Tagged: excellence

Sean Goedecke:

The difference between a “smart” engineer and a “strong” engineer is how they react to problems that aren’t solved instantly. A smart engineer might flail and struggle, hoping to find that flash of insight that eluded them; a strong engineer will have some process for methodically plodding away.

What skill do these smart engineers lack? I think it’s the ability to think slowly and clearly. Smart engineers can think clearly, but they can only think clearly at high speed. Strong engineers can think clearly all the time, even if their highest speed isn’t quite as fast. It’s like the difference between a Formula 1 car and a regular car: Formula 1 cars have a high top speed, but you couldn’t drive them in traffic, because the tyres and brakes don’t work at normal driving speeds.

“smart” engineers and “strong” engineers is really good phrasing and gives vocabulary for something that is otherwise not straightforward to describe.

Thorsten Ball:

Here's what I consider to be the basics. I call them that not because they're easy, but because they're fundamental. The foundation on which your advanced skills and expertise rest. Multipliers and nullifiers, makers and breakers of everything you do.

They don't usually show up in technical books and yet without them a lot of brilliant effort can go to waste. I constantly have to remind myself of them, sitting on my own shoulder and wagging a finger in my face.

What a great set of obvious but seldom articulated things that every developer would do well to go through at some regular interval (because these are easy to forget, especially in this age of agentic engineering).

This is an old post that I discovered through last Sunday's Joy & Curiosity, Thorsten Ball's weekly round up of really wonderful links (a lot of them focused on agentic engineering, given Thorsten is building Amp, which I've heard described as the Porsche of coding agents).

I had come across this old lecture from Richard Hamming before but never watched it. But I had multiple people recommending it on Xitter in just the last day, including Paul Graham. Thorsten Ball (of Amp Code) recommended it in his excellent Joy & Curiosity newsletter today, and I had to watch it.

What an excellent talk covering such a wide array of topics, but all towards an exhortation for how to be great. I watched the entire thing at 1x speed. Yes, it's that good!