The Habits of Highly Effective Engineers

A presentation at KonferenSE:20 by Robin Pokorny

I am a zealous engineer. Every morning I just wanted to write code, read code, and talk about code. But at the end of the day, I rarely felt I’d done any of that. The days somehow flew by. I blamed frequent meetings and colleagues for interrupting me. Two years ago I decided I want to change that. In the books, articles, and podcasts I discovered concepts and techniques, I had no idea they existed beforehand. I learned about the non-technical skills our industry tends to undervalue. I realised that when you do not possess the ‘soft’ skills you cannot utilise the ‘hard’ ones. I learned the power of deep work and how to get into one. I went on a year-long decision-making diet. I became confident with ‘good enough’. I stopped just hearing and started listening. And I finally felt effective every day. In my talk, I will share three tips, techniques, and best practices that I’m sure will make every individual engineer highly effective.

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