.

TL;DR

• Pen + paper still wins for planning, because it’s fast, flexible, and doesn’t require yet another app
• Personal Kanban works because it forces you to limit WIP (work in progress) and gives you a visible "Done" list
• Pomodoro is stupid-simple… which is exactly why it works. Do a real one (no email, no Slack, no calls during those 25 minutes), then do eight in a day and see your productivity skyrocket
• Tracking (even lightly) is a clear way of knowing "where did my day go?". Use a free app like RescueTime to learn exactly where your time went
• Habits > inspiration. Show up, do the work, repeat.

!TL;DR

Why paper beats "yet another productivity app"

In the podcast, Shawn and I tried digital systems. Both of us still come back to paper for day planning.

Not because apps are bad, but because:

• we already spend our whole day typing,
• paper is offline and distraction-free,
• and a notebook can be a calendar, journal, TODO list, idea dump… whatever you need today

Shawn also explains the Bullet Journal approach (start with a blank notebook + table of contents and make it yours), while I share the more structured BestSelf "Self Journal" format (3-month goals, daily prompts, gratitude, wins, lessons learned, etc.).

Personal Kanban (and the magic of limiting "Doing")

If you only take one thing away, take this:

Your "Doing" list must be limited.

Kanban’s superpower is that you can’t keep dumping work into the "Doing" column. You move something to "Done" first. That’s how you stop feeling like you’re doing 20 things and finishing zero.

Bonus: at the end of the week, the "Done" column is a reality check that you did get work done — even if it didn’t feel like it.

The tool I use for this is a free app called KanbanFlow.

Index cards

Shawn shared one technique that works surprisingly well for him:

• grab index cards,
• write one task per card,
• clip them together.

Now you can physically sort and prioritize your tasks on your desk like a tiny human Kanban board.

Getting Things Done (GTD)

We touch on Getting Things Done system by David Allen and the big psychological idea behind it:

• If your brain thinks you’ll forget something, it keeps reminding you
• That’s why you’re thinking about work at 2AM
• A single trusted place to capture tasks calms that down

Even a simple list + calendar can reduce that background anxiety.

"When in doubt, throw it out"

I bring up a tip from Brian Tracy (and we drift into minimalism for a moment):

If something has been sitting on your list/bookmarks/todo pile for six months, there’s a decent chance you’ll never do it.

Keeping "aspirational" tasks around can become emotional debt. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is delete the thing and move on.

Pomodoro: the simplest focus tool that still punches above its weight

Pomodoro is basically:

1. work for 25 minutes (no distractions),
2. break for 5,
3. repeat,
4. after 4 cycles, take a longer break of 30 minutes

And the key rule: if you break focus (check email, respond to a Slack message, answer the call), that Pomodoro doesn’t count.

My favorite challenge from the episode:

Try to complete 8 real Pomodoros in a day.
Do that for a month, and after it feel free to thank me for this newfound productivity.

Tracking your time

Shawn shares a neat approach: a script that pops up every so often and forces you to write what you’re doing.

I share my "overly detailed" habit of logging work in Evernote (nowadays I use simple Google doc), and why something like Shawn’s approach can be even better — especially for long debugging sessions where progress is slow but the work is real.

We also talk about RescueTime (a tool that tracks app/site usage) and the very honest moment when it tells you you spent 10 hours on Facebook. Ouch.

Sharpening your axe (aka: learning counts as work)

This is a topic we both care about:

If you’re spending extra time outside work, don’t just do more of the same work.
Use that energy to improve — learn, explore, build side projects, read, sharpen your skills.

That helps you and your team long-term.

Habits: do a 30-day challenge, don’t wait for motivation

We wrap up with something I love:

• do it for 30 days,
• make it small (even one Pomodoro),
• and let it become a routine.

And the quote that basically sums up the whole episode:

Inspiration is for amateurs. Pros show up and do the work.

Full transcript

Below is the full transcript, in case you wanna throw it into an LLM or something 🙂

Shawn: Alright. Hello. And welcome back to the DevThink podcast with Shawn and Nikola. Today, we are here
to talk about some organizational and time management techniques that have helped us as developers
to get through the week without feeling like we’ve done absolutely nothing.

Nikola: Exactly. Welcome, guys.

Shawn: Yeah. So I think we’ll start. We’ll talk a bit about the paper version of things such as the the
Bullet Journal, Self Journal. And actually, Nikola, I think you and I have probably both
experimented. We haven’t talked about this prior to the podcast, but we’ve probably experimented
with online or web based systems, and we have both, separately decided on using an actual pen and
paper method. Is there anything you, wanna say about the online versions, why they didn’t work out
for you?

Nikola: Okay. So actually, actually, here’s the thing. The online versions, I still use one till this day.
It’s called, kanbanflow.com. So, so no affiliation as with, like, probably everything.
kanbanflow.com. It’s kinda like a Kanban board, but the only reason why I still kinda use it is that
it has an integrated Pomodoro timer, which we’ll say more about during this show. And that’s why I
kinda, like, still use it for the tasks where I time them. But, yes, to answer the question why I
still use my pen and paper for planning out my day is, I guess that maybe the reason is because I
type so much. I mean, we both type like 90% of our time is that I still like to have a pen, have a
paper, write something in it because know, it’s kinda like becoming a lost lost art kind of. How
how’s the reason with you? And I’ll I’ll to add to this, this is something that I’ve been doing, you
know, those kinda like to do lists ever since I can remember, you know, like, I would say, you know,
in your version, like middle school, you know? And I love it since.

Shawn: Yeah. I like the the pen and paper tactile feedback. It’s something that you can do offline. And I
feel like at the end of the day, I also the thing is it’s very versatile. Right? So my notebook is a
journal and a to do list and a calendar and, you know, whatever you want it to be. It can be your
your food journal. It can be your weight loss guide. It can be, you know, your appointment book. And
just taking that with a pen and paper, with a computer screen off, and just doing things at the end
of the day, I think is very helpful. And since you did mention Kanban, and we didn’t really explain
it, you can just look up Kanban online. It’s a very simple concept that comes from the manufacturing
philosophies from Japan. And the short version is, instead of having a single to do list, you have
at least you divide the list into maybe three columns. The first column is the stuff to do. The
second would be doing, and the third would be done. And the very important thing, the magic bullet
here in Kanban is that doing box is limited. You can only have a set number of things. Maybe it’s
two. Maybe it’s three. Maybe if you have a developer team of 20 people, maybe it’s five. But nothing
is allowed to be put into into the doing column until something else is moved out into the done
column. And that’s the basic short version of it. You can make it a lot more complicated, have a for
example, in software, you can have a QA column. It can go from the doing to the QA column or
whatever. And it’s also important to have the done column because at the end of the week or the end
of the month, if you do this, my wife has one on the wall, it’s just overwhelming. You have a never
ending task list of things to do. You always feel like you were super busy all day, all week, and
you’ve done nothing. And you can look back at that done column, and you can actually see, yes, you
have done quite a bit. And you only clear them off when you have to, when you need room. So I just
wanted to mention that, because Kanban is a really great just you could do it for yourself. If your
company doesn’t buy into it, if your team doesn’t buy into it, you know, just do it yourself. You
can use that. You can use Trello, trello,.com, which is a nice simple Kanban flow as well. And,
yeah, give it a try.

Nikola: Yeah. There’s actually so we’re gonna probably leave the link in the description because I can’t
remember, you know, the actual name of the book. I think it’s personal Kanban or something like
that. I didn’t read it whole. I’ve lit I know, kinda like listed through it. I read few chapters. It
was good, but basically, as you said it, that’s the gist of it. So yeah.

Shawn: Yeah. Kanban is is really helpful. So I guess I’ll just briefly mention the Bullet Journal. I’m
actually not a an expert on the Bullet Journal. I do use, I guess, a modified version of it, which I
guess pretty much everyone who uses the Bullet Journal does. It’s just bulletjournal.com. You can
use any notebook you want. And you have, you know, a table of contents. That’s very important in the
beginning. And then depending on how strictly you follow it or how you adapt it, you have a section
for your calendar, for goals for like a week or a month. Then you have, like, a weekly spread, which
I actually don’t do. And another thing I don’t do that many do is they decorate their Kanbanes. They
use washi paper. They use all kinds of different color markers to make everything pretty. But, Just
go check it out. They’re a bunch of YouTube videos, and I don’t really want to go into detail
describing it because there are a thousand ways to do it, and you just have to make it your own. And
that’s the thing I like about it. You can just make it your own. The important thing to me is having
the table of contents. And also, you start with a blank notebook. Any blank notebook. It could be a
molyscheme. Could be they sell one. Page three things. You need page numbers. You need a blank
notebook with a table of contents. And then everything you do, you write on the next available page.
It’s not like a premade book where, okay, if I wanna put a journal entry, I have to turn to page 47
because that’s where the journal section starts. Or if I wanna write something on my, you know,
calendar for the week, I have to flip over to the this week in the calendar. That’s what the table
of contents is for. If one page has a recipe and the next page has a journal entry and the next page
has your spread from Monday through Friday for next week, that’s totally fine. That’s why you have
the table of contents. You don’t you don’t waste pages, and you can start it any day. You could
start it March 27, and you’re good to go.

