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

• 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 👍

⚠️ I wrote this in 2016 (yes, 10 years ago), and never actually hit publish 🤦

I found it now while I was going through my drafts. What’s funny is that it holds true today more than ever…

So, I’m hitting publish this time:

The title is a quote by the ever-so-slightly-great Warren Buffett, and it’s worth repeating:

Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful

See, today (11.11.2016) I got a taste of that medicine. As you may know, yesterday my fellow Americans voted in a new president, and I thought the dollar would plummet. Quickly, after reading a few headlines, I rushed to convert all my hard-earned $ into my local currency. However, what do you know — by the end of the day, the market “welcomed” this, and if I had just waited one day to see whether it would fall further, I could’ve exchanged then. Instead, I missed out on 0.7% in just one day.

The percentage may sound funny to you; however, given the amount, I learned a valuable lesson the hard way. And, as it seems, those are the only ones that “stick”.

In hope of a better future self; I wish you well, dear Padawan.

It seems that we’ve turned into mere “headline readers,” without even reading the content — let alone reading a book on the topic, or, God forbid, spending some time researching the subject. All we do is read the headline and immediately form an opinion. That doesn’t sound too scientific to me.

So, dear people, please read and research more. Oh, and on that point of research: I’m not talking about “I hold one opinion, let’s Google that and see what I find.” I can guarantee you’ll find websites that affirm your thoughts. However, did you know there are so-called “content generators” that create content so searchers like you find it — boosting view counts and helping dumb us down as a race?

We’ve got to snap out of this Matrix.

You know that moment when you’re staring at a branch named feature/whatever and thinking:

"Cool… but what was this branched off from?"

Maybe you’re cleaning up old branches, reviewing a PR, or trying to figure out why feature/foo contains commits from three different universes. Either way: Git doesn’t explicitly store "parent branch" metadata (because branches are just pointers to commits). But we can usually infer it.

In this post, we’ll use a practical one-liner that prints the most likely parent branch of your current branch.

What we’re building

A small command that you can run on any branch to get a best-guess "parent branch" name.

Here’s the solution:

git show-branch | sed "s/].*//" | grep "\*" | grep -v "$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)" | head -n1 | sed "s/^.*\[//"

If you like, you can wrap it in a function later so it’s easier to run. But first, let’s understand what’s going on.

The command (run it on the branch you’re investigating)

Step 1: checkout the branch:

git checkout feature/my-branch

Step 2: run the one-liner:

git show-branch | sed "s/].*//" | grep "\*" | grep -v "$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)" | head -n1 | sed "s/^.*\[//"

What you’ll get back

Something like:

main

Meaning: "Given what I see in the commit graph, main looks like the most likely branch this one came from."

And voilà, your repo just got a little less mysterious.

How it works (without turning this into a PhD)

This is a pipeline. Each part trims the output until we’re left with a single branch name.

1) git show-branch

This command prints a compact view of commits and the branches they belong to. It’s useful when you want to compare branches and see where they intersect.

The raw output is noisy, but it includes bracketed branch names like:

* [main] ...
 ! [feature/my-branch] ...

2) sed "s/].*//"

This removes everything after the ], leaving just:

* [main
 ! [feature/my-branch

We’re basically stripping commit messages and keeping only the branch label portion.

3) grep "\*"

This keeps only lines containing *.

In git show-branch output, * is used to highlight a particular row of interest across branches (in practice, it helps narrow candidates to "closest" related branches).

4) grep -v "$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)"

Now we remove the current branch name from the list.

Because if Git returns your branch as its own parent, that’s not helpful (and slightly insulting).

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD prints the current branch name, so this part is a clean "exclude me".

5) head -n1

We take the first remaining match—basically the best candidate from the top.

This is one reason I call the output a "best guess". It’s a very useful guess, but it’s still based on how git show-branch orders things.

6) sed "s/^.*\[//"

Finally, remove everything up to the [, so we’re left with just:

main

Quick recap ✅

At this point, you have a one-liner that prints the most likely parent branch, a quick way to sanity-check where a feature branch probably started, and a decent understanding of the pipe magic so it doesn’t feel like copy-paste sorcery.

