One thing I love about the internet is how easy it is to get confused in time. You find a new article that describes the current situation of the world perfectly and then it turns out to be from 2011. I mean, yes, it’s not that far from today. But I argue that if you tell people from 2011 about what happened in the 2020s, they wouldn’t believe you.
Cupcake June 2026 - Brain
This issue is all around the brain. how weird it is and the issues we deal with in our life, both in private and professionally.
- Aeon - Your Brain Does Not Process Information And It Is Not A Computer is a longer, but very interesting read taking a jab at our current idea of how the brain works. I also enjoyed the showcase of how ridicoulous past beliefs about the brain are to us, yet it seems hard to imagine that our current belief is anything but the right one.
- Developer Success Lab - Code Review Anxiety Workbook focuses on a very practical moment in the life of a software developer - giving or receiving a code review. However, the intervention techniques explained in the workbook are valuable in many other situations.
- Change, Technically - You have a bad mental model of learning, a podcast episode with transcript available. Besides attacking a few misbeliefs I had about learning, Ashley and Cat also helped me get out of a plateau phase of my “I will learn guitar” project.
- Support Systems: Mentoring, Coaching, and Therapy, What Sets Them Apart goes into a hands-on explanation of what the difference between therapy, coaching and mentorship are. In my personal experience coaching and mentoring are often used as synonyms, when they are not. There is also no clear border, but it is helpful when you are coaching/mentoring somebody to be generally aware of the differences.
Personal note
When I started my career, one field I really did not want to engage with was politics. The professional drama. Dealing with conflict situations. Or in other words: psychology.
My big issue was that I saw it as something negative. Manipulating people. Which is always bad… or is it? Today, my view has shifted a lot. Understanding how others think is an essential skill to make progress when nothing moves, to achieve alignments faster and to set up whole projects for success. The problem is very rarely technology. We can build almost anything. The problem is getting people aligned on a solution.
As you need different design patterns in System Design, you need tools to deal with people effectively. The more tools you have and the better you understand them, the better you can react to a new situation. This means psychology and behavioural science are not just weird fields that exist - They are exciting and interesting topics that you should keep an eye on, as they can give you a real boost in your life.