Category: Life

The Courage to be Disliked overview

I bought this book recently and went through it in a single weekend. It reads very easily. The book is a dialogue between a philosopher and a young person; naturally, in the beginning, the young person is very skeptical about what the philosopher has to say. They discuss philosophical and psychological concepts in five days, and each day is a separate chapter, whereas each chapter is 40 pages on average.

The authors are mainly inspired by the psychologist Alfred Adler and use many of his concepts/ideas, but they also find inspiration in Socrates, Platon, Aristotle.

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Some thoughts on recent self-reflections

As I reflect on my pattern of thoughts lately, I noticed how I often “step out” and think of things at a higher level, e.g., trying to justify some justifications, etc. Where does this change come from? I’d assume it has to do with me reading a lot of philosophy lately 🙂 I’ll post some brief random thoughts here about this matter.

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First talk on DevEx & DevRel

At the WordPress 31st Skopje Meetup, my friend and I presented on the topic of DevEx & DevRel.

Here is a brief summary of some of the stuff we talked about:

  • There is no single definition of DevEx/DevRel. Our take is that it’s like a tourist guide that spreads the word (company culture) across.
  • It can be seen as an engineering intersection with one or more of {HR, Marketing, Product, Community, Content}
  • The three pillars Product+Community+Content are useful fictions and a lot of stuff overlaps between these
    • Community: meetups, conferences, workshops, hiring, mentorship…
    • Content: blogging, documentation, tutorials, podcasts, talks…
    • Product: coding examples, integrations, collecting and applying feedback, tooling, processes…
  • Developers by nature are skeptical folks * – we can achieve much more by doing “indirect marketing” (things such as mentorship, bottle pickup, content writing, etc.) with the hope they follow along and improve – more specifically, they see “by example” why some things are useful doing and they eventually start doing it themselves. This approach is in contrast with e.g. “let’s actively teach you [X] so that you will be better at [Y]”, where I think this will repel more than attract.
  • DevEx exists because of the intersectional voids between engineering and [X]. Building relations/partnerships helps fill these voids.
  • Measure success in terms of lifetime value rather than OKRs – you can measure how many fishes someone fished but you can’t really measure how you taught someone to fish.
  • Why DevEx/mentorship: Third perspective argument – developers get easily stuck in a cycle when programming (focused work) and it is easy to “forget” the big picture.

* This argument is of the form “Everybody is a skeptic” – you either agree with it, or you don’t, which proves the point in any case. One can argue it’s an unfair argument 🙂

Philosophy and critical thinking overview

I recently completed Philosophy and Critical Thinking (Syllabus), an edX course. The course took about 2 weeks, on and off. This is my second course in philosophy, and my earlier writing on a previous course can be found here.

The course contains 6 modules in total. The format is, for each module there are submodules, and most submodules have text that explains the ideas, accompanied by videos that are a distilled version of the text. Finally, each module includes a graded quiz. The course intertwines philosophy (philosophical ideas i.e. who said what at some point) and critical thinking (logic).

(Meta) The way I consumed the contents:

  • Skimming through the texts, including ChatGPT section summaries (this was particularly useful)
  • Watching all videos
  • Taking notes (thus this blog post)

(Meta Meta) Talking about the way I consumed the content gives more information about what my actions might have been during the course 🙂

In this blog post, I will briefly overview the ideas being discussed.

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