Make it easier to use (optional but recommended)

If you find yourself using this often, add a helper function to your shell config (~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc):

git-parent() {
  git show-branch \
    | sed "s/].*//" \
    | grep "\*" \
    | grep -v "$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)" \
    | head -n1 \
    | sed "s/^.*\[//"
}

Now you can just run:

git-parent

Much nicer.

Caveats (because Git is Git)

This works best when your repo follows a normal branching model (feature branches off main/master/develop), when you have the relevant branches locally (run git fetch --all if needed), and when your history hasn’t been heavily rewritten in weird ways.

Things that can confuse "parent branch" inference: rebasing after branching, lots of cherry-picks from multiple branches, branching off a feature branch and then merging from other places, or when the real parent branch was deleted.

So treat the output as: "most likely parent branch", not a guaranteed truth.

Want to read more?

If you want to go beyond "best guess" and explore exact branch points, merge-bases, fork-points, and different strategies, these two Stack Overflow threads are gold:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1527234/finding-a-branch-point-with-git

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3161204/find-the-parent-branch-of-a-git-branch

Final thoughts

Git doesn’t store a "parent branch", but with the commit graph and a bit of filtering, you can usually infer it quickly:

git show-branch | sed "s/].*//" | grep "\*" | grep -v "$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)" | head -n1 | sed "s/^.*\[//"

Next time someone asks "where did this branch come from?", you’ll have an answer—and you won’t even need to blame your coworker. 😉

TL;DR

Over the past few days I started getting a bunch of weird error emails in my inbox from, what seemed to be, SendGrid. The subjects all looked technical; things like “API Endpoint Failure” or “messages are not processing via /v1/send”. Enough to make any developer raise an eyebrow 🤨

What’s going on is simple: some mail servers seem to have been compromised over the holidays and a bunch of not-so-nice people are sending phishing emails posing as SendGrid.

Now, if you’re not using SendGrid, you’d probably ignore them right away.

However, the goal is to get you to click a link that leads to a page that looks exactly like the real SendGrid login — and if you’re not careful, enter your real credentials (which they’ll happily store for future use 😅).

What makes this unusual is that Google hasn’t flagged these as spam yet, so be wary.

What You Should Do

• Don’t click any links in the message.
• Mark the message as spam or phishing in your email client.
• If you do use the service, open your dashboard manually and check logs rather than clicking through the email.

Examples

Here are just some examples, so you can get an idea of what to look for. One common sign is that the email claims to be from SendGrid, but the domain in the “signed-by” field is something you’ve never heard of.

Conclusion

Remember, always, always, always check the actual From in an email if it looks remotely shady.

Stay safe!

TL;DR

Here’s a very long list of retrospective questions which, if used wisely and seldomly (at least twice per year; at most monthly), can help you spot patterns and behaviors you may want to address.

As a pro tip, get a notebook where you’ll be answering all these questions. Yeah, I know, probably a better idea nowadays would be to store it digitally and then feed it into ChatGPT for some conclusions, but there’s still something with actually writing stuff down by hand (you can still OCR it if your writing is readable 🙂).

Anyways, hope this proves to be useful on your improvement path 💪

Disclaimer: I’m not the author of these questions. But, for the life of me, I can’t remember where I got these from (yes, I Googled and ChatGPT-ed). If you do, please ping me an I’ll update the post.

