Written and Spoken Ideas.

Chapter notes from Learning Domain-Driven Design Part I: Strategic Design

A true friend is the one who randomly calls or rings your doorbell.

I wish I learned how to invest before I had 10€ to save.

Claude Code develops, opens a pull request Devin reviews and adds comment. Claude addresses comments. Devin reviews again and adds new comments, then Claude addresses, then Devin...

I read a text written by AI in a book. I mean, the AI is kinda right when it says humans are cyborgs already.

Learning from a single AI prompt that cost $35.

Building a personal blog cms app with Claude Code

It's pure joy to use products that do one job and do it well.

Not only learning how to use AI, but also how a team works going forward.

It's not 'do less' or 'earn more money.'

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, Chapters 1-4

A short book focused on overcoming obstacles with Stoic principles.

The context you might be missing can lead to a wrong perception.

How Autonomy and Self-Regulation, Psychological Safety, Cognitive and Emotional Load can help

How Socio-Technical Systems, Institutional Economics and Evolutionary Economics Theories can help

Discovering how problem-solving shapes a journey from computer engineering to leadership

A subtle shift in an Internet user's behavior might change the world.

Is the definition of software engineering changing with AI?

Chasing seniors alone creates an unsustainable system

Confirmation bias in AI usage leads to blind trust and costly errors. Learn how cognitive biases affect decision-making with AI tools and solutions.

Plan thoroughly upfront to execute projects faster later.

A management concept I remind myself often. As a boss, you carry a gun. It's up to you to figure out which size.

How small mistakes often cause incidents, the importance of simple solutions, and leadership's role in fostering quality problem-solving.

I reduced news overload with curated attention: focus locally and preserve compassion through selective awareness.

Reflection on how ego and stubbornness led to focusing on the wrong problem, and the journey of finding the right one.

Only 8-9% of people keep their New Year’s resolutions, but achieving them requires consistent action beyond motivation.

Personal websites offer unique freedom, flexibility, and connection unlike physical creations, balancing creative freedom with challenge of maintenance.

Learning from social media was my excuse to keep consuming while lying down on my couch.

My experiment to live without recommendation engines or algorithmic feeds. The battle against popular culture driven by algorithms.

Leaders often overlook building trust, yet intentional actions can boost team performance. Learn key tools to systematically build trust.

How I balance meetings, solo work, and reflection time. While meetings dominate, uninterrupted time for planning and spontaneous chats is crucial for managers.

Organizational change is inevitable; leaders must adapt, understand they need to let some people go, and create environments where teams thrive with evolution.

Transform complaints into action by asking, 'What do you expect from me?' Foster trust and focus on outcomes in your team.

Discover the meaning of a high bar: ownership, growth, and sustainable excellence. Learn how leaders inspire teams to unlock potential and redefine standards.

Discover the power of withholding judgment to make better decisions, foster understanding, and navigate the complexities of modern information overload. Learn how to pause, assess, and experiment for more informed choices.

The key to successful delegation is that leaders should delegate their strongest skills to people who are both capable and interested in learning them.

Discover how the illusion of transparency affects communication, influencing how our emotions and intentions are perceived by others and shaping our interactions.

A comprehensive framework of six universal principles of influence that drive human behavior.

How engineering managers lead cross-team projects: aligning problems, stakeholders, solutions and everyone in between.

Defining the right mindset and the strategies to set goals correctly

Learning what transparency means and how to find the right level of transparency.

A profound book shows the psychological behaviors' impact on our investment and financial decisions.

Learn the promotion cases holistically. Once you know the rules of the game, you know how to play and win.

I set out to find a simple definition that would help managers frame the fundamental things they expect from software engineers.

A profound book teaches how to extract more information from any book through disciplined reading to transform reading approach by helping to read faster and more effectively.

I changed my mind and will not wait for retirement. Instead, I will focus on aligning financial investments with activities I enjoy till my last breath.

Building a culture of ownership and continuous learning through one-one-ones, delegation, and clear goals, while acknowledging the effort and adaptation needed.

Krishnamurti recommends to reject culture and Seneca says don't follow the crowd. Both are the same but one is more applicable.

Engineers should focus on two fundamentals when giving feedback on UI/UX designs: understanding the users' needs and feasibility.

Learning mental models

JOMO is about the importance of prioritizing meaningful experiences over constantly trying to keep up with popular culture.

Learning how to keep a budget.