Nikola: Cool. Okay. Sounds nice. And sounds like way more flexible than the one that I use. The one that I
use is, called Self Journal. I honestly don’t know the exact website, you know, I bet that if you
just Google Self Journal, you know, it will pop up. Actually oh, I see it’s, bestself.co. So
bestself.co. Here’s the thing. This one is kinda like specific in terms of its three months, of
trying to, let’s say, reach a certain goal. But, also, you can start it any day that you like.
Although, to be honest, it’s very it would be way better if you it’s actually kinda, like, set that
way that it kinda, like, makes you start on Monday because, you know, it has week note notes in it.
And how it actually works is you have your kinda, like, from 6AM to 9PM time schedule that you can
put in, then it has your kinda like notes, ideas. And something that’s kind of very important here
is that you also have few questions. And this is so you have a question, for example, this morning,
I’m grateful for, and you have to list three things. I’m not going to go into the details and and,
I’m not going to breach into the so called woo-woo kind of, you know, new age, quote, unquote, BS.
But, honestly, you know, like, just try it, and you’ll see if this helps you in any way. Also, have,
on every kinda like a day page, you have to write your own goal. What your goal is? Well, your goal
is that thing which you kinda like set that you’re gonna achieve in this try three months. Right?
Why it’s important to write it every day? Well, because, you know, if you keep it in your
subconscious, then also going into that woo-woo BS, it will you will constantly have your mind on
this, you know, goal that you wanna achieve. And then below it, you have your today’s targets, which
you kinda like list three targets or whatever amount of targets if you’re now very high achiever.
You list your targets for this date that will help you come next to that end goal that you wanna
achieve. Then you have few, you know, quotes, which is kinda nice. Actually, I’m gonna read you the
one from today. Know what you want, work to get it, then value it once you have it. It was by Nora
Roberts. Then in the evening, that’s also important. So, basically, you kinda like use it the whole
day. And in the evening, you list the lessons learned, wins, even, you know, like, even the small
ones, you know, I took out the trash. It’s important to as you basically going back to what you said
looking at the end of the week it’s very important to also see what you did and not just always look
at the stuff that you always have things to do because honestly if you’re let’s say, an achiever and
you you are a go getter, then you will always, always, always have stuff that you, you know, have to
do or want to do. And also, like, finally, you have the tonight I am grateful for, where you also
list three things that you’re grateful for. And they also have this thing kind of like, how you
called it, week recaps, where you write, how your week went and stuff like that like like that. To
this, I kinda like added one more thing to this where I do one thing from the book called the
miracle morning. I don’t know. You probably haven’t mentioned this before, but I did I believe I
mentioned this book to you. And, you know, I’m not sure, but you’ll tell me you kinda like didn’t
like it, but I like it. And what I take from it is the so called SABRS. So SABRS is an acronym for,
silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, read, and scribe. And to not go too deep into it,
like, s is for silence, and honestly, I’m not very good about it. I only do one minute of quote
unquote meditation. I know everybody is someone who’s doing the meditation will laugh, but, you
know, gotta start somewhere. A is for affirmations. Again, breaching into the, you know, Google
stuff. I have my list of affirmations that I read to myself. Am I crazy or not? Let’s just not go
into it. I think that it may help you, you know, but I’m gonna keep this one for myself. V is for
visualization. So you have your goal. Right? And if you try to visualize yourself I’m not gonna go,
you know, run the burn on people and say, you know, you just have to visualize it and what it will
manifest. No. Not none of those none of that kinda, like, bullshit. Oh, I don’t know if we’re
supposed to say bullshit here, but, you know, I guess we can do whatever we want because it’s our
podcast. And, to be honest, you know, you have to work in the end, you have to work on it. And
that’s just, you know, we we are both wired on it. We are gonna, I guess, speak more about it and
how we do stuff, but not to try to drag this one way longer. The e is for exercise. I honestly do
just you know, if I can, go for a walk for, ten minutes in the morning and listen to my Audible,
which I love, by the way. R is for read. I try to read every morning, at least ten minutes of
something, you know, I try to make it positive and whatnot, because during the day, I read all the
stuff that I read is concerned, with software development. So this in the morning kind of stuff,
it’s something that’s not related to software development, but, you know, may maybe a book, you
know, whatever. And then finally, describe part is where I reflect on my day before. So, literally,
I have my action. So for this, I have my other book because so this one this Self Journal is just,
you know, as I said, for three months, and I have my totally blank, very big a four kinda big,
journal where I write things that happened for the next past day. Why? Because, well, I want to have
it as I want to put as much stuff in it because then it’s very, very I found it to be very rewarding
to go back and reread the stuff that I wrote, let’s say, two year I actually have entries that go
way back like two years ago. And that’s kind of very rewarding to go back and read what you were
thinking at that time, what were your struggles at the time, …. Anyway, not to, you know, prolong
this answer too much, but yeah, I’m currently I’m sticking with this self, best self Self Journal.

Shawn: Right. So, and just to clarify it, I, I didn’t like the book, not because I had a problem with the
message, but because the entire book came across as a giant infomercial for itself. So it was
whatever. A couple hundred, three hundred pages, whatever. And from the amount that I read, it seems
like it could be about 10% of its length and just tell you what it wants to tell you, instead of
every other paragraph telling you how great what they’re telling you is going to be for you, and how
exciting and awesome it It’s like there’s a hard sell in the book you’re already reading. So that
frustrated me. And then to finish off the paper thing, there’s also a fun little thing called I’ve
seen it referred to as the hipster PDA. And all that is is you get a stack of index cards and a
binder clip that you may have seen as one of those typical, you know, black triangle things. And you
just put them in the clip. That’s it. That’s the entire thing. And then on each one, you can write a
task. And what’s really cool about that is when you sit down at your desk, you just came back from
lunch or you just came back to work after on on Monday after the weekend off or whatever. You came
back from a meeting. You’re completely out of the zone. You have no idea what you should be spending
your time on. Boom. You take out your index cards. You look at them. They’re physical items you can
move around, put on your desk, reorder, you know, make notes on. And it’s really nice because then
you can look at that and say, okay. This is the one I should probably be spending my time on now.
And I really enjoy doing that. As a matter of fact, I started doing that again recently. I didn’t
have any index cards with me, I did have a deck of cards, of actual playing cards. And so I took a
marker, and I wrote on the cards, like, on the borders, on the edge, just tasks. And I was able to
sit down multiple times throughout the last couple weeks, pull them out, reorder them, prioritize
them, group them by ones that I’m gonna do in the near future, ones that I should be doing today,
ones that I would still like to do, but they’re just not gonna be anytime, anytime soon. And that
helps you schedule things on your calendar. Maybe I know I don’t have time for this now, but I’ll
schedule it every Tuesday at 10:30AM and leave it there until it’s done, which is actually,
something that I just did last week. I filled up my calendar with a bunch of things from my cards,
and I schedule them as recurring to happen every single week. And I know they’re not gonna get done
every time, but they can stay on there until they’re done or I decide they’re no longer necessary.
And that is a good way. All of these things, by the way, psychologically, there’s a book called
Getting Things Done by David Allen, which I recommend everyone at least take a look at and skim. I’m
sure actually, probably everyone listening to this has probably read it or heard about it. The
general idea is that you are not allowed to have many sources of to do lists. You can’t have
everything in your email inbox, plus a bunch of post notes on your fridge, plus, you know,
handwritten notes in your pocket, plus voice mail messages. You need to put every single thing that
comes into your life into one place, whether it’s an electronic system or paper, doesn’t matter, but
only in one place. And then it gets processed. It gets put onto a you do you do it if it’s less than
two minutes. You delegate it if you can’t if you if you can delegate it, or you schedule it, put it
on your calendar or something. And the general idea is that if you have anxiety because you have too
many things that you know you need to do and you know you haven’t been doing them, your mind,
because it’s uneasy with that, is going to keep bringing them into your into your thoughts. And
that’s why you can’t fall asleep at night. Because you’re laying there, and you can’t fall asleep
because you’re thinking about the 50 things you didn’t do. If you take those 50 things, write them
down, put them on a calendar, say, okay. I’ll do this one next Tuesday. I’ll do this one tomorrow
night at, you know, 08:00. I’ll do this one noon. Once your brain knows they are handled, even
though you’ve done nothing but schedule them, your brain knows when your calendar alert comes up,
it’s gonna be you’re gonna be reminded at the right time. It’s not gonna slip away, and you’re not
gonna suddenly, you know, show up at the airport without having bought your tickets or whatever.
You’re able to sleep. So, yeah, that’s just you know, I wanted to mention GTD, so that’s all I have
to say about that for the moment. Anything else on calendars and paper and pen, or should we move on
to some of the day to day techniques?

Nikola: Actually, yeah, I remembered one thing now as you were saying about GTD. And if you like, this is a
very good tip from Brian Tracy. I’m gonna mention his I quote, unquote read why I said, quote,
unquote, because I listened to, the audible version of the time management made simple by Brian
Tracy. And that’s kinda like a book, where he has all the stuff that he kinda like wrote about time
management condensed into one, let’s say, book. And it’s very good. Like, this is the book, that I
reread or re listened most amount of time. Because here’s the thing, I believe that we need, you
know, to hear these things over and over again just because, you know, if you heard it one time and
you think it’s great, but then you try it and maybe you kinda, like, forget it, it’s good to be
reminded about it. And one thing that just, you reminded me of is so you have your stack of, you
know, tasks or whatever, or you as you said, you file stuff in. And then if after six months, you go
in and you revisit that list, and if for example some, you know, or maybe this is okay, this is an
awesome, example. I have bookmarks. Right? I have so many bookmarks that I need to kind of like
look, But then again, if you see that some bookmarks or some files that you need to kinda like look
into or read through are still there after six months, probably you should just toss it away. He has
this cool thing. When in doubt, throw it out. And it’s actually honestly true because if you’re if
you haven’t looked at it in six months, probably, you know, it’s not worth your time.

Shawn: You know, that’s not only true for I don’t wanna take the podcast on a whole left turn, but real
quick note about minimalism, which you’ve been to my house. I am not a minimalist by any stretch.
But I have acquired multiple books on minimalism, which is ironic. And one of them is called The Joy
of Less. And the author says that you should only have things in your home if you either believe
them to be useful or sorry, know them to be useful or believe them to be beautiful. And know them to
be useful. It means you have to use them. If you have some, you know, implement in your kitchen and
you never use it, I mean, probably three or six months is a good amount of time. You should get rid
of it and believe it to be beautiful means you not only like it, but you have to have it on display.
So if you have, like, an old thing that your grandmother left you that, you know, some dishware or a
a picture that a painting, if you don’t have it hanging up for everyone to see, it needs to go. So
you decide. Do you really need it in your life? Do you really need to pay money to store it, to
climate control it, to clean it, to even just the space it’s taking away from you being able to move
around in your home and be comfortable and spend time with the things and people that you want to
spend time with. Is it really worth all the overhead? And the answer is no. And the same thing with
all these aspirational things we buy. How many people listening right now have a guitar or some
other musical instrument that they bought to learn, and it’s been sitting untouched for more than a
year? I know I just struck a chord with a lot of people. Or, you know, a juggling set or a set of
skis, or you know

Nikola: Set of exercise equipment.