The Questions™

1. Who am I?
2. Am I living the life I want? Why yes or why no?
3. If I had 1 year to live, what would I do?
4. If I had 1 month to live, what would I do?
5. If I had 1 week to live, what would I do?
6. If I had 1 day to live, what would I do?
7. If I had 1 hour to live, what would I do?
8. If I had 1 minute to live, what would I do?
9. What would I regret the most if I died right now?
10. What advice would I give to myself 3 years ago?
11. What advice would I give to myself 1 year ago?
12. What advice would I give to myself 1 month ago?
13. What advice would I give to myself 1 week ago?
14. What had to be done yesterday, and I didn’t do it?
15. What do I want to achieve until the end of my life?
16. What do I want to achieve in 5 years?
17. What do I want to achieve in 3 years?
18. What do I want to achieve in 1 year?
19. What do I want to stay remembered for?
20. Why are these things important to me?
21. What is stopping me and how can I achieve them?
22. Do I know people that achieved similar goals?
23. What opportunities am I seeing in my environment, and how can I use them?
24. Have my recent activities brought me closer to my goals?
25. What do I need to do in the next week to get closer to completing my goals?
26. What’s my biggest priority for next week?
27. What will I do about it?
28. What can I do so that the following week will be less stressful?
29. What was I avoiding to do, and it had to be done?
30. What prevented me from doing that?
31. What were my wins in the last week?
32. What did I learn in the last week?
33. What moment was unforgettable in the last week and why?
34. What am I grateful for?
35. Do I love my self, and why?
36. What is the one thing I could do for free till the rest of my life?
37. Do I like what I do, or am I at least trying to make it work?
38. What’s my biggest fear? How can I overcome it?
39. Who are the 5 people that I spend the most time with?
40. Do these people motivate or limit me?
41. Who inspires/motivates me the most currently? Why?
42. Who’s the most important person in my life, and have I dedicated her/him enough of my time?
43. Who am I going to dedicate the time in the next week?
44. Who deserves my gratitude this week?
45. How, whom and why can I help?
46. Have I dedicated enough time to myself?
47. Which habits should I keep on enforcing?
48. Which habits should I get rid of?
49. What was the time sink last week?
50. Is this what I do today be important in 1 year?
51. Is this what I do today be important in 3 years?
52. Is this what I do today be important in 5 years?
53. What can I simplify in my life?
54. What can I delegate in the next week and to whom?
55. If life is so short, why do we do so many things we don’t like and like so many things we’re not doing?
56. When all’s said and done, will you have the feeling that you said more than did?
57. If the average human life span would be 40 years – how would you live your life?
58. How much of your life’s path are you controlling?
59. If you could offer one advice to the newborn (presuming it could understand you I guess), what would it be?
60. Who would you like to have as a mentor in your life? How can you get to this person?
61. Is there something you didn’t do, and you really want to do it? What’s stopping you?
62. What would I do if I had no limits in terms of money, time and resources?
63. If you had to move to a different country, what would it be?
64. Would you rather be a worried genius or a happy fool?
65. Are you the sort of friend you’d like to have?
66. Has your greatest fear ever come true?
67. Do you remember a time 5 years ago when you were really stressed about something – is this important today?
68. If you win a lottery would you quit your job and why?
69. Do you feel like you’ve lived today’s day 100 times?
70. If I had a million $, what would I do and why?
71. If everyone you know would die tomorrow, who would you visit today?
72. Would you be willing to lower your life expectancy for 10 years in an exchange for being extremely pretty and famous?
73. Where did you live primarily in the past week? In the past, present or future?
74. If I had more guts, willing to take any risk, what would I do?
75. Decisions are made here and now. Are you making your decisions or are they being made for you?
76. What’s the purpose of my life?
77. What will I do right now so that I would live a life with purpose?
78. Is the current work I do meaningful for me?
79. Is this job going to give me a chance to develop?
80. Am I going to learn new things?
81. Will I have the opportunity for recognition and achievement?
82. Am I going to be given responsibility?

Dude, this is too much

If these feel too much, it’s because they should. Improvement doesn’t come from thinking about your life for 2 minutes. Nor 20 (although a great step up from 2, or worse yet: 0). It usually takes me about an hour and a half to go through these and write them down. YMMV.

However, since you won’t be going through the whole list weekly, here are a few to ask yourself on a weekly basis (ideally when you prep your next weeks’ agenda):

1. What’s my biggest priority for next week?
2. What will I do about it?
3. What can I do so that the following week will be less stressful?

Protip: work on that biggest thing (as Brian Tracy says: eat that frog!) first thing in the morning!

Conclusion

Really, there’s not much to say here other than to challenge you to do it and see if it moves the needle for you in your life. Good luck!

…was pleasantly surprised to receive this in the mail today. Yes, snail mail 🙂

Thanks to dev.to for being thoughtful.