My goal is to ensure this is the most helpful email you get in your inbox.

Escaping the News Cycle for Intentional Living

How can I learn from audiobooks while taking walks with my dog?

Focusing on continuation rather than chunking the time.

No page and visitor tracking. What I care about the conversations we have, not analytics.

Differences between ADRs and RFCs in software development. When and how to use each with practical guidance and templates for better decision-making.

When things are chaotic, and there are many unknowns, good leaders approach things differently and systematically, sometimes without knowing.

A small story explaining my realization of the value of knowledge-sharing

A book I used as a think-along partner when I felt the pressure that I have to accomplish all the things waiting for me.

The importance of building a personal library full of unread books.

The importance of close relationships and the impact of social media on relationships

Short Intro to How I Take Notes

Relationships and New Beginnings

Do we have to seek convenience everywhere in our lives? I don't think so. Inconvenience brings the forgotten joy.

When we tried to introduce the Request for Comments (RFC) process to an organization, we failed. Here is what I've learned from my mistakes.

After years of reading about, learning, and trying public speaking in different forms, here is what I have found.

Finding a purpose in life is a difficult journey. Is the journey itself the purpose of life? Or is it something else? Well, I continued searching for why we exist, or at least, why I exist.

Leaders often guide problem-solving in the software and involve themselves in every decision. Instead, they should clarify the goal and bring transparency to problems.

Even the best of us make mistakes. Taking feedback well is aimed at building a healthy growth habit, identifying the best growth path, and keeping the balance while walking down that road.

Linearizability and its trade-offs, ordering guarantees, sequence number ordering, consensus, and coordination services in distributed systems.

Understanding how we can increase our resiliency

'Bet on things that won't change rather than predicting how things will change.' — Jason Cohen

Constraints are everywhere. We live and work with them. There is no other way than to love them. Otherwise, they will chase us and pull us down.

Inspectional reading helps us to learn more about the book before we spend hours on it.

We need to know when to shut up and learn when to talk with a few words that we plant like seeds (not too close to each other, but not too far).

When we learn something, does it mean we understand it? How can we say we understand?

How I stopped using Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon for 2+ months.

Why and What it Means

My previous teams performed because of the ownership, autonomy, inclusive environment, people-first and full-of-feedback culture, and no over-time and no over-commitment policies we had.

John Doerr explains OKRs (Objective and Key Results) with many examples from Gates Foundation to Bono and how OKRs help organizations succeed.

I cannot read every book. I buy more books than I can read. I'm not counting my wish list even. I have enough books to keep me reading for the next five years. But how do I get to the end of this pile?

Chesterton invites us to think about the rationale behind an earlier decision and take action only after we understand why there was a decision in the first place.

When I wrote you the last time about the myth of multitasking, I talked about our attention limit having a value of only one cognitive task. Today, I want to double-click on that attention-demanding creative task and connect it to the quality of results.

How should you deal with annoying tenure engineers and get unstuck? Blocking tenure engineers should become counselors of innovation and development.

Two earthquakes took the lives of thousands of people (40k+) and impacted millions in Turkey. And I want to talk about how it feels being here in Germany, far away from all of the impacts.

The impact of modernization and colonization on Kenya

This is the 50th issue, and I thought it would be good to talk about habits and how I kept my writing habit to bring Mektup to you every second week.

There are three types of feedback: Appreciation, Evaluation, and Coaching.

How to write effective messages on Slack, Confluence, and Google Docs to convince people? How to build strong arguments in writing at work?

The most common and known problems and challenges of Distributed Systems.

How would you explain the 'Shift Left on Security' to a five-year-old?

New year's resolutions, new habits, happiness, and thinking about balanced living.

While we can improve our decision-making skills by learning methodologies and mental models and practicing mindfulness, one shortcut helps the most.

Ed Sheeran uses the pipe with one faucet analogy. If you're using the pipe for the first time, the first water that comes out is always dirty. You have to push out all the dirt to reach clean water.

Do you feel overwhelmed by the distractions at work that don't let you do your job? How many times did your 'focus time blockers' get interrupted? When was the last time did you think about your energy, not only your time?

Database transactions are a way to simplify the programming model, and they offer certain safety guarantees for specific errors and fault scenarios.

Team Topologies book is driven by Conway's Law and Inverse Conway Maneuver to help us understand how teams collaborate and communicate.

