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The ins-and-outs of building a career in tech, gaining experience from a mentor, and getting your feet wet with coaching.

How to Vet a Mentor in a Field With No Credentials

You're looking at a profile and you can't tell. That's the normal experience in these three fields, and it isn't a failure of attention.

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DevOps and Platform Certifications That Actually Carry Weight

I've watched people spend $20,000 on a bootcamp and get nothing back for it, so when someone asks me whether a certification is worth the money my instinct is to say no.

What Changes in Code Review When AI Writes the First Draft

I started engineering at 15, and I've never watched one side of a system get cheap this fast while the other side didn't move at all. Developers at the 400-plus companies DX surveyed in June 2026 now self-report that more than half their code is AI-…

Emotional Intelligence: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Improve It

After facilitating more than a thousand mentor-mentee matches, I've learned the ones that work don't turn on who has the deeper resume. They turn on aligned communication, realistic expectations, and whether two people actually read each other on th…

Programming Language Certifications: Why Almost None Exist

Somebody asks me which Go certification to buy roughly once a week. The honest answer is that Google has never issued one, and neither has the Rust Foundation.

Business and Vendor Certifications: Table Stakes, Not Proof

Business and vendor certifications are the one kind where the honest answer has two halves that don't cancel each other out. A lot of them are genuinely required.

How to Tell Whether AI Tooling Actually Made Your Team Faster

Self-reported AI-authored code went from 27.4% to 51.9% in a single quarter across the 400-plus companies in DX's Q2 2026 data. Nearly double, in three months.

Robotics, IoT and Fields Without a Settled Credential

Is a robotics certification worth it? Not as proof. Robotics and IoT haven't converged on a credential, so nobody is in a position to issue an authoritative one.

What Customer Service Skills Really Are and How to Get Better at Them

Customer service isn't a retail job or a people-person personality you're born with.

What Certification Should You Actually Get?

A certification is worth exactly what its issuer can enforce. Run that one test and "what certification should I get" stops being a question about which credential is best.

Should Juniors Use Claude Code, or Does It Stop Them Learning?

Let them use it. Route their work by what it can break, exactly like everyone else's, and then make them answer for it out loud to someone who can tell whether the answer is any good.

Conflict Resolution: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Improve It

The first mentor I ever tried to recruit told me it wasn't worth their time. Not a soft no, a flat one. I could have argued back. Instead I spent a week rebuilding the pitch around what they actually cared about, and they said yes.

From the Community: Mentor Contributions

"My Manager Doesn't Trust Me Yet". What I Tell Every Mentee Who Says this

Six months into a new senior role, a mentee told me his manager didn't trust him yet. The fix had nothing to do with his work.

Krunal Parmar

August 3rd, 2026

Meet the Mentors

Moving From Execution to Strategy: How to Break the UX Career Glass Ceiling

Many talented senior designers find themselves stuck at a mid-career plateau, mistakenly believing that mastering design tools alone will earn them a promotion. True design leadership requires shifting your focus from pixel execution to corporate business strategy and measurable executive impact.

Farhad Qazi

August 3rd, 2026

Leadership Perspective: Are You Measuring Performance or Activity?

If you were asked tomorrow to defend the value of your team, a role, or a project, would you have the evidence to do it? In this article, I’ll share why tracking true performance before you need to prove it matters, and how to make sure you’re measuring the value your team creates, not just how busy they are.

Michelle Weber

August 3rd, 2026

Why New Managers Need to Stop Winning Their Team’s Deals

One of the biggest leadership shifts isn't learning how to lead. It's learning when to step back so your team can step up.

Meci van der Veen

Meci van der Veen

August 3rd, 2026

How I went from React developer to AI engineer in 8 months

In late 2024 I was leading frontend development in Dubai. Eight months later I had a retrieval system in production, a deepfake detection model at 99% accuracy, and a fraud tool that cut 2,000 weekly alerts down to 22.

Shaniya Khan

August 3rd, 2026

Our AI Rollout Didn't Deliver What We Were Promised. Five Checks You Can Run This…

An AI rollout that disappointed almost never failed where the meeting thinks it failed. The tool works. Your engineers are using it. The gain left somewhere between the keyboard and production, and the number in the deck went with it.

Communication Skills: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Improve Them

After more than a thousand mentor matches, I've learned communication isn't a personality you're born with. It's a handful of specific, trainable behaviors: saying the thing clearly, actually listening, giving feedback that lands, reading the room, and picking the right channel.

I Built an App With AI and I Can't Ship It: How to Take an AI Prototype to Production

Everything the internet tells you about shipping an AI-built app is basically correct. That's the annoying part. It's written for people who already know what an environment variable is, and scattered across six blogs that each want to sell you something.

The AI Usage Policy for Engineering Teams (With a Template You Can Actually Use)

Ninety percent of the nearly 5,000 technology professionals in DORA's 2025 survey use AI at work. Of those same people, 30% say they have little or no trust in the code it writes.

A Practical Framework for Prioritizing Engineering Incidents Under Pressure

A field guide for SRE incident execution in high-pressure environments

Ricardo Acosta

July 20th, 2026

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