The Curious Engineer

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Thinking Through

thinkingthrough.substack.com

Sharing the time-tested, industry-vetted tips & tricks for software engineers and engineering managers who looking for growth in the Tech Industry. Click to read Thinking Through, by Mayank Verma, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

Engineering management / careersAI / MLSoftware / engineering practice

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
102 from 20 Jul 2020 to 28 Jan 2025
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now and then
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personal blog
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2025 1

  1. How will technical interviews (coding, system design) change in the world of Ai?

2024 18

  1. The Illusion of Multi-Cloud Providers
  2. (Series) How Engineers Can Build Products In Big Tech
  3. 41 Pieces of Advice I gave myself last year
  4. How To Focus
  5. One Productivity Tip to Rule them All
  6. How To Coach
  7. How to Mentor
  8. FAQs on Mentorships
  9. Why become a Mentor?
  10. 10 Mistakes Mentee Make During Mentorship
  11. How to Find a Mentor
  12. Difference & Similarities Between a Mentor & a Coach. And why you need both
  13. Why you need a coach?
  14. Why You Needs a Mentor?
  15. Designing My Perfect Sabbatical
  16. A Leader's Guide to Navigating the Halo Effect
  17. How Leaders Can Make the Open Door Policy, Inclusive
  18. How to Build & Ship Projects FAST

2023 10

  1. Manager's and The Art and Science of Delegation
  2. Day-to-Day chores With ChatGPT
  3. LyingGPT 🤥
  4. Going down the rabbit hole with ChatGPT Custom Instructions
  5. How AI is Transforming Content Moderation
  6. Generative AI: Why Artists Need Not Worry
  7. On Rails in Mt. View California 🚂
  8. Relentless Rescoping & Saying "NO"
  9. One File That Every Project Needs
  10. Why build Side Projects that are Not Startup

2022 29

  1. Why & How to Prioritize Product Table Stakes Over Features
  2. Transform Your Life by Overriding Inaction with TAN
  3. 99.999% of Your Ideas are Side-Project Ideas, Not Startup Ideas: Why Treating Them as Such Increases Follow-Through
  4. Here's Why Engineering Interviews Are Not Stupid
  5. [Action] Length of Email To Leadership
  6. 39 Pieces of Advice I Gave Myself
  7. How a Linux Command Got My Twitter Account Locked for Abuse and Violation 🤯😂
  8. What Do Katana Sword-Smithing and Engineering Have in Common?
  9. Airbnb: Stay Anywhere, Work Anywhere 🌎❤️💻🏠
  10. Snap's PIXY: Your Drone Selfies Delivered
  11. What is Misc Commentary?
  12. Why & How to Speak Up
  13. Build Vs. Buy: Vendor Contract Shenanigans
  14. Ensuring Vendor QoS & Setting the Right Type of SLAs When Buying Service From a Vendor
  15. Build vs Buy: One Aspect That No One Talks About
  16. How to Make Great Decisions as a Group
  17. On Dealing With Ambiguity
  18. What We Can Learn About Taking Action From Watching Sports
  19. What's the Context
  20. How to Switch Career to Tech
  21. Seek Interesting Feedback
  22. Nathan Chen: Olympics, Focus & Smartphones
  23. How to Do Team-Match Correctly
  24. Why Be Productive?
  25. Engineering Productivity Tax
  26. A Better Way to Write Self-Evaluation and Peer-Feedback
  27. Good Cop/Bad Cop-ing Engineers
  28. Building Trust With Your Team
  29. 3 Areas of Work

2021 38

  1. What We Get Wrong About Proof-Of-Concept
  2. Don’t Join a Unicorn 🦄, Join a Freakin Griffin 🦁➕🦅
  3. How to Drive Innovation
  4. How to Find the Job You L❤️ve
  5. How to Win at Interviewing
  6. Don’t Do Interviews, Do Discussions!
  7. Don’t Hire a Marginal Candidate
  8. How to Catch a Cheating Candidate in an Interview
  9. How to Guarantee That Your Project Will Be Successful
  10. We All Are Playing Squid Game With One Exception
  11. Smoke Alarm Vs. Car Alarm
  12. Is Work From Home now part of Total Compensation package?
  13. Why Making No Decision Is Worse Than Making a Bad Decision
  14. "Work Smarter Not Harder"
  15. What to Do When You Suspect Someone Is Bluffing You
  16. Index of Thinking Through
  17. We are Using the Templates Incorrectly
  18. How to Hack Parkinson's Law and Get 20% Time Back Every Workweek
  19. What to Do When You Get Butterflies In Your Stomach
  20. The Fastest Way to Get Into the State of Flow
  21. Lessons learned from running 4 half marathons and 1 full marathon in 6 weeks
  22. Eisenhower 2x2 Metrics: Focus On High Impact Work While Eliminating Busywork From Your Life
  23. 4 Ways to Outsmart the Smart Devices and Take Charge of Your Focus Time!
  24. Repetitive Tasks Got You Down: Use This Simple Framework so You May Not Have to Do Them Again!
  25. What can we learn from watering the backyard about increasing our productivity and throughput?
  26. What can we learn from Hackathons about shipping creative work
  27. Holi and diversity in software
  28. When migrating big systems
  29. Software needs an expiry date.
  30. Everyone hates surprises in the workplace
  31. Make better decisions by running small experiments.
  32. Taming the monkey mind
  33. Stop Swiss Cheesing your calendar
  34. Assumptions are dangerous; Validate them.
  35. /r/wallstreetbets vs. WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore!!
  36. Do we need a new open-source license? Amazon Vs. Elastic Part II
  37. Do we need a new open-source license? Amazon Vs. Elastic Part I
  38. Context switching costs more than we give it credit for.

2020 6

  1. Participate in team OKRs.
  2. Finding your blindspots and helping others do too.
  3. Mental Model for clickbait detection.
  4. Skills to develop after an engineering internship
  5. Dos and Don’ts from Death By Meetings
  6. Do's/Don'ts When Attending Meetings