We all have daily routines: some of them are tedious, and some of them are delightful. But we're not destined to live ordinary and miserable. Ritualizing gives a sense of satisfaction to the most tedious and regular activities.

Everybody talks about managing time to get more things done. Yet, I rarely found conversations around managing energy to get the right thing done.

Two strategies to help explain technical things to non-technical people.

I can finally say I have reached the end, and I'm finishing my research and experiments with note-taking apps. I share what I learned in this post and explain how things have changed.

The only thing we, you and I, can do to impact how we change is to choose a direction. We can decide in which way we want to evolve. And that way has to be kindness.

I started going to the office again, even though it was not mandatory. And that reminded me of a few things about remote work and office work.

Partitioning with primary or secondary keys, rebalancing partitions & trade-offs and how to solve them and the pros and cons of each approach.

I'm starting as an Engineering Manager at SumUp! Today is my first day, and I'm excited to join this fantastic team.

Today, I want to reflect on the past ~2 years of Mektup and share some news with you. It's a bit longer than usual but keep reading till the end.

What are the hiring managers looking for in behavioral interviews? How to better answer their questions?

How do we know that we're on the right track? How can we ensure that we're progressing in the right direction?

Avoid Snack Work

Hidden monoliths are everywhere and affect the software system design. When the organization is aware of its software's environment, it can thrive. If not, it faces various challenges.

How to choose what to delegate?

Choosing who to delegate requires thinking

The underlying approach to encoding and decoding decides how we approach data evolution and how we use schemas.

Replication is keeping the copies of data between multiple machines that are connected via a network.

The difference between questioning and asking.

At the fundamental of any database, it stores data when we give it and retrieves data when we ask for it. These fundamentals require different data structures.

The biggest leadership development happens with solving internal challenges, not external challenges. If we want to create a healthy work environment and keep the team motivated, we have to develop effective leadership skills.

The relational, document-based, and graph-based data models are the fundamentals of understanding data-intensive applications along with query languages.

Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order. — Patrick Winston

Understanding how they work is fundamental to developing data-intensive applications. This knowledge impacts our design choices, and the basics of these features demand an understanding of reliability, scalability, and maintainability.

When you use any drugs, have you thought about the background of it, about people dying and suffering?

Some people learn the best when they take responsibility. When blame absorbers are not mindful or misguided, this behavior goes out of its way.

Think Again is the book by The New York Times Bestselling Author Adam Grant. I've read it with a book club and written my summary, notes, and review.

Work is not something of who you are; it's something you do

Some people avoid conflicts thinking that they brake harmony and create problems. Some people create relationship conflicts because relationships are more important than work. And some people create task conflicts while thinking it will also improve their relationships.

I have been trying to optimize my life for a while. If I search about productivity and life organization, Google shows me almost four billion pages. I have read many of them while hoping they will help me.

At first glance, blame absorbers look good because it shows that the person owns their work and has a sense of responsibility. However, we often don’t notice that they harm the team more than bring an advantage.

Don't fire people when they fail. Encourage them to fail fast and ensure responsibilities are balanced.

Reorganizations and restructurings demand a clear understanding of the reasons and require good storytelling skills to convince people.

I cried over the last week. I cried with different feelings. The wars create many different feelings in us. It creates conflicts within us. I cried a lot over the last week. This time, I know why I cried.

If you ask me my advice would be to mid-level software engineers these days, it would be to stay where you are if you don’t have a stressful problem and if you’re learning.

Do we know how to live? Are we expecting to have a great life because we're morally good? Do we know how to fight? Learning how to fight separates the good people from the winning people.

Empathetic leadership improves leaders' emotional intelligence, which is a fundamental skill for leadership development and better mental health.

Why is software engineering hard? Do we confuse the profession? Is software engineering really engineering? Or is it art? How does innovation play a role?

Make Time is written by the bestselling authors Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, the authors of Sprint: Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.

Solely encouraging people to create team spirit never works, especially for new teams. The manager has to give the team a goal and celebrate achievements.

In one of my previous delayed projects, I told my manager, 'It's all my fault. I made many mistakes, and I take full responsibility for them.' I blamed myself, which contributed to a burnout that I had a year later.

How to give feedback to others? Where do we start?

Positive reinforcement works with timely feedback

When giving feedback managers shouldn't expect their authority's effect on action

What's obnoxious aggression and how does it impact?

