jeffcarp Monthly: July 2019

Hi there,

I’m super busy preparing to hop on a plane to China very soon, so this newsletter is going to be on the brief side.

Here’s a nice Dolores Park doggo:

This month I want to share 2 articles as a package:

📰 How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably - Steph Smith

📰 Do Generals Matter? - Cathal J. Nolan

Initially these two articles don’t seem related at all. One is about productivity and the other is about military strategy. But there is a common thread between them: there are no easy wins. Winners are those who are willing to endure a long and depressing string of losses on the road to success.

These articles resonate with me. Software engineering is a career of repeated failure—both getting into the field (tons of failed interviews) and day to day on the job where everything you do is steeped in failure—debugging, rollbacks, bad data—my primary role is on a bug tracker, literally cataloging the nearly 1,000,000 ways Chrome has failed.

I find the lessons from these articles comforting. They tell me not to waste effort on big quick flashy wins. Success is gradual—it’s a function of putting in the work every day.

Elva and I ran the SF 2nd Half Marathon! My toe survived. I posted about it and my training season on the gram:

“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong.”

— N. R. Narayana Murthy, Indian entrepreneur (1946-present)