Shawn: These are these are called aspirational items. Like, and I’ll tie us back into our our actual
podcast topic in a second. These are what’s called aspirational items. Every time you look at it,
you say, if I get rid of that guitar, then I will not end up ever end up being a guitar player, and
I want to be a guitar player. I see myself as someone who I would like to be a guitar player. And by
getting rid of this, by selling it, put it on Craigslist, not only am I giving up on that dream, but
I’m also now officially a failure. As long as I keep it, I might get to it one day. But if I get rid
of it, I’m admitting to myself and the world that I’m not capable or I’m not good enough or
whatever. And that’s just not true. That’s just a mental block that you’d have to get to. And so, to
bring it back around in a circle to us, as a developer, we all have ideas for side projects and
businesses we wanna start, and features we wanna add to our company’s product that are gonna get us
recognition and make our coworkers love us or some process that we wanna automate. And we have so
many of these ideas to the point that it becomes crippling when you look at the list because you
realize you haven’t done it, you don’t have time for it, and you’re probably never going to do it.
So now you feel like a loser just because you were actually trying to improve the world. You know,
you came up with these ideas. You’re like, wow. That would be great. That would be great. That would
be great. And then every time you look at it, it’s another reminder that you didn’t do it yet. And I
think you gotta throw the stuff away after a while. You know? I mean, I know you wanna contribute to
that open source project. I know you want to completely, replace this the, proprietary software at
work that you hate because, you know, it’s written in Java and you hate Java, or because, you know,
you hate the configuration tool, or you would just love to rewrite and make. You know, we all have
those things. You know, I wanna rewrite my own calendar system because I don’t like Google Calendar
or whatever. You know, you’re not going to. And even if you did, it’s not worth your time other than
as a learning experiment. And for the amount of time it would take to do well, you might as well
pick one of your other side projects. So yeah.

Nikola: Awesome. This this was great. This was great. Just like a quick question. Did you read the book? I
can I don’t know the exact name? I mean, the title, the magic of tidying up or something like that.

Shawn: I don’t know.

Nikola: Yeah. Because it was very similar to what you were saying to the other one.

Shawn: Anyways, cool. Called Swedish death cleaning. You should just Google that real quick. Swedish death
cleaning. Apparently, it’s a tradition in Sweden that as you approach a certain age, from like maybe
50 or so, that you start getting rid of things over time, so that when you die, your family doesn’t
inherit a house full of stuff. Interesting. Yes. Alright. So we’ll go back, move on to the the next
topic here, which is Pomodoro. I’ll describe the Pomodoro Technique because it’s so easy to describe
briefly. The short version is, you set a timer for, let’s say, twenty five minutes. You work only on
one thing for that twenty five minutes. You take a five minute break, then you do another twenty
five minutes, another five minute break. And the very, very important rules are, once you start,
there are no distractions. If someone comes and interrupts you, they have ruined that cycle of the
Pomodoro. If you go to Facebook or your email, you have ruined that Pomodoro. You focus intensely
only on the one thing for twenty five minutes. Take a break. Repeat. Once you’ve done three or four
of these, you can take a longer break, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty minute. And the twenty five
minutes, five minutes is entirely that’s, like, kind of the standard. But you can make it anything
you want. You can do ten minute Pomodoros. You can do one hour Pomodoros. Probably neither one of
those are those are probably both a little extreme. But, yeah, that’s basically it. And I’m gonna
assume that 80% of the people listening to this already know the Pomodoro Technique and have used
it. And, Nikola and I both really like it. So I’m sure you have some stuff to add to that.

Nikola: Yeah. Pomodoro rocks. I mean, actually, as I always say, right, here’s a challenge for you. I
challenge you to do eight true Pomodoros. You know, don’t don’t try to fake it. Yeah. I just
answered that email now. True Pomodoros, I challenge you to do eight of them in a working hour. Yes.
That’s if you calculate less than four actual hours. But, honestly, remind remember me when you do
that and when you look back on your day that day, you will feel like, oh, man, I really did a lot of
things today. Trust me. Try it. You’ll see.

Shawn: Yeah. And if you’re using the hipster PDA or if you’re using, you know, the Kanban method or
whatever, at the before each Pomodoro, look at it and say, where should I be spending my time?
Should I be working on the thing that I did right before my last break because I was getting on a
roll or because it really needs to get done because I have a deadline? Or should I look at, you
know, item two on my list, which I haven’t touched in five days that is coming up due as well? You
know, that’s all gonna be decisions you’re gonna have to make on the fly. But it’s really nice
because another well, nice for many reasons. One of the things that really helps me, and I’m sure
we’ve all done this, is you have some kind of problem. It’s not working out. You’re trying to write
some code or trying to fix something. Fix a bug. You can’t find the bug. Or you think you fixed the
bug. You deploy it to production and it’s still not working. If you take a step back and look at it
with bring someone over with fresh eyes or you stop working on it until tomorrow, which you can’t do
with a production bug, it helps a lot. If you put a limit okay. Here’s a twenty five minute limit.
I’m fixing this bug. For the five minutes, you should get up away from your desk at least, you know,
walk 10 feet away. Go to the bathroom. Get a hot drink. Do whatever it is you’re gonna do. When you
come back, you will probably realize a lot of the time that you’ve been going down a rabbit hole.
Like, you had a thought process. You had an idea, and then you kept iterating on that idea until you
were straying off from being productive because you think you’re almost there. Oh, let me oh, let me
just try it this way. Oh, let me just try this. And it turns out that wasn’t the right solution, but
you’re never gonna see that. You could have stayed at their desk for three hours with a full bladder
and a head full of stress and a headache just trying to beat this thing into submission. But if you
do a Pomodoro and get up and come back and sit back down, you look at it and you say, oh, wait. What
about this? Or try this. Or at the very least, I was clearly beating my head against the desk with
this. Let’s look for another approach.

Nikola: Yeah. Definitely. Agreed. Although to touch on one point, as you said, okay, let’s move to the item
number two. Here’s the thing. Yes, that’s a good point. Although I’m gonna link back to the Brian
Tracy again. I actually like that guy very much. He has this book called eat that frog, where he
basically says, if the first thing in the morning that you do is eat a frog, Well, probably during
the day, nothing worse will happen. Well, your frog is your task, you know, that it’s hard that you
can’t do. You’ve been at it for like maybe even, you know, a week, a month, whatever, and you just
can’t make the progress. No. Don’t go do anything else. Try to do force yourself to go and work on
this, task slash project first. Because, yeah, if that’s the worst thing that you do, probably you
won’t have anything worse during the day. Although, to give credit to your idea, yes, it’s maybe
sometimes good to, you know, just switch the thinking process to something else because you may get
another idea, back on the one that you couldn’t solve. But, yeah, just just be wary of, you know,
not pushing the main ticket or, I mean, ticket project to the sidelines.

Shawn: Yeah. And there’s there’s no right answer to this. It could be that eating the frog first is the
right answer for you 99% of the time. It might also not be. And just to take some learnings from
more artistic things like writing and music and create creative things or drawing. If the advice
that I’ve heard and read from multiple sources from authors and things like that is, if say you
write something, you don’t immediately critique it. You put it in a drawer for a day or a week, and
then you read it. And then you’ll find out if it was good or if it was crap. So you might just be
too close to it. You might need to take a break from it in order to take a have a clearer mind about
what the next step should be or whether it’s even worth continuing at all. So oh, and I should just
mention real quick, the pomodoro pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato, and it got its name from a
college student who was having trouble studying. And I forget his name, but if you look up Pomodoro
Technique, you’ll find the creator. And he had a kitchen timer shaped like a plastic tomato. And so
he named this the Pomodoro Technique. So there’s the mystery solved there.

Nikola: Yeah. Those who like apps, there are multiple versions of Pomodoro. Thousands.

Shawn: Chrome plugins, web browser pages that do it with JavaScript, Android, iOS. I mean, you can get
little standalone timers. I mean, a standalone kitchen timer that makes a loud ding at the end, you
know, might just be the thing for you.

Nikola: Yeah. Usually, you know, nowadays, especially it seems like we’re trying to, you know, complicate
things. This one is so simple. It’s almost as in, hey, this can’t work because it’s so simple. But,
yeah, most of the times, simple stuff, that’s what works. Right? Because, will you use a system that
you have to go through 15 steps of configuration or setting or what whatnot? Yeah. Maybe you will
two or three times, and then it’s back to the old habits. Right?

