In the past few days, some of my articles have really hit a chord on reddit and hacker news. I'm stoked to see them helping people. And they've led to a lot of new faces on the newsletter this week.
Zain Rizvi
Software Engineer with over a decade of experience. Building the infrastructure used by millions of developers around the world. I helped build GCP and Azure. Nowadays I'm building Stripe.
Taking my own Advice
You’ve heard how the best way to learn is by teaching, right? Wrong. Try grading instead. The single biggest practice that improved my writing was reviewing other people's essays. David Perell made me do it. I took his class
Newsletter #6 - Struggling with Impostor Syndrome
Two years into my first job at Microsoft, I was expecting to be fired. I felt like I wasn't good enough, like I was only pretending to be smart. I spent years desperately trying to hide my incompetence from others.
Newsletter #5 - Keeping side projects alive
Ever notice that it’s much easier to give advice to others than to give advice to yourself? I have a group of friends from my writing class, and every week we offer each other feedback on our essays. It’
How I learned to turn Impostor Syndrome into an Advantage - The Impostor's Advantage
My heart was racing. My palms sweating. I was going to be fired. Performance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?
I couldn’t abandon another side project
I didn't want this to become another abandoned project. By trying to do less stuff, I got more done
Newsletter #4 - Community Edition
Last weekend I had a huge zoom call with my extended family. Parents with nine siblings each equals many, many cousins. I met cousins who I hadn't talked to in years, saw nephews and nieces I've never met, and enjoyed
Effective Altruism is Suboptimal
What a homeless cametaught me about caring for others
Newsletter #3 - Navigating the Workplace
It's amazing how much the simple act of writing down your ideas helps you think 🤯 That happened to me this week. I'm writing an article about altruism (you'll see it next week), and I had originally planned to highlight the
Hacking the Bureaucracy to Get Stuff Done
The Dangerous Professional finds the seams between the policies, and slips inside them to Get Stuff Done
Newsletter #2 - Senior Engineering
Last week I said that I'm taking an online writing class called Write of Passage. What made me sign up for it? Well, I read a lot. I mean a LOT. Like, the-librarian-knows-me-by-name a lot. But often the fascinating stuff
Newsletter #1 - Interview Advice
I recently started David Perell’s course “Write of Passage” It’s an intensive 5 week class teaching how to extract all those thoughts in your head and put them down on paper. It’s a grueling pace, where you