Telling people what they want to hear

We can take a step back and look at how each of us contributes to the work

Working with people who absorbs all the blame

How I improved my feedback skills by just thinking in the radical candor framework

Concrete team goals drive people to success

Separate Evaluation Feedback from Coaching & Appreciation Feedback In Performance Reviews

People should focus on achieving goals, not following rules for the sake of following

Set clear and measurable goals for both short and long term

Separate Evaluation Feedback from Coaching & Appreciation Feedback In Performance Reviews

Separate Evaluation Feedback from Coaching & Appreciation Feedback In Performance Reviews

Saying no to good things enables us to say yes to great things

Delayed deployments increase the repair cost

Don't act, do it.

We need to increase the consciousness of our actions by naming them.

Habit stacking is forming new habits by tieing a new habit into an existing one.

Changing environment is the backbone of building new habits.

The more you read and learn, the less you know. The more uncertain you are, the more you are open to learning and changing.

When giving praise, be as specific as constructive feedback. Be mindful when and how to give it.

Separate Evaluation Feedback from Coaching & Appreciation Feedback In Performance Reviews

Improving Competency with Mechanisms

Conceptual Integrity

Arnie Malham talks about what they did specifically to change the culture in cj Advertising. They changed the culture with many small steps, not with one big jump. Making it wrong with small steps to make it right is the message of the book.

Choose one topic and grab a pen and paper (not a phone), and take a walk, preferably in nature, a park, or a calm area where you won't have distractions.

Recently, I became the book supplier for my father. Choosing books for someone else is a powerful position, and I take it seriously and feel responsible.

'Our desire is no longer material; it's existential.' The book is about understanding life a little bit better by accepting the pain and giving up trying.

Leadership is not something you're born with it; it is something you learn. When you study leadership, you learn the fundamentals.

Consensus decision-making means everyone explicitly agreeing to the proposed idea. The leader needs explicit agreement from everyone and shouldn't assume consensus in the absence of objection.

Every day, I either write one to three pages or rewrite what I wrote the day before. It's a challenge. I fail sometimes.

The inflexibility in decision-making is at the root of various problems. Many leaders either use a lot of authority or seek consensus. What they need is a pendulum.

Having a bias to action is more helpful than discussing and researching everything prior. Quantity beats quality in learning. Action beats perfection.

How an architect thinks and approaches designing and architecting software systems? The architect's job is eventually a combination of tech lead, software engineer, R&D engineer, and strategist. But how do these responsibilities come together?

A business novel from Navy Captain David Marquet explains intent-based leadership and identifies how the leader-follower approach is ineffective.

Software engineering career ladders and frameworks are helpful tools for software engineers to grow. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of career frameworks and ladders.

Remote work is more inclusive than on-site work. It provides opportunities to people with disabilities, disorders, and deficiencies.

Most things in life are either average or suck. The media blurs this reality. It also creates a fake one by saying that everyone can achieve everything.

The question, 'Why can't this be done sooner?' makes you deeply understand the approach you're taking, question it, find the gaps in your knowledge, and analyze the risks better so that you make an informative decision while moving faster.

In a blink of an eye, we're happy. We may be achieved a goal or finalize a project. This happiness usually lasts for one blink, maybe two.

Hades taught me to be beaten up by trying to do something every day but never give up. In every attempt, I am stronger than before.

Expressing disagreements is not always pleasant, but they might be better than misunderstandings. In some cultures, it causes miscommunication; in some of them doesn't.

Either managing or being part of a partially distributed team is difficult. It requires a mixture of sync and async processes to prevent low performance, conflicts, and burnout.

Have your team meetings as either remote meetings or on-site meetings. Don't have hybrid meetings. If you do, people in the meetings will have a bad experience.

I have faced this question recently, and I went silent. I knew that laying off people or firing someone specific are unpleasant moments of management.

Don't split the monolith for the sake of having microservices. Use incremental approach.

There is no easiest, hardest, useful, or best programming language; they are all similar. Learn data structures and algorithms to master in all languages.

In organizations, we draft proposals to make decisions. Handling and overcoming objections to a proposal helps to make the decision process sustainable.

Through a software engineer career, deciding factors change, and we forget how to decide and focus on one thing. What you need to do is sit and prioritize.

When you grow into more senior roles, your responsibilities evolve. Prioritization changes for software engineers. Communication and analysis skills become more important.

Miscommunication and lack of empathy lay beneath the conflicts. The expectation of a magic wand resolving everything can put high pressure on managers' shoulders. However, there are initial steps managers can take.