Shawn: Yeah. And so to move on to the next topic while also slightly hanging onto the Pomodoro, if you do
Pomodoros and you track them on paper or in whatever Pomodoro app you’re using, you have the ability
to go back at the end of the week and evaluate what you’ve done, sort of having a the version of the
done column in the Kanban board. And something that I have done, learned from a friend of mine,
Rupa, he wrote a bash script which would pop open his editor every, I think, every hour or something
like that. And he would just type in it when it pop when it popped up and interrupted him, he would
just type what he was working on. Then he can go back at the end of the week, and he can, you know,
see what he’s doing, how he’s spending his time. And I don’t know what his end goal with that was,
whether he was just trying to improve and see if he felt like he was wasting time, or he just wanted
to keep track of what he had worked on for the purposes of, you know, employee evaluations or
whatever. But I really like the idea, so I stole it. And I have, from time to time, actually made it
every fifteen minutes, sometimes half an hour. And it’s really good because when it pops up, and you
have to type what you’re doing, and you have to type, I was instant messaging with this guy, or I
was on Amazon researching a purchase I wanted to make, it snaps you back to, oh, yeah. I should
probably be doing something productive. And when you are being productive, a lot of times, you don’t
realize at the end of the day where your time went. It turns out, I was working on, you know, a
project, and someone had a problem and they asked me if I could look into it. And I’m digging into a
database, I’m doing some, you know, little bit of research where I’m answering a question, and my
little thing pops up, I’m like, oh, I helped so and so with this thing. Whereas if you would ask me
an hour later or especially at the end of the day or week, what I worked on that week, I would have
never realized it, but that person may have taken thirty, forty five minutes of my time. And it’s
good to keep track of that for your own sanity when you look back at how little you’ve accomplished
and realize, no, you’re doing things. You’re just getting interrupted. And if you are in any way
reporting up, which actually, I recommend this. This isn’t something that I I would never want to
work at a job where I was record required to track my time and justify forty hours worth of work in
a week. However, I do keep track of what I do in a given week. And at the end of the week on Friday,
I send out email to certain people in the company telling them that what I worked on. Because I want
to, you know, show where I’m adding value. I want to get feedback if I’m going in the wrong
direction. I wanna throw out ideas for things that I wanna do, which might cost developer time or
money. I’m in a management position, so I might have ideas along those lines. And, you know, let
them know it’s coming. Let them know to expect it. Get feedback from them, or just tell them when
things got accomplished. Or tell them when when things are going wrong. You know, we we didn’t get
as much done or we had a problem in production or whatever the case may be this week. And the reason
is because our developers don’t have resources a, b, or c. Or, you know, another department did this
which affected us or whatever. And it’s really it feels good to me. I have that now in my email
outbox archive, and they have it. And I can look back on that and kinda see progress. Especially
when you see you know, you don’t wanna see repeated topics coming up, because that means that they
weren’t addressed. So I use it, and it’s just a Bash script that opens up an editor if you use, you
know, leaf pad, notepad, g edit, text mate, whatever you want. You can, you know, write a little
script. I have mine append the date time to the bottom of the file automatically and then open it.
So when I when I see a pop up, I scroll to the end of the file, type a couple sentences, and I close
it. And it’s not exactly the same thing as, Nikola uses, so, tell us about your your rescue time.

Nikola: Actually, two things. I’m gonna, talk about the rescue time plus Evernote. Although I immediately
immediately have to say, you’re gonna send me that back script, and actually, can share it also with
people because and here’s why because. So, as you know, you know, I’ve been freelancing for a very,
very long time, and you have to do your reports as in, you know, almost honestly, I mean, some
people may not do it. I’m crazy, and I did it literally in a minute. So for example, I started
working on something and I write started work. So 1625 started working on this and that. 1628
committed this, 1754, did this, did that. And when I stopped about, to people about this, they were
like, woah. This feels way, you know, over the top. And I was when I thought about it, I was like,
okay. Maybe you’re right. But here’s the thing. It became such a habit for me that I don’t even
think about it. So it’s it’s second nature to me to when I did something, open up, Evernote and
write for that date, what I did, and that’s it. But to tie into your, what you’re doing, I
absolutely love this because, you know, every twenty five or whatever minutes, it’s way better
because I don’t know, I think I like it, and I wanna try it. As you know, when I hear something, I
try it without any, you know, how do you say, thoughts about it. And then I see if I like it or not.
But after doing it, giving it a proper shot to tie back to our last episode, yes, at Vorak, I love
it. Now it’s my third third week, I believe, and I’m starting to really, really love it. And, of
course, the type matrix keyboard, it’s awesome. But yeah. So what I do is, as I said, I use Evernote
for my notes. Literally, I’m crazy. I do when I write something, I put the time and what I’m doing
or, for example, what I committed. But here’s the thing, and here’s where things may here’s where
your bash script may very, very much help me. What if I’m working on something and debugging
something, and I didn’t make any freaking progress for, you know, two, three hours? What then I’ll
have only two entries. Right? For example, 7AM, start working on this, and then, you know, thirteen
twenty five finished this. Someone reading that kind of a report will be, oh, the guy was slacking.
But if I every fifteen minutes, right? Oh, I tried this. It didn’t work. You know? And then you have
10 entries where you wrote, hey. I tried this. Didn’t work. Try this. Didn’t work. Maybe even this
just kept popping my head. Maybe even if you read through that yourself, you’ll be like, hey, dude,
but I didn’t try that. You know? So I definitely see value in your, you know, constant popping pop
ups. And I actually think yeah. Sorry?

Shawn: One thing to that because the one of the biggest problems, challenges, whatever, that developers
have is every time someone says how long will something take, we either grossly underestimate it, or
we say we don’t know, and then we do it for however long it takes. And the other people in the
company are saying, well, that’s taking way too long. It’s such a simple task. And the fact is, you
actually start working in the surrounding code and considering other things that will break, things
until then, you’d have no idea how complicated something is. And if you are able to keep track, as
you were just saying, Nikola, you will find that you can show this to someone and say, look, we it
took this long for this reason. Or you can even say, hey, you know how I’m always telling you I
wanna, you know, take a week and refactor, you know, some some code here. Or instead of taking an
hour to do this in a really crappy way so that I know I get it done for you, if I could take two
days to do it, you get the same end result, but maybe the next five tickets after that would take
half the time they would have otherwise taken. And without documentation, without evidence, without
something that they can understand, you’re never gonna get that. So, you know, if you do a seven
hour debugging session and you actually had problems because there was some bad code and you found
some other bug along the way, and you noticed that if you were to fix this, it would actually break
something else, and you can’t just do it the straightforward way. You have to go and, you know, redo
some refactoring, or maybe even talk to someone who’s in a more product owner type role to get
permission to change the behavior of the application. I mean, this isn’t it’s not just fix a bug, go
find the place where it says less than two and make it less than three, and boom, you’ve fixed the
problem. And those kind of bug fixes are exceptionally rare.

Nikola: True. True. So to add one more thing, you mentioned, you know, that we don’t know how productive we
were. Well, now you can. There’s a tool that I use for, honestly, like, maybe more than three years
now, or maybe even more. I honestly don’t remember. It’s called rescue time. I don’t know if it’s
cool. I mean, I saw on other podcasts that what they do is they spell out the word, but, you know,
Google rescue time and you’ll find it. You You install it on your computer and it does something
pretty freaky. It tracks everything that you do. So people who don’t like that will have a problem,
but here’s the thing that it does for you. It tracks all your apps that you’re using, and at the end
of the week actually, well, you can anytime you log into their dashboard on their website, you can
see how is your day going, what apps are you using. And it’s smart enough to know that, for example,
Visual Studio Code or Facebook.com is bad for you, and Visual Studio Code is good for you in terms
of productivity, meaning that you’re probably doing something, you know, productive. And what it
sends you, only one email per week where it says, you were this productive during this week. And
there’s no, you know, fooling yourself. Hey. If it says that for this week, you did ten hours of
freaking Facebook, then my man, something’s wrong. Right? You’re being not productive. You’re lying
to yourself. And if your productivity level is, you know, 50%, honestly, dude, you can do way
better. So, like, to be specific, I just looked at my mind for this week. It was just a sec. I just
had it opened.

Shawn: And while you’re looking that up, there is a thing that I just heard about today or yesterday, I
forget, in a podcast, where they’re talking about people working forty, fifty, sixty hour weeks
plus. And the the saying that they brought up was, work will expand to fill the time available. So
if you have to get something done in forty hours, you probably can. If you’re spending sixty hours
in your week, I can almost guarantee you, unless you’re like a sweatshop laborer, that’s because you
spent twenty or thirty hours of your week on Facebook and talking to coworkers and, you know,
forwarding memes to other people. So, you know, find a way to to cut that down. You know, use rescue
time. Use pomodoro so you can actually track your time. Use the pop up timer to log what you’re
doing, you know, multiple times an hour. Alright. So your productivity for this week is?

Nikola: 78%, which,

Shawn: to

Nikola: be fair, is not as always so high. For example, last week, this is, an 11.4 increase from the
previous week. So how did this happen? Well, last week, I saw okay. So it’s, like, 60, what, 7%.
And, usually, I’m way like, I’m almost almost always over 70%. I was like, okay. Past week, I was
not so good. I’m gonna, you know, double down this week, and, well, it happened. I did 78%, which is
kinda like good. Considering that I logged, and that’s also what you get, it get it says, over the
past week, you logged this amount of hours. And for example, for me, this week was forty eight
hours. So now you’ll be like, oh, you’re overworker, whatever. No. We’re gonna do a podcast show
about this. I just you know, I like to learn stuff. And, yes, I do work over weekends, but as we
talked, you know, if you wanna work over the weekends, just work on something, you know, that’s
progressing you as a dev because at the end, you will be helpful to your company, … blah blah. Yeah.
So yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I’m very happy with this week, by the way.

