Job Search Coaching, Hand-Writing Code, RSS Feeds

I’m at just about 40 job applications submitted, no interviews. I’m currently submitting four applications each day. I’ve signed up with a mentor on MentorCruise to get a second pair of eyes on my resumes and cover letters, see if there are things I can improve.

I enjoyed this video by Dreams of Code on why writing code by hand is still a valuable practice even if you’re all-in on agentic software engineering.

It got me thinking about the differences between using something like Claude Code and old human pair programming. When I would pair with someone, I would shift how much code I would write in response to their prompts based on how much they understood about the problem and the code we were working on. If they had a good understanding, I would write more. If they had less understanding, I would drag my feet and let them over-specify so they had the chance to internalize what was happening in the code.

I updated my claude code setup to try to have it act more this way. It should now keep track of which subsystems I do and don’t deeply understand in the codebases I work in, and then adjust how focused it is on getting the thing done vs teaching me based on that. We’ll see how well it works.

I’m continuing to enjoy reading RSS feeds in Feedly. I’ve moved most of my newsletter subscriptions to Feedly. Thankfully Substack and most other newsletters expose an RSS feed. Not a Substack publication, but I’ve been especially enjoying Brennan’s Weblog, written by avid Beeminder user Brennan Brown. His blog is exceptionally well-written and always thought provoking.