The post that got me the top author award was: Getting started with React by building a Pokemon search application

Happy Saturday!

TL;DR

Beware of the crypto scams. Here I’m just sharing one that I just got from a site I never even heard of. Still not clear what could they do with my IBAN – assuming it’s just the first step in them trying to extract more info…

Anyways, stay careful 🤗

!TL;DR

The Email

Just so that this hopefully gets picked up by Google and people see it before it hits their email, I’m sharing the text of the email in full:

Dobar dan, I sam Monika Verbic, i predstavljam tvrtku Firebocks. Želim vas obavijestiti da imate neaktivan račun u našem sustavu koji je automatski otvoren 2019. godine.

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/bc1q4cyj5ucd9xenehxyjjm24ycv84c44c4eyf50r8

Na taj račun je uplaćen bonus u iznosu od 250 eura koji ste dobili prilikom registracije. Nakon toga ste aktivirali sesiju automatskog trgovanja, a naš robot je obavljao trgovinske operacije na vašem računu tijekom 5 godina. Zahvaljujući rastu vrijednosti kriptovaluta u tom razdoblju, saldo vašeg računa trenutno iznosi 4670 eura.

Sesija trgovanja je završena, a prema pravilima naše tvrtke, registraciju je potrebno zatvoriti. Međutim, zatvaranje nije moguće dok na računu postoji pozitivan saldo. Zbog toga je potrebno prebaciti sredstva s ovog računa na vaš bankovni račun kako bi se registracija mogla uspješno zaključiti i izbjegli dodatni troškovi provizije.

Molimo vas da nam dostavite IBAN legalnog hrvatskog računa na koji želite primiti sredstva kako bismo mogli izvršiti prijenos. Ako imate bilo kakvih pitanja ili trebate dodatne informacije, slobodno mi se obratite u bilo kojem trenutku.

Hvala vam na suradnji!

—
Monika Verbic
Manager Fireblocks
https://www.fireblocks.com/

The crazy part? Someone who claimed to be Monika called me just before this email was sent (I hung up the phone as soon as the person started saying "you have a trading account with us…").

As crypto is becommoing more lucrative and even a household name, it’s not surprising that the scams are picking up in volume and also becoming increasingly sophisticated. Malicious actors continually find new ways to deceive unsuspecting victims. Recently, I received an email that’s a textbook example of a scam, and I want to share this experience to help you avoid falling for similar traps.

Too Good to Be True

The email, which claimed to be from a company called "Fireblocks," stated that I had an inactive account with a balance of 4,670 euros, earned through a supposed cryptocurrency trading bot. The message seemed professional and convincing at first glance, complete with links to a Bitcoin wallet and a seemingly legitimate website.

The twist? To "retrieve" the funds, they requested my IBAN (bank account information). This is a classic phishing technique—luring you in with promises of a large payout while stealing sensitive financial details.

Red Flags in the Email

• I never signed up for such a service or company
• Legitimate companies won’t ask for sensitive details like your IBAN over email.
• Promises of free money are almost always scams
• While the email included a link to a Bitcoin address and the company website, these are likely designed to create a false sense of legitimacy
• Use of the letter "I" instead of "ja" in Croatian language
• Misspelled name of the actual company
• Use of a private Gmail account, instead of one coming from a company domain

How to Protect Yourself

• Verify the Sender: Check the email address carefully. In this case, the address was from a generic domain, not an official company domain
• Don’t Click on Links: Hover over links to see their true destination before clicking. Avoid clicking links in unsolicited emails altogether
• Contact the Company Directly: If you suspect the email might be legitimate, visit the company’s official website and contact them through their verified channels
• Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Secure your accounts with MFA to make them harder to breach
• Educate Yourself: Learn about common scam tactics to recognize them quickly

What to Do If You Receive a Scam Email

• Do Not Respond: Never reply or provide personal information.
• Mark as Spam: Flag the email to help your email provider filter similar scams.
• Report It: Notify your local cybersecurity authority or anti-fraud organization.
• Spread Awareness: Share your experience with friends and family to protect them.