Shawn: Cool. Yeah. I mean, I just wanna say something about because we in our recent meeting that we had,
we talked about the concept of sharpening your axe, the the parable of the the woodcutter who could
cut down, you know, 10 times as many trees in a in a workday as everyone else. And eventually, it
was five times as many, and then twice as many, and then equal, and then he was doing half as many.
And the other woodcutter said, hey, you know, why don’t you sharpen your axe? And he says, can’t you
see I don’t have time? And the idea for developers in sharpening your axe is improve your skills.
You know, learn new language, learn a new framework, learn more about the way your current language,
you know, works. And when I have seen developers that I work with committing things or doing things
on weekends, I see things popping up in GitHub and whatnot, I have actually individually spoken them
and said, you know, hey. Is this necessary? Like, if something’s broken in production, you know, if
the boss is asking for something, absolutely, you gotta do what you gotta do. But I shouldn’t be
seeing you committing code every Saturday. If you’re that motivated to do something, you have
nothing else you’d rather do, fine. Do a side project, take an online class, do something. Because
if you just do the same thing on the weekends and evenings that you do during the workday, you’re
not gonna come in fresh. You’re not going to do your best work at work. And if you don’t continue to
expand your skills in our industry, you are not going to be all that you could be as a developer on
my team. And I want someone who’s going to not only want to learn for themselves, but bring those
ideas to the rest of us. Maybe Nikola’s gonna, you know, do some research or read a book tomorrow,
and he’s gonna come in the next day and say, hey, guys. Hey, check out this really cool thing. And
that’s what I value a lot over almost anything in a developer. I don’t wanna be I listen to
podcasts. I read blogs. I go to conferences. I follow certain people in various ways. And I get
exposed to what’s going on in the communities that I value. And I get excited about things and talk
about them and bring them into work and bring them into my friends. And all I want is for others to
do exactly that. I mean, everyone has permission. It’s not like only the manager, only the boss,
only the team lead, only the guy who’s been here the longest, only the guy who wrote the original
version of the software. You know, it’s not like only that guy can make improvements, can bring in a
new technology, you know, can maybe change the way we do things. Because every single person, even
the most junior person that we have in the company or that, you know, we have yet to hire, knows
something I don’t. They know multiple things I don’t about some things I don’t care about at all,
and some things that would make me more effective. So, you know, everyone just should feel free to
do that and improve themselves for their own mental health, for their own well-being. And and if
you’re really trying to look good for the boss or trying to be more productive for the company, that
will still make you over the long term more valuable than just continuing on your your work tickets
for the week. And back to what we said before, maybe you spent 20 or 30% of your time, you know,
browsing websites around Facebook, and that’s why you’re working on Saturday, you know, think about
it.

Nikola: Yep. Totally agree. Totally agreed. It’s I would say that when people do that and install it and
they, you know, try it for, you know, a week, a month, as they say, or I think I read that
somewhere, truth will set you free, but first it will make you angry.

Shawn: Nice. Yeah. I do have to say, I would never install or use it because I will not install some
tracking thing on my computer knowingly that reports out. If it did its collection locally and gave
me a way to view it locally without sending it to them, I would consider it. But yeah, there’s no
way I’m giving that out.

Nikola: Yeah. I’m way more liberal, with that kind of stuff.

Shawn: Yeah. No. Just no.

Nikola: Yeah. Cool. So I guess we’ve covered a lot of stuff. One thing that we haven’t touched on, and,
actually, there’s we’re gonna make a whole new show about it, and it’s since we’re both fathers, you
know, something this question always comes up. Okay. How do you, you know, juggle your family slash
dev life slash I wanna improve kind of life? You know? And this is something that we’ll definitely
talk about because we don’t wanna go too overboard with this show.

Shawn: This is by far our longest podcast to date, and so we should probably start to wrap it up. But I do
wanna kinda wrap it up by talking about some of these things that you’ve heard in this podcast, and
we probably listed way too many. You probably have to go back and listen to it and take notes. We
should have given a disclaimer at the beginning, have a notepad ready. But you may wanna implement
some of them, and you will forget, or you will try one day and then forget, and never do it again.
So how do you actually do something like this, make it a habit, and get started? And I I don’t know
at all how to be successful in creating a new habit, but one thing that I suggest is trying to do it
as a thirty day challenge. A lot of people have done thirty day challenges of exercising every day
or not having sugar or you could make it doing pomodoros. You can make it whatever you feel lacking
in your life. So if you wanna do pomodoros for thirty days, you wanna log your time for thirty days,
you wanna run rescue rescue time for thirty days, you wanna keep a journal for thirty days of what
you’re grateful for and what you’ve accomplished and go back and read it once a month or once a
week, you know, maybe commit to doing it every day for thirty days. Put it on your calendar so you
get a reminder every day or a text message every day or whatever, you know, type of scheduling
system you use and give it a shot. And actually, that would be amazing if we got some feedback on
that in about thirty days from the day this podcast goes out, people telling us what they did, you
know, what change they made. Because it’s only work until it becomes a habit. Once it becomes a
habit and it’s part of your routine, then you that you’ve had that for free now for the rest of your
life. So you can add a second habit. So you can practice guitar for thirty minutes a day. You know,
you can do pomodoros at work. You can spend more time reading to your kids. Whatever it is that that
you value, that you secretly feel ashamed as a person because you can’t do, at least I assume it.
I’m either revealing way more about myself than necessary, or I’m speaking the truth that we all
feel inside, you know, you look at, you know, either not spending enough time with your kid, or not
doing a good enough job at work, or not paying enough attention to your spouse, or not cleaning up
enough around the house, or, you know, being an impatient driver in traffic. I don’t know what your
pet peeves or psychological blocks are, but, you know, I think we’ve all had most of those at least
at some point. So, you know.

Nikola: Yeah. And so in terms for, you know, habits, you’ll read all over the web that it takes twenty one
days or thirty days to form a habit, blah, blah, blah. Yes, true. But here’s the thing, you actually
have to see value in it for you to be able to go through it. And what will happen in some habits, it
will be hard. Honestly, it will be so freaking hard. But here’s the kicker, you know, somewhere I
read or I even experienced that, for example, I’m on and off this sugar roller coaster or whatever.
You know, I as you know, I like chocolate. Like, I would probably, choose chocolate over, like, meat
every day, but yeah. And I know it’s not good. So here’s the thing. Let’s say ten days in, it’s so
hard. It’s painful. You know? But then you kinda, like, start getting used to it. Then at day
twenty, you’re like, okay. I’m feeling this. You know? I don’t need it anymore. At day 30, although
to be to be fair, some habits may take not thirty days, but three hundred days. But here’s the
thing, when you achieve that, you kinda like tip of the iceberg, right? And you are on it, you’re
into it, You will ask yourself, you will honestly ask yourself, how could I have ever been that way?
But trust me, yes, it’s hard work. And probably like with everything I like to say, everything worth
fighting for, everything that’s worthwhile is worth fighting for. Something like that, you know?

Shawn: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It’s we all take the path of least resistance. If you you only have so much
willpower in your life. So on a day to day basis, if you refrain from making a smart ass comment
that you know is gonna upset somebody, it’s gonna be that much harder for you to have a salad at
lunch instead of pizza. If you manage to not have the salad instead of the pizza, you’re gonna be
that have that much less left in you to really do serious work your last half hour at the office
instead of slacking off. So if anything you can make a habit that you don’t have to waste that
willpower reserve is just going to be one more thing that’s gonna help you improve as a person.

Nikola: True. And just like the final probably note, it doesn’t have to be so so so so for example, writing.
Right? You don’t have to write, you know, you’re okay. I I have to write a book. I have to write a
book. No. Because if you’re thinking about it in a way of, okay, I’m gonna sit for the next month or
three months and write a book. Well, that’s mentally hard. But if you say, every day, I’m gonna
write at 7AM, the so the first thing that I do when I come to, quote, unquote, work, I am going to
spend 1 Pomodoro writing. That’s it. 1 Pomodoro. And trust me, one year later, you’ll be like, oh, I
wrote three books. How come? Well, that’s how. You know? That’s You

Shawn: have written books, so I should point out. Yes. Yes. Books have you written at the

Nikola: time? Two.

Shawn: Two books. Yeah. And it’s, you know, the old joke, how do you eat an elephant?

Nikola: One bite at a time.

Shawn: That’s it. So you wanna write there’s a a challenge I heard about where people write a novel in
November. And if you write a novel, I forget, I think they said something like 50,000 words, and
it’s like 1,666 words a day or something, which is totally doable. It won’t be a great novel,
probably, unless you’re already an established author trying to, you know, pump another one out. But
you can say you wrote a novel, and your next one’s gonna be better. And same thing with reading. You
wanna read textbooks and get better at what you’re doing, and I’m just repeating something Nikola
told me. This is not my thought. If you spend ten minutes a day, how many pages is that? At the end
of thirty days, how many pages is that? Ten minutes a day is nothing. You waste that amount of time,
you know, looking at your hand. I don’t know. So I don’t know what people do, you know, chewing gum.
I don’t know. Listening to the radio for the extra thirty seconds when you park your car instead of
getting out and going into the office. You know, you waste that time already. It’s nothing to do ten
minutes. Imagine what you could do with 20 or 25. You know, like Nikola said, one Pomodoro. So yeah,
longest podcast ever coming up on an hour. I think there’s a lot of great stuff here that we didn’t
plan. And that’s what makes makes it so magical.

Nikola: Absolutely. And yeah, as, it’s like Stephen King, I think it was he who said it, probably like
people go in and they say, you know, the new resolutions and whatnot. And okay, so people say, okay,
now I’m gonna, you know, do one Pomodoro of writing every day or exercising every day or whatever.
And then a week after, they fail over off the roller coaster. And, like, I have no more inspiration.
And then he says or if I’m misattributing, then I apologize. But it goes along the lines of
inspiration, that’s for freaking amateurs. Pros, come in, clock in, do the work, period. And that’s
kind of mentality that you have to you don’t get that. You have to train that.

Shawn: Yeah. Yeah. No. There’s, I I read an article. It’s like, forget inspiration. What you need is
discipline. Look it up. I’m sure you’ll find it. And what Steve one thing I specifically remember
reading Stephen King wrote was that he doesn’t wait for the muse to whisper in his ear. He shows up
at his desk at the same time every day, you know, no matter what, and then the muse knows where to
find him.

Nikola: Yep. Yep. I I mean, I can’t say I’m too into, let’s say, the genre that he’s writing, although I
very much liked few of his books, The Stand being one of them. I mean, I loved it. But, yeah, you
gotta give the man credit because he knows something, and that is hard work always wins.

Shawn: Yes. Alright. And that’s a good good place to end it. Hard work always wins. And thanks for being
here, Nikola. It was a great one.

Nikola: Yes. Thank you, Shawn. And thank you guys for listening.

Shawn: Yep. See you all next time.

Nikola: Bye bye.

Shawn: Bye. Thank you for listening to the DevThink podcast.

