The Curious Engineer

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The Effective Engineer

effectiveengineer.com

Time is your most limited and critical resource. Learn powerful mindsets, strategies, and tools on how to spend it on what matters most.

Engineering management / careersSoftware / engineering practice

’15’20’25
Posts
76 from 14 May 2013 to 5 Jun 2026
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 1

  1. Relationships Are Systems — What Engineering Taught Me About Partnership

2020 2

  1. How to Stay Happy, Healthy, and Productive During a Pandemic
  2. Help Me Celebrate My Five-Year Anniversary

2018 4

  1. What Does It Mean to Be an Effective Tech Lead?
  2. My New Adventure: Leadership Development for People in Tech
  3. My Farewell Letter on What Working at Quip Meant to Me
  4. The Most Intense Year of Growth in My Life — What I’ve Learned

2017 15

  1. My Keynote Talk: What It Really Means to Be an Effective Engineer
  2. Why It’s Important to Raise the Bar for Engineering Leadership
  3. Share Powerful Stories to Shift the Culture Around You
  4. Breaking Out of the Stories We Make Up About Ourselves
  5. The Simple Secret to Effective One-on-Ones
  6. How to Create Time and Space for What You Want to Do
  7. The Myth that Technical Skills Alone Will Make You Great
  8. How to Make Your Engineering Team More Effective
  9. Valuable Lessons Learned and Missed from My Time Working at Google
  10. Facebook Tech Talk: How to Effectively Transform Your Engineering Effort into Impact
  11. How to Build an Engineering Culture that Focuses on Impact
  12. What Makes an Engineer Successful Here?
  13. How to Unlock More Productive Conversations with Two Key Skills
  14. The 3 Keys to a Remarkable Career
  15. What’s Possible Here?

2016 12

  1. Stanford Tech Talk on The Power of Leverage: How Quip’s Small Engineering Team Built a Product on 8 Different Platforms
  2. Taking Ownership Is The Most Effective Way to Get What You Want
  3. How to Transition from Average Engineer to 10x Engineer
  4. The Trouble with Trying to Win at Everything
  5. When Pride Gets in the Way of Your Best Work
  6. The One Key Question to Ask When Measuring Your Own Productivity
  7. The Five Key Mindsets to Master If You Want to Be a Successful Programmer
  8. Why I Stopped Working Crazy Hours and Now Strategically Procrastinate to Get Better Results
  9. How a Small Team Iterated Rapidly by Running Up to 12 User Tests Per Week
  10. The Secret to Growing Your Engineering Career If You Don’t Want to Manage
  11. The Highest-Leverage Activities Aren’t Always Deep Work
  12. Why’d You Do That?!? An Engineer’s Guide to Debugging User Behavior

2015 10

  1. Google Tech Talk: Proven Techniques for Increasing Your Engineering Impact
  2. What I Learned from Quip on How to Build a Product on 8 Different Platforms with Only 13 Engineers
  3. Communication: The First Casualty of a Team’s Growth
  4. How to Avoid the Biggest Mistake You Can Make as a New Software Engineer
  5. How to Identify and Make Contributions with a Big Impact
  6. Master Adjacent Disciplines
  7. What 2 Years Spent Self-Publishing a 77,000-Word Book Taught Me about Shipping Products
  8. Don’t Be the Bottleneck
  9. How a Scientifically Proven Technique Can Improve How Well You Learn and Remember
  10. The One Important Thing to Consider When Deciding Where to Work

2014 14

  1. The Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore
  2. Build and Deploy Code in Small Chunks to Reduce Risk
  3. Avoid a Disastrous Mistake that Interview Candidates Make
  4. How a Small Change Can Boost Your Motivation and Performance
  5. How to Avoid One of the Costliest Mistakes in Software Engineering
  6. How to Know When It’s Time to Quit Your Job
  7. What Qualities Make a Good Startup Engineer?
  8. How a Strong Tribal Identity Can Bind Your Team Together
  9. How Modeling the Value of Your Time with a Single Number Can Simplify Decisions
  10. What Google Taught Me About Scaling Engineering Teams
  11. Beware the One-Person Team
  12. The Single, Most Valuable Lesson I’ve Learned in My Professional Life
  13. Shape the Culture You Want through the Stories You Tell
  14. Compile Flight Rules for Your Software Engineering Team

2013 12

  1. 10 Ways to Leverage Resources at Your Company to Improve Your Programming Skills
  2. What Research on Happiness and Motivation Can Tell Us About Finding Meaning in Our Work
  3. Five Books Every Effective Engineer Should Read and The Lessons They Teach
  4. What Makes a Good Engineering Culture?
  5. How to Build a Good Onboarding Process for New Hires at a Startup
  6. Make If-Then Plans to Get More Things Done
  7. How Do I Tell My Team to Work More Hours to Hit a Launch Date?
  8. Script for Success — What a Football Coach Can Teach Us About Engineering
  9. Don’t Let Indecision Make Choices for You
  10. Do More With Less Time — The Compounding Power of Time-Saving Tools
  11. Pick the Right Metric to Incentivize the Behavior You Want
  12. There’s More to Learn and Grow Than You Might Think

Undated 6

  1. Career Growth
  2. Productivity
  3. Engineering Best Practices
  4. Engineering Culture
  5. Startups
  6. Teamwork