Final Thoughts

Scammers rely on a lack of awareness to succeed. By staying informed and vigilant, you can avoid falling victim to their tactics. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

If you’ve encountered similar scams or want to share tips for staying safe online, feel free to comment below!

TL;DR

Today marks 5 years of me being on dev.to. In general, I gotta say that I like the community (I just got this nice badge, so what’s not to like 🙂), and wish to be on the platform 5 years from now too.

Stats

I like stats (and working towards improving them), so I’ll share my stats from these 5 years:

• Posts: 92
• Total post reactions: 847
• Total post views: 273,102
• Followers: 2895
• Following users: 36

Top 5 most viewed blog posts

• Making AJAX calls in pure JavaScript, the old way – 93k views
• How to make a native Android app that can block phone calls – 24k views
• Git branching done right with Gitflow & improving code quality with code reviews – 19k views
• JWT authentication in an Angular application with a Go backend – 16k views
• How to get started with Ionic framework 3 on Mac and Windows – 12k views

Personal favorites that, IMHO, could use a bit more view-love

• Learn Git fast as if your job depends on it – 12k views
• How to ‘make it’ as a remote developer? – 273 views
• Too many books, not enough time – 237 views

Daily-Thought Series

Recently, I started a new daily-thought series where I post a tweet-like tiny blog post entry every day. The post that got the most exposure in that series was Knowing != Doing. Please feel free to check out the rest and chime in on the discussion.

Learnings

I shared a bunch of learnings from when I published my 300th blog post on my blog.

One thing that still holds to this day is the consistency. What you’re consistent with, you will improve.

The gaming industry is changing rapidly, with more users than ever before turning to online games.

Some play games with friends on a console, playing titles such as Call of Duty or Fortnite. Others use gaming to meet new people, whilst some replace activities they used to do at a physical location with a virtual experience, such as going to a casino.

The iGaming market, which incorporates online slots and casinos, saw a significant rise in 2020, courtesy of the pandemic. In Croatia, the iGaming market has increased by more than 300% since the start of the century, with European Gaming estimating it is worth more than €360m (HRK 2.6bn). With GiG moving into the country recently, that means lots of opportunity for online gaming providers, and therefore for those involved in coding and developing such games.

If you are interested in coding for an online provider, there are three fundamental rules to remember. Hopefully, these will give you a good starting point when deciding whether iGaming coding and development is for you.

Regulations

The first thing to remember is that iGaming is heavily regulated worldwide, and you need to understand the country you are coding for, not the one you are coding in. Much of this is around Random Number Generators, RNGs, which operate at the heart of every online casino. Techopedia explains that an RNG is a mathematical construct that generates a number without a discernable pattern, hence being called random. Some countries are strict on how the RNGs work, what information must be displayed on-screen and other requirements. In the United States, a growing market for the iGaming industry, those regulations can vary from state to state.

Design is Key

When online casinos first appeared, they were rather basic designs, focusing on gameplay rather than the user experience. Much of that has changed, especially with such a wide variation of online slots and different games available. The user experience must be smooth and facilitate access to a wide range of games. It must not be chaotic, cluttered or unappealing. In terms of basic design, Gala Bingo displays top titles such as Fiery Wilds and Big Banker on their homepage, with options for users to drill down further into each section for even more titles. Those sections contain many more titles, but if they were displayed on the main screen, it might become too busy to navigate. Also, the design of games has changed over the years, with users expecting a solid visual experience from their gameplay and dynamic sound. All of this is worth considering if you begin to code for a provider – are your skills up to the task?

Bugs

Generally, games released on a console can have a few bugs at launch. Cyberpunk might have bombed because of several problems, but titles such as Fallout 76 survived despite being buggy when they first dropped. In the world of iGaming, those bugs need tracking and dealing with very swiftly. You only need to spend a few minutes perusing online casino review sites to discover that bugs or crashes can destroy a brand quickly. Also, if the bug can be exposed by a cheat or someone looking to make some quick money, rest assured they will find a way. Your code needs to be solid, but those bugs need tracking and dealing with immediately.

For more coding advice, tips and news, be sure to pay regular visits to this blog.