TL;DR

Why are we still using the QWERTY layout even if:

• it makes our fingers ‘walk’ way more miles for the same amount of written text (supposedly as much as 1 to 12-20)
• it makes us ~42% slower
• it causes all sorts of repetitive strain injuries

Sounds like I made this up. But here, look it up for yourself:

"Dvorak estimated that the fingers of an average typist in his day travelled between 12 and 20 miles on a qwerty keyboard; the same text on a Dvorak keyboard would require only about one mile of travel." ~ MIT

"Dvorak “uses about 63% of the finger motion required by QWERTY” (i.e., ~37% less motion)" ~ Wikipedia

The reason for this is simple: we’ve always done it that way™. We just don’t know that there’s something better out there. And by better, I mean miles better.

The second, more practical reason is that the change is hard. Like, really hard. Imagine having to re-learn how to ride a bike… Doesn’t sound too fun, now does it? 🤦

I went through this myself a couple of years ago, and once I went through the hard period (frankly, took me a month), I never looked back.

! TL;DR

In this episode of the DevThink podcast, Shawn and I nerd out about something you touch every single day (and probably never question): your keyboard layout.

Specifically, we talk about the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout — why it exists, what problem it tries to solve, and what it actually feels like to switch when you’ve spent your whole life on QWERTY.

Here are some main takeaways from our chat…

“Dvorak sounds scary” is… a branding problem 😅

Shawn makes a good point early on: the layout is often called “Dvorak,” but the original intent was a simplified keyboard layout optimized for English typing. The name makes it feel like some niche, academic thing you need a monocle to try.

The core idea: less finger travel, more alternation

Dvorak was designed around English letter frequency:

• Vowels on the left hand
• Common consonants on the right
• Lots of hand alternation, which can reduce strain
• More work done by stronger fingers (index/middle), less by pinkies

You can summarize it as: “move less, reach less, suffer less.”

The hardware rant: staggered keyboards are a fossil

We also detour into a keyboard hardware topic I didn’t expect to love as much as I did: the TypeMatrix (http://www.typematrix.com/ – no affiliation) keyboard.

Shawn explains why most keyboards are staggered (mechanical typewriter constraints), and why that’s… kind of absurd in a world where the “bars that jam” problem no longer exists.

TypeMatrix goes with an ortholinear-ish grid, which makes touch typing feel more “logical” because you’re not constantly compensating for weird offsets.

My switch experience: the “first week pain” is real

I went into it thinking: “How hard can it be? I’m a touch typist.”

Well… cue dramatic music.

The first days were rough. The muscle memory you built over years doesn’t politely step aside. It fights back. Hard.

But after going cold turkey (no “just one quick QWERTY reply”), it started clicking:

• Touch typing felt more natural with Dvorak (especially on TypeMatrix)
• Speed improved week by week
• The mental “map” started forming again

The phone question: does QWERTY thumbs ruin Dvorak hands?

This comes up a lot, and we talk about it directly:

• Typing on a phone is a different motor skill (thumbs, not fingers)
• Keeping QWERTY on mobile won’t necessarily “undo” your Dvorak learning
• Shawn even mentions that he can’t type QWERTY on a computer anymore… but still uses QWERTY on his phone

So yeah—no need to panic and install 17 weird iOS keyboard apps unless you really want to.

If you’re considering switching, here are some practical takeaways

If you type mostly in English and spend a lot of time at the keyboard, experimenting with Dvorak is one of those rare “small change, big daily impact” things.

My personal advice (based on what I learned the hard way):

• Expect the first week to feel like typing with oven mitts
• If you can, do it during a slower period (vacation / lighter workload)
• Decide early: cold turkey or mixed mode
  (mixed mode preserves QWERTY ability, but slows Dvorak mastery)

And voilà — your keyboard becomes a project. Because of course it does.

Transcript

Here’s the cleaned up transcript of my chat with Shawn (in case you wanna feed it into an LLM or something). If you want to listen to the recording, you can do so here (I suggest 1.5x speed as I speak too slow 🙂)

Shawn: Alright. Welcome back to the second DevThink podcast. This is Shawn Maločić, and with me is—

Nikola: Nikola Brežnjak.

Shawn: Today, we’re here to talk about the simplified keyboard layout, which is something that I’ve been using for about ten years. It’s more commonly known as the Dvorak layout because it was designed by a guy named August Dvorak and now bears his name—which I think is actually a big problem. The simplified keyboard layout is something a lot of people would be interested in learning, but “Dvorak” (d-v-o-r-a-k), syllables we don’t generally use in English, tends to make people think it’s something hard or scary.

I haven’t found it to be that, and I’ve found it to be very beneficial to my life. Nikola has been using it for, I guess, a few weeks now. Do you want to describe what it is, since you’re looking at it from a fresher perspective than I am?

Nikola: Yes. So basically, it’s a different layout. You can use the Dvorak layout on any keyboard. Of course, it would be kind of a pain if you were looking at the keyboard and it says “S” but it’s actually “O” if you switch. But then again, the advice you gave me was: do not look at the keyboard.

So yeah—basically, the letters are all mixed up based on this Dvorak guy. Actually, a side note: isn’t it actually pronounced “Dvorak”?

Shawn: It is. That’s actually probably the correct pronunciation. And I just want to mention: the layout was designed explicitly for the English language. So if you’re typing in English, this will be helpful.

The general idea is that the guy who invented it studied English words, phrases, sentences—whatever—and figured out how to minimize finger movement. So the keyboard is designed in such a way that if you were to type out an entire novel in both QWERTY (the standard English layout) and the simplified keyboard layout, your fingers would travel many, many miles less with Dvorak than with QWERTY.

Nikola: Yeah. I read somewhere that it’s actually 40% more finger movement on QWERTY than on Dvorak. And also all the vowels are on the left side of the keyboard. So in general, in English, you will alternate your hands when typing. There are almost no words you’ll ever type in English all with the same hand, which is nice because it reduces strain that way as well.

And then in addition: if you consider your ring finger and pinky finger to be weaker, and your index and middle finger to be stronger—the most frequently used keys you have to reach for or type are going to be with your index and middle finger. You do a lot less reaching. The less-used keys are the ones your pinky uses.

And then the home row—everyone knows “A S D F” … and “J K L ;”. Anyone who’s taken a class has done that. So compare “A S D F” with “A O E U”. That’s your home row with your left hand.

And the right hand—instead of “J K L ;”—is “S N T H”. I mean, are there any more commonly used letters in the English language than “S N T H”? And who uses semicolons except programmers on a regular basis?

Shawn: Yeah. So, anyways, as you said: “Nikola, try it.” I was like, “Okay,” because I’m going to do it. But then again, I remember one friend referring me to it before, and I looked at it and thought, “Are you crazy?”

But it was an awesome time to try it because we were on a break, so I was at home and I said: “I’m going to give it a go.”

Although—to be fair—I’m doing this on a keyboard you gave me, thank you very much. It’s actually a TypeMatrix keyboard.

So let’s put Dvorak aside: TypeMatrix… I love it. I honestly love it. And as you said, you could use QWERTY on it without a problem. I agree. People should look up that keyboard because I think it’s cool. Maybe you can say more about it, because you’ve been using it for how long again?

Shawn: I’ve been using it since February 2006. I will not use anything else.

Probably everyone listening to this has a keyboard based on a limitation of mechanical typewriters. Back in the day, every key you pressed raised a metal bar with a reversed letter that slammed into an ink ribbon and hit the paper. So if you look at your keyboard—just to pick two QWERTY characters at random—there’s “J” and “U”. J is on the home row, U is right above it.

If those metal bars were in direct line, you could never type J, because it would just slam into the U bar. So all the keys on your keyboard are staggered. Your top row isn’t perfectly aligned with your home row, which isn’t perfectly aligned with the bottom row.

We still—today—manufacture keyboards this way, which makes no sense. Not only do you have to learn which finger types which letter and whether it stays on the home row or reaches up and down—you also develop an instinct for whether you need to reach up and slightly left, or slightly right, or down and slightly left, or slightly right. There’s no sense in this.

So these people at TypeMatrix (typematrix.com)—I have no financial association with them—but I recommend everyone buys their keyboards because they are sane. They fixed this. I’ve been using it since February 2006 and I will never go back.

I’ve purchased extras and have them brand new in boxes in storage, just in case they become unavailable, because I don’t want to type on anything else.

Nikola: Awesome. Yeah.

What I noticed is that my fingers definitely don’t have to move as much. But also, I really see that in this setup, I don’t have to move my fingers much.

One thing: I’m in Croatia—born and raised, still living here—although I type mostly in English (like 99%), so that’s not an issue.

So how I started: I’ve been a touch typist—I can type very fast and I don’t need to look at the keyboard. On QWERTY I was very fast. That’s one thing. So I developed this muscle memory for certain keys—when you see the key in your mind before you even press it.

And now when I was trying Dvorak… oh dear God. First few days: a pain. Honestly, a pain.

To be fair: I had to reply to one ping on Slack very quickly, and I literally went on my laptop and typed the reply there. It felt… relieving.

But then I talked with you and you said: “Don’t do that, because you’re not progressing.” And I said: “Okay. If I’m going into this, I’m going cold turkey.”

And literally ever since then—so I’m on my third week now—I haven’t used anything else but this keyboard and the Dvorak layout. It’s gotten way better. Honestly, way better.

Here’s one thing: I think it’s way easier to do touch typing—using all of your fingers—with this layout, and especially with this keyboard.

Also: zero affiliation. You were the one who introduced me to it. So yes, I’m feeling there’s definitely something in it. I’m still not as fast as I was on QWERTY, but I’m sensing I’m developing new muscle memory for these keys.

One thing I brought up—and you said I shouldn’t worry—is that on my phone, I still have the QWERTY keyboard. And I felt that by using that, I’m going backwards, like not using Dvorak everywhere.

I installed some new keyboard on my iPhone, but I don’t like it because it’s not in the same row. But hey—I had a great app idea there. Maybe I’ll make it. We’ll see.

But as you said, I don’t have to worry about it, right?

Shawn: Right.

Here’s the thing. If you are in tech support, or if you work somewhere where you handle other people’s computers all day, or use other people’s terminals, you may have to type QWERTY.

