For junior devs and career changers

Career-start guides, bootcamp reviews, AI coding tools for beginners, and the resources that actually move you toward employment.

• Lisa Su Tells MIT to Run at Hard Problems. Her Own Bet Returned 168x — MIT 2026

  The AMD CEO's address is built on one piece of advice she got at 25. We checked what the bet she used it on actually returned, and what that does to the advice.

  2026-09-04 · talks

• Pichai Says Your First Job Barely Matters. The Wage Data Disagrees — Stanford 2026

  The Alphabet CEO's commencement advice is that most early decisions are noise. Labor economics has measured exactly that question, and the first job is the one exception.

  2026-09-04 · talks

• Best Coding Interview Books: 5 Picks and the Order to Buy

  CtCI, Elements of Programming Interviews, Grokking Algorithms, Alex Xu's System Design Interview and Skiena: the job each book does and the order to buy.

  2026-09-02 · dev-knowledge

• Moving From QA or Support Into Engineering

  Internal transfers get approved on merged work, not potential. Build evidence from your ticket queue, ask for the move, and negotiate a trial.

  2026-08-12 · career-starter

• Your First On-Call Rotation: What to Do When You Get Paged

  Acknowledge the page, bound the blast radius, run four narrowing questions, and escalate on a timer instead of a feeling.

  2026-08-12 · career-starter

• How to Tell Whether a Junior Role Is Real

  A junior title guarantees nothing. Read the requirements, responsibilities, and posting metadata to spot a mid-level req, pipeline ad, or compliance posting.

  2026-08-12 · career-starter

• The 90-Day Portfolio Review for Junior Developers

  A framework for picking the projects that demonstrate growth and writing case studies hiring managers actually read instead of skipping.

  2026-07-20 · career-starter

• How to Cold Email a Senior Engineer for Mentorship

  A tested template, what to ask for, how much to write, and why most of these emails fail before the first sentence.

  2026-07-20 · career-starter

• Document Learning in Public Without Looking Like a Beginner

  A framework for what to write, what to skip, and the format that turns a learning log into a reputation asset.

  2026-07-20 · career-starter

• Negotiating Equity vs. Salary at Your First Startup Job

  How a junior hire can compare offers with equity components in 2026, and what to ask before accepting a number that sounds big on paper.

  2026-07-20 · career-starter

• Side Projects vs. Open Source: Which Helps Juniors in 2026

  What each path teaches, what hiring managers value from each, and how to pick the one that fits your career goals.

  2026-07-20 · career-starter

• Side Projects That Actually Impress Hiring Managers in 2026

  Most side projects get skimmed for ten seconds and forgotten. Here is what separates a portfolio piece that gets you an interview from one that gets ignored.

  2026-06-09 · career-starter