Recent content on sofiakodar.github.io
I vividly remember most of my own journey into engineering management over the years. Throughout my career, I’ve also mentored several people taking the step from engineer to engineering manager. It’s a challenging and often lonely journey, and here are a few truths most new managers realize the hard way. (If you aren’t a manager yourself, you might just learn a bit about your manager’s…
A few days ago (May 19) I attended the AI fokus conference. I attended last year as well, and I think this year’s version was improved with even better talks. It was a great venue, very well planned with good breaks for coffee and lunch and I had lots of interesting conversations with different people during the breaks. Always fun to meet people you haven’t seen in a few years.
We need to talk about feedback loops. Short feedback loops are the heartbeat of Agile. Once, cutting development cycles to two weeks was a massive achievement (and for many, it still is). But the core principle, learning quickly from what we build, seems to have been lost, even though the tools to do it are better than ever. Continuous delivery, continuous discovery, and releasing features to…
Here are some blog posts and articles I thought found interesting the last month. (Books will be covered separately.) AI related Bob has written two good blog posts with scathing critique on how many organisations adopt AI and neglect solving their real issues. I found them very interesting and funny, even though I don’t agree with everything. AI won’t save your dysfunctional…
The urgency gap Over the last few months, I’ve sat across from product leaders and engineers in different companies and they all told me the same story: a frustration from product managers and the leadship team about lack of urgency in dev teams and whether they truly care about the company’s success. Product leaders and managers are super eager to deliver new features and to fulfill commitments…
Yesterday I attended the Agentic DevDays conference here in Stockholm. I enjoyed it a lot and there were some great talks. This is just a quick post about my favorite talks and learnings. Usually conferences have several tracks, but here all talks were at the main stage, with only a few workshops in another room. This was actually refreshing: no decision paralysis, no running between rooms, and no…
I’ve been a manager for about 11 years now and a team lead for a few years before that. Two of the most important leadership responsibilities, in my opinion, are setting clear expectations and giving feedback. When I’ve mentored new engineering managers and team leads, this is usually where they struggle most. I’ve seen countless managers struggle to give feedback and feel unsure about how to do…
I always enjoy getting tips from friends about great apps or services they use, so this post is about what apps I really like and use. My favorite productivity apps: Obsidian (MacOS, iOS) (free) I take a lot of notes and I save a lot of information, snippets from books, pod transcripts etc. I need a place to dump all my notes and thoughts to easily find them again. I’ve used other personal wikis…
A friend of mine had an app request for daily commuting to/from work. The use case is simple, you’re getting ready to leave for work/home and want to know when the next train/bus leaves and if you should hurry or not. I implemented this today in a few hours with Cursor and thought I’d write about it. App specification A simple iOS app where you can see when the next train/bus for your…
I love books. I usually read 30–55 books a year. It’s usually a mix between non-fiction and work related books: leadership, neuroscience, communication and engineering, and books just for fun, mostly fantasy and science-fiction. Last year I read (and finished) 36+ books, mostly fantasy, since I decided to get my mind off work more during my free time. My favorite work related book last year…
When I was helping my son study for an exam a week ago, I thought that a flashcard app would be helpful. I looked at Anki and other flashcard apps that already exist but thought they were quite ugly. I wanted a more appealing app with an algorithm for spaced‑repetition learning effectively. This felt like a very small and easy project to build myself with my trusty companion, Cursor. I decided to…
Over the past few months I’ve been vibe‑coding several apps with Cursor. It has been the most fun I’ve had in years, I have learned a lot, and I’m really happy with my apps. I thought I’d write about it, to gather my own thoughts and in case my learnings help someone else. I’m planning three blog posts on this topic: one about developing with Cursor and tips and tricks (this one) and then…