You can always do a software change of the keyboard layout from QWERTY to Dvorak, and that’s fine. But if you feel it would be an undue burden to lose your QWERTY ability, then you have to continue to do QWERTY interspersed with Dvorak.

Because if you don’t, by the time you’ve learned Dvorak fluently, you will actually have lost your QWERTY.

I typed QWERTY for over a dozen years. When I switched, I went cold turkey, never looked back, and I completely lost my QWERTY.

However, on phones, they didn’t have a Dvorak layout, so I just continued typing with my thumbs on QWERTY.

A couple years ago, I found I could actually get a Dvorak layout on my phone, and I switched to it—and I was completely lost. I just went back to QWERTY on the phone.

When I type with my thumbs, I use QWERTY. If you put a gun to my head and made me type QWERTY on a computer keyboard, I would not be able to do it. But it’s the only thing I know how to type with my thumbs. So I don’t think it’s a detriment to continue thumb typing with whatever you want—or swipe typing, whatever.

Nikola: Awesome. Awesome.

Anyways, that’s it for now. We’re going to do a follow-up when I’m “converted,” so stay tuned for that episode.

And until then—try it. You’ll see. I definitely see the benefit.

If you asked me two weeks ago, I would tell you: “Okay, that’s kind of how I am. I will try it. I will give it a fair shot.” But at that time I was like: “This cannot work.”

Now I’m like: “Okay. This will definitely work. I love it. Just give me a bit more time.”

So yeah… try it. See if this is something you may benefit from.

Anyways, till next time.

Shawn: Yeah. Look it up. Do some research for yourself, and let us know what you think.

Nikola: Awesome. See you, guys.

Shawn: Alright. Bye.

Thank you for listening to the DevThink podcast. To reach us for feedback, show suggestions, or any other comments, email us at [email protected]. That’s devth.ink.

OK, I admit, this one is going to be weird. So, buckle up…

Tabbing feels like it costs a second. It doesn’t. It costs your train of thought.

You know the move: you’re testing the app and it’s crashing, you’re mid-sentence of screaming at prompting your favorite LLM to fix it, and then you Alt+Tab (CMD + Tab for fellow Mac users) to Slack "just for a sec", then you come back and… reread the last 15 lines like it’s a novel you forgot the plot of.

Hot take: tabbing is a context tax. And it adds up fast.

TL;DR

• The real cost of tabbing isn’t the switch — it’s the mental reload after.
• The easiest fix isn’t discipline, it’s layout: make your screen a multi-window workspace.
• Use a big monitor + split your apps into a "cockpit" so you don’t need to switch contexts.
• On macOS, use Spectacle (not affiliated) or some other window tiling app

The real problem: you’re not switching apps, you’re switching brains

If you had to physically stand up and walk to another desk every time you checked Slack, you’d do it less.

Alt+Tab is the "teleport" version of that walk — and that’s exactly why it’s dangerous. It’s frictionless distraction.

Because when you tab away, you don’t just lose what’s on the screen, you lose:

• the next step you were about to do,
• the mental model of the code,
• and whatever fragile "flow" you managed to summon that day

The cheat code: stop tabbing by making your monitor do the work

This is the part nobody tells you:

The best productivity "hack" is having everything visible at once.

Not 27 windows stacked like lasagna. I mean a deliberate layout where your brain doesn’t have to switch, it only has to look.

A bigger monitor helps because you can run a real multi-window layout, for example:

• Left (60–70%): editor (VS Code / IntelliJ)
• Right top: terminal (tests, logs, git)
• Right bottom: browser (docs / ticket) / ChatGPT

⚠️ Note to you, dear reader, if you’re using some layout like that: share it in the comments, I’m curious to hear what’s been working for you.

Oh, and BTW, if Slack is visible, you don’t "check Slack". You just notice if something is urgent. And 95% of the time… it isn’t. Also, don’t get me started on email…

Spectacle on macOS: the "I refuse to drag windows" tool

The reason people tab is often stupid-simple:

"My windows are annoying to manage."

or

"My screen is just too small."

I can’t help you with the 2nd one (tell your boss you need a bigger/external monitor 🤷‍♂️ – tell them, politely, that some dude on the Internetz sent you), but as far as the 1st one goes, you end up stacking everything and flipping through it like TV channels.

That’s where Spectacle comes in.

It’s a lightweight macOS app that lets you snap windows into positions using keyboard shortcuts:

• left half
• right half
• quarters
• maximize

So instead of:

• "drag… resize… oops wrong size… now I’ll just tab…"

You press a keyboard shortcut, and the window goes exactly where you want.

The next you know it, voilà — your screen becomes a workspace, not a pile of rectangles.

Goal: reduce tabbing by making switching unnecessary.

A simple "no-tab" layout you can try today

Here’s a clean starter layout (works great on a 27" or ultrawide):

1. Editor: left side (primary focus)
2. Terminal: right side (top)
3. Browser/docs/ChatGPT: right side (bottom)

That’s it.

You’ll be shocked how often you tab just to peek at something that could’ve been visible all along.

One tiny habit that helps even with a perfect layout

Sometimes you still need to switch (different project, different doc, whatever). Before you do:

Write one line somewhere (notes, TODO comment, sticky note):

"Next: update handler → rerun tests → fix validation error"

That single sentence is a bookmark for your brain.

Wrap-up

Tabbing isn’t evil. It’s just expensive.

If you want the cheapest win:

• get a bigger monitor (or use what you already have smarter),
• build a consistent multi-window layout like Spectacle on a Mac,
• and turn "tabbing" into something you do intentionally, not reflexively.

Because the fastest way to stay in flow isn’t to "focus harder".

It’s making it harder to accidentally leave.

TL;DR

By now, everyone has probably seen this (or a similar version) graph:

So, let’s not dwell on it, shall we? It was nice (great even), when it lasted.

Nowadays, it’s better to work on your Github profile or actually building/publishing.

That’s it, going back to my terminal to see if Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenBot needs my attention, ciao 👋

Yes, our (programming) world is changing, and I hope you’re keeping up…

!TL;DR

Back in 2018, my friend Shawn Milochik and I discussed on our DevThink podcast if it’s still worth it to build a portfolio on StackOverflow. It was our 1st episode.

Then, I thought that building the profile there was still valuable, especially if you wanted to change jobs, but I also agreed that having an active Github account is also important (maybe even more so) as you can show people what you can do with the code, and ‘code does not lie’.

Moreso, if you didn’t care about the vanity points you may want to do it because of your own satisfaction of helping people.

Because it took a lot of effort to actually get to a certain number of reputation points on StackOverflow, I would argue that one developed a decent set of skills (writing, explaining, thinking).

So, IMHO, it was totally worth it. And wonder if a similar network will ever arise in our agent-first world.

Here’s the recording, and below is the transcript in case anyone is interested.

Fun thought: folks listening this in 10y from now may be like: lol, they still actually wrote code back then 🙂.

Nikola

This is a question I get asked a lot, mainly because I have a profile with more than 15k rep:

Shawn

I have a profile on StackOverflow, and created it just because I wanted to post a question or upvote someone’s answer one time or another, but I have a pretty low ranking and I’ve never sought out higher one.

I have no idea why anyone would want to cultivate a high ranking unless it was for the purpose of getting a job. But then again, it doesn’t seem to compare to your Github profile.

Nikola

I created mine in 2010, and I was only asking questions for a very very long time. However, it turned out that those questions were very good because I got a lot of upvotes on them. The first time I started answering questions was when I had to create a mobile version of some site and I was using jQuery Mobile and found a lot of questions to which I knew the answer because I read some book about it, and had experience with it. At that time I had around 300 points, and after I started answering I quickly got to 2K.

Flash forward today, I am approaching the 10 K, and what I have to say about that is that my experience with it is very good, because I got admited to one freelance site without any interviews, just by providing my StackOverflow profile link.

I think it’s valuable if you want to change jobs, but I also agree that having an active Github account is also important (maybe even more so) as you can show people what you can do with the code, and ‘code does not lie’.

Shawn

I’ve hired and interviewed quite a bit since about 2010, and I don’t remember ever asking about or being presented with an applicant’s StackOverflow account but definitely have asked for or been presented with their Github account in the resume.

Nikola

The dean of our university used to joke that our graduates find a job in maximum three days depending on when the weekend falls. To extrapolate on that one, having a very good StackOverflow profile makes you very desirable. When you have a certain amount of reputation points (reps) you get recruiter emails (if you allow the option in StackOverflow settings).

I met people who don’t care about the points. Instead, they only do it because of their own satisfaction of helping people.

Shawn

When I was doing Django pretty heavily from 2009-2012, I was on the Django users mailing list every day. I’ve seen plenty people ask questions where it was obvious that they were lazy and they didn’t take the time to figure out how to ask the question so that they could be helped.

I had a habit of making sure I can explain the question pretty clearly, and trying to find the answer myself first. What happened was almost all the time I was able to answer my own questions and almost never ask a question.

I found that I was answering a lot of questions for a few years and there were multiple times that years later when one of the developers on my team would come to me and say:

"Hey I had this problem and I did a Google search and I found the answer, and you wrote it"

So, you can definitely contribute in a way that doesn’t acrew any points or reputation.

To touch on the Github mention, I would look at the actual code in the Github profile and not just the number of stars.

Nikola

Since I know that it takes a lot of effort to actually get to a certain number of reputation points on StackOverflow, I would argue that this person is very good because I myself know that it’s not an easy task to do.

Newbies complain too much

New members don’t seem to like StackOverflow (and there’s even a term SO police) because most of their questions go along the lines of: "help me connect to the database".

I don’t have respect for those kind of people because they didn’t read the rules, or the FAQ.

If you want me to help you, then at least put in some effort. Usual answers to these kind of questions are: ‘What have you tried?’. And then they wouldn’t have anything to show for it.

Usually those people go away, and honestly you don’t want to have them in the community. I may be too harsh, but if you want me to give you my time for free, then please show that you really took some effort and did some researching. If you’re a beginner there is probably 99% chance that there already is same/similar question because you’re not as advanced so you don’t have a specific question that you need a professional to answer you.

