I have a confession to make: I rarely read, let alone finish, books about software development.

I used to feel very guilty about my apparent inability to learn from our body of "professional wisdom". But nowadays, I believe these means of learning are not very helpful, and might even be harmful.

Here, I explore an often overlooked way of learning and doing software development.

“Are there good rules of communication I should be aware of when I'm communicating with engineers?” I recently got this question from a designer, a new subscriber to my newsletter. It is a question I keep asking myself as well.

Influencing is a crucial part of collaborating with others effectively. Without it, we would rarely arrive at the same page and head in the same direction. We cannot not influence, we can just do it more or less effectively. Here I share some of my observations on how to influence developers.

Practitioners in fields like data science or software engineering need to work with experts in many fields. The advice we often get is to communicate in the other experts’ language or find some kind of “pidgin“ that works for everyone.

From my experience, that advice is not enough. The differences begin already in how we perceive a situation, not just how we communicate our conclusions about it.