The communication of the decisions is sometimes more important than the decision itself. The leaders often make horrible announcements of significant decisions. How can they do it better?

Every engineering team has some sort of documentation of their team's work. Most often, these documents get disorganized reasonably quickly. People have a hard time finding their way around. There are some tricks to solve the problem.

I live streamed for fourteen weeks, every Tuesday at 19:00 CET. I had thirteen amazing guests. We talked about many different things in the software industry, ranging from DevOps to marketing. I learned a lot from my guests and enjoyed all the talks.

Many software engineers are poor at writing, or they avoid it because they think it takes a lot of time. Yes, it takes time. But it is crucial and cannot be ignored at work.

I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of different estimation techniques. I think timely estimations are better when they are done right.

Most of the one-on-one templates I found online did not suit me and were not effective. I picked the best parts adjusted them according to the software engineer's perspective.

When I changed my perspective and worked on improving my one-one-one meetings, the results were terrific. Now, I have better communication with my manager, and I feel that I'm learning and growing way faster than usual.

The most important aspect of technology correlated with microservices is integration. When we get it right, microservices are autonomous and independent. If we get it wrong, the risk of catastrophe increases.

The most important aspect of technology correlated with microservices is integration. When we get it right, microservices are autonomous and independent. If we get it wrong, the risk of catastrophe increases.

Building trust in teams is complex. Trust in the workplace is crucial to becoming a successful software engineering manager.

The Blue-Green Deployment is an application deployment technique used in continuous delivery. The new service is deployed and put into production gradually.

The goal of modeling microservices is to have loose coupling and high cohesion. Don't directly go with microservices. Start monolithic and evolve to microservice.

Comparing software architects with actual architects is inaccurate. Physical-world constrains architect, and software evolves with user requirements.

Thinking diversity only in our immediate environment is a shortcoming. Instead of blinding ourselves, we need to broaden our horizon and think of other sides of the world to have a bigger impact.

Microservices emerged from continuous delivery, domain-driven design, automation, and small and independent teams. They reflect the real world in the software. But what are microservices?

When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don't know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.

We cannot use interactive rebasing and resetting. Both of them have security mechanisms to prevent this action. Instead, we have to use other approaches.

If you are planning your days and still failing to stick to them, these tips can help you. Instead of feeling bad, you can start feeling great.

We often don’t even realize that we’re mixing things at work. There are a couple of reasons and strategies we can follow.

Growth with big goals is an illusion. Growth without goals is too. We need the middle ground, and this is how I approach it.

Review about the book The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

Technical skills are easy, yet soft ones are harder. I learned a lot of lessons from my failures, experiences, and successes. Here is my shortlist.

Multiple environments like staging and production are standard and when we use it with AWS, we face the problem of managing access to them.

Most of the developers have a hard time understanding the testing. Tests are often underrated and despised. What are the benefits of tests?

We face handling more than one operation at the same time. We want to shorten the waiting time even though it is not always necessary with the concurrency.

Truly understanding when the view is created, loaded, appeared, or destroyed helps us to understand our approach deeply while developing an iOS App.

Every iOS developer needs to understand the possible states and lifecycle of an iOS application. Knowing when the state enables us to work behind the scenes.

Linear Regression is a basic statistical method that applies a linear function to data and predicts a scalar value. But why do we use it?

Feedback is defined as a reaction after a behavior or statement. But what does it really mean for us?

Google announced Firebase Predictions in Firebase Dev Summit in Amsterdam this year.

We use some tools and also some do customizations on them to increase our productivity. Every tech stack has different needs, thus, a different set of tools.

The fundamentals of machine learning require some knowledge of linear algebra and calculus. This barrier frightens people and keeps them away from machine learning with curiosity.

As one of the most powerful features in Swift, Generics can be tricky. A lot of people have trouble understanding and using them, especially application developers.

When Apple announced Server APIs and working group, it made me think to switch to Swift for server-side development.

Migration Guide from Vapor 1 to Vapor 2

Swift is a very flexible language, therefore, easy to misuse. Applying best practices in Swift lint is important.

Why do we need to reshape our module to make it testable?

After hearing a lot about the great performance of Swift in the backend, I decided to give it a try. And here comes my first experiences step by step.

Firebase gives you the tools and infrastructure you need to build better apps and grow successful businesses. It provides several features divided into three groups develop, grow and earn.