So, is it good of an investment to do that nowadays?

Maybe not in Java, maybe not in PHP, or any of those languages that have been with us for a long time. But, it may be a very good idea to do it with a certain new technology because that will help you to place yourself as a master in the field.

If people search for something in a certain technology or language and your name constantly keeps popping up, and if they have a company that’s searching for some specific answers and you already answered them for free on ten questions, if they really need some additional help they’ll certainly reach out to you.

Beware of the help vampires

Shawn

It’s definitely good to have reputation, but at the same time you want to avoid what we used to call a ‘help vampire’. That’s someone who after they ask a question, and you give them an answer will immediately come back with the next problem. They’re basically having you do their homework and keep wasting your time. The whole point of helping someone is you want to say:

Oh, you’re a smart person, you’re trying and you got stuck because you don’t know what you’re doing as you’re new to this. That’s totally reasonable, so let me help you get over this little hurdle, so you can see the other side and then you can have smooth sailing from there on.

Nikola

This can happen on StackOverflow as well, but when someone keeps asking the followup questions in the comments you just ask them to make a new question.

They rarely do that, either because of laziness or frustration. I think that these kind of people came to this industry for the wrong reasons because if you don’t see real true pure joy in finding out things for yourself then you won’t last long here. I remember when I was starting out, that I couldn’t figure out something for like a week and then, when I finally got it, it was the best feeling ever! It’s one of the things that gets me going in this field.

Shawn

I agree that it’s how it should be. There’s a very famous person on the internet called Eric S. Raymond (wrote the art of unix programming) who wrote this post called how to ask questions the smart way. I think there’s really good stuff there like:

• before you ask try to find an answer by searching the archives
• try to find an answer by doing a web search
• try to find an answer by reading the manual
• read the FAQ
• experiment with it yourself to try to figure it out

The questions like "how do I connect to a database in language X" very clearly show that they didn’t do any of those things

What we do is a craft, and not just something that anyone can do 9-5 and then go home and sit on the couch and watch TV and drink beer without it being a part of their life.

Nikola

If you clock in the 8 hours and you can’t wait to come home and do something else then honestly I would really question if this is something that you’re put on this Earth to do.

Shawn

I read this blog post about a kid from Nigeria who wanted to become a programmer but couldn’t afford a laptop, so he started with his Nokia phone and in the end ended in an MIT backed startup.

Then you contrast that with someone who has a computer, and an internet connection that works perfectly fine and a full keyboard and then they can’t even be bothered to figure out the first thing about what they’re trying to do!?

Talent is overrated

Nikola

I agree and am going to pull a parallel here with a book that I’m currently reading called How to teach your baby to read. I’m not going to go into the details of why and how, but the thing is that they were actually working with brain damaged children and what they were able to do with them is that they read on a level of a normal child. Now, if we all would be willing to work harder, I’m wondering how much more would we advance. We’re not using our potential and that’s sad.

Shawn

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, interviewed some violin teachers who said that if you compare someone with a lot of talent to someone who’s not as talented but is putting in more practice hours, they will be way better in five years. It doesn’t matter what you start with as much as how much you practice. Of course, practice is not just repetition, it’s also doing something while intentionally paying attention to what you’re doing and noticing the outcome and making adjustments and so on. That’s known as deliberate practice.

Nikola

We’ve derailed this podcast from StackOverflow, but I want to say that I have on my website three basic quotes that I love and one of them is:

hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard

Conclusion

Nikola

Definitely create a StackOverflow account. Before you ask any questions please read the FAQ, and please try to be as thorough as possible. Many times you will find out that by asking a question in the concise way you will actually find out the answer yourself. Pro tip: don’t try get points in a very established language, try to do it in some new language/areas/framework.

Shawn

Do it, as it can’t hurt. If you like to help people anyway, you might as well get a little credit for it. It can also be addictive, and a good way to pass the time. If you’re going to be online watching YouTube videos and clicking funny memes and things like that and wasting your time and not being productive, you might as well spend that time on StackOverflow helping others because it feels really good and on top of that if you’ve ever done it you learn so much by teaching and helping others.

Our profession is so huge and wide that even if you’re an expert in a language you use every day, you don’t use every single aspect of it based on the industry you work in, or you know other factors so sometimes someone asks a little question that’s seems easy and you’ll learn a little bit better about that you learn about the tools you use everyday so definitely go for it.

TL;DR

• In software, daily learning is the real career cheat code.
• Use the Feynman technique to turn “I think I get it” into real understanding.
• Read less, summarize more (processing beats re-reading).
• Apply the 30‑second rule: summarize right after reading, in your own words.
• Use a Mind Palace (Ramon Campayo style) for flows/lists you must recall fast (e.g., OAuth, some architecture, etc.).

As pompous as it may sound, we do need to work on ourselves, or we’re just gonna fall behind. There’s no stagnation in learning; it’s only going downhill.

And in software engineering, that’s not motivational woohoo new age stuff; it’s just a reality. The tools change, the “best practices” change, and the stuff you learned two years ago might now be a footnote in a migration guide. And don’t even get me started on all the AI tools (or let alone models)…

So if you opted for a software engineering field (and, I hope, for good reasons – $$$ not being one of them), one would expect from you that you have it clear in your mind that you’re in for the long run and for life-long learning. You’ve heard this one; it’s a marathon…

Here I’m going to share few of the techniques that I picked up along that long way, and will be updating the post once I find something new and useful.

The goal isn’t to “learn everything” (because… good luck with that 😅). The goal is to build a habit that compounds. Ten minutes a day beats a weekend binge once a month — especially if you actually retain what you learn.

Let’s get into the techniques.

The Feynman technique

This one is simple, slightly uncomfortable (in a good way), and brutally effective.

Step 1. Choose the concept you want to understand

Take a blank piece of paper and write that concept at the top of the page.

Step 2. Pretend you’re teaching the idea to someone else

Write out an explanation of the topic, as if you were trying to teach it to a new student.

When you explain the idea this way you get a better idea of what you understand and where you might have some gaps.

Step 3. If you get stuck, go back to the book

Whenever you get stuck, go back to the source material and re-learn that part of the material until you get it enough that you can explain it on paper.

Step 4. Simplify your language

The goal is to use your words, not the words of the source material.

If your explanation is wordy or confusing, that’s an indication that you might not understand the idea as well as you thought – try to simplify the language or create an analogy to better understand it.

Quick takeaway: if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough yet. And that’s fine — now you know exactly what to fix.

Read less, but process more

It’s better to read 10 pages and then write your own summary of it than to read 10 pages 5 times.

This is one of those things that sounds obvious, but most of us still don’t do it. We re-read because it feels productive. But writing a short summary forces your brain to do the actual work.

⚠️ No, AI sumarizing it for you just isn’t the same thing.

If you want a tiny routine that works:

1. Read 5–10 pages (or one article).
2. Close it.
3. Write 5–10 bullet points in your own words.
4. Bonus: write one “so what?” sentence (why this matters).

That’s it. Not fancy, but works like a charm.

The 30-second rule

This one is actually an addendum to the one above. Right after you read an article sum it up in 30 seconds in your own words.

I love this because it’s so small you can’t really complain you “don’t have time”.

Right after you finish reading, ask yourself:

• What was this about?
• What’s the main idea?
• What will I do differently because of it?

Then say it out loud, or type it into Notes / Notion / a journal / Slack DM to yourself / add it to SOUL.md. Whatever. Just make it yours.

And voilà — your brain gets a “hey, this matters” signal.

Memory Palace

Think of it as saving knowledge into a “place” you can walk through later.

How it works:

• Pick a place you know well (your apartment, your office, your route to the gym).
• Choose 5–10 fixed “stations” in it (door, couch, kitchen sink, balcony…).
• Attach each thing you want to remember to one station using a vivid, slightly ridiculous image.
• To recall: mentally walk through the place and “see” each station again.

Your brain is insanely good at remembering places + visuals, so we’re basically cheating by storing information in that format.

Example: memorizing the OAuth authorization code flow

Let’s say you keep mixing up the steps. Put them into your apartment:

1. Front door → User clicks “Sign in with Google” (imagine a giant Google logo as a doormat).
2. Hallway mirror → Redirect to Authorization Server (mirror “redirects” you somewhere else).
3. Couch → User consents (a big “Allow” button is sitting on the couch).
4. Kitchen sink → Authorization code returned to your app (a “CODE” label floating in the water).
5. Fridge → App exchanges code for tokens (fridge opens and spits out “ACCESS TOKEN” and “REFRESH TOKEN” cans).

Now when you need it, you don’t “remember text” — you just walk through your apartment and the steps pop out.

Where this shines:

• flows (auth, payments, onboarding)
• checklists (incident response, release steps)
• “I always forget the order” problems

You may want to dig into this one a bit more, and here is a great book to do so: Moonwalking with Einstein.

F motivation -> make it automatic

Here’s the part most people skip: make daily learning automatic.

A simple setup:

• Pick a daily slot: right after coffee, during lunch, before bed (IMHO, the hardest, and I don’t recommend it for anything except light reading to fall asleep easier).
• Pick a tiny goal: 10 minutes, 1 article, 5 pages, 1 concept.
• Pick a capture format: one note per day (title + 5 bullets).

If you want the lowest friction version: do the 30-second rule only. Every day. No excuses. Even on days when you’re tired and your brain feels like mashed potatoes.

Conclusion

You don’t need to “go hard” to get better. You need to be consistent.

Working on yourself daily is basically the job description in software engineering. The tech changes, the tools change, the expectations change — but the habit of learning daily keeps you steady. Even if AI does "take our jobs", being someone who can grasp/learn things quickly is going to be a differentiator.

Use the Feynman technique when you want real understanding, use short summaries to retain more, use the 30-second rule to make it effortless, and sprinkle in memory techniques like the mind palace when you want to remember more than your brain would normally allow.

Like I said, I’ll keep updating this post once I find something new and useful.

If you’ve got something that made a difference for you, hit me up in the comments 👍