Most people are modest about their contributions in the workplace. We also forget how important our contributions are. Then, when it comes time for recognition, you’ve forgotten, others didn’t notice because they don’t understand all the details and moving parts, and work just moves on. What do you do if/when your work goes unnoticed? Here’s what Julia Evans suggests… Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season! This is a pretty common tactic – when I started doing this I mentioned it to more experienced people and they were like “oh yeah, I’ve been doing that for a long time, it really helps”. Where I work we call this a “brag document” but I’ve heard other names for the same concept like “hype document” or “list of stuff I did” :). BONUS — Julia included a basic template for a brag document at the end of the post.

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If you’ve ever wondered why exactly Kubernetes is a thing OR wondered what the root problem is that Kubernetes solves, then this post from Jef Spaleta is for you. For organizations that operate at a massive scale, a single Linux container instance isn’t enough to satisfy all of their applications’ needs. It’s not uncommon for sufficiently complex applications, such as ones that communicate through microservices, to require multiple Linux containers that communicate with each other. That architecture introduces a new scaling problem: how do you manage all those individual containers? …Enter Kubernetes, a container orchestration system — a way to manage the lifecycle of containerized applications across an entire fleet.

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Focus was the topic of this and this episode of Founders Talk, but from a different angle than presented in this post from Bar Franek on freeCodeCamp. It doesn’t matter if you’re working on a side hustle or if you’re a junior developer wanting to get noticed and promoted. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lead developer looking for a change of pace, from a corporate gig to a start-up or the other way around. It doesn’t matter if you’re jobless out of college. As long as you’re a programmer, no skill is more important to your success than focused, deep work.

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To button or not to button…the button element is “actually really cool”… Something that comes up again and again in front-end accessibility is the issue of links versus buttons. You know, the HTML elements that open links in new windows or submit forms? In JavaScript web applications, it seems we’re still confused about which element to choose for user interaction. To try and clarify the haziness, I’ll define use cases for links and buttons in client-rendered applications and help you make better UI decisions, from design to development.

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Harry Roberts writing on CSS Wizardry: One metric I feel that front-end developers overlook all too quickly is Time to First Byte (TTFB). This is understandable—forgivable, almost—when you consider that TTFB begins to move into back-end territory, but if I was to sum up the problem as succinctly as possible, I’d say: While a good TTFB doesn’t necessarily mean you will have a fast website, a bad TTFB almost certainly guarantees a slow one. Even though, as a front-end developer, you might not be in the position to make improvements to TTFB yourself, it’s important to know that any problems with a high TTFB will leave you on the back foot, and any efforts you make to optimises images, clear the critical path, and asynchronously load your webfonts will all be made in the spirit of playing catchup.

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Erik Kennedy is back to give developers (and other folks who aren’t steeped in UX) some actionable advice on how to make interfaces more usable. This is my advice on improving the UX of your designs WITHOUT hours of user research sessions, paper prototyping playtime, or any other trendy UX buzzwords. When I started as a professional UX designer, I was shocked how many times my clients would hand me the initial wireframes (or the living, breathing, in-browser MVP) and there’d be completely obvious UX mistakes all over them. I’m not talking about things you need hours of research and A/B testing to discover. I’m talking, like, dead simple mistakes.

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Joel Marcey shares his story and some background on what a developer advocate is and how to be success as a developer advocate. I am a believer in the pop-culture version of Occam’s razor, or the law of simplicity, where the simplest explanation is usually the right one. A developer advocate is exactly what its title implies — an advocate for developers. A successful developer advocate can go both deep and broad. They can own a technology stack but also run programs that span an entire open source program office… A successful developer advocate is able to quickly ramp up on new technologies, sometimes with no background in the space previously, and be able to understand how those technologies may fit into the overall open source ecosystem.

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What, exactly, is mentoring? How does it work? Better yet, how does it work well? In this post Gergely Orosz, Engineering Manager at Uber, shares his perspective and the practices he’s seen work well. Mentorship has been the best things that’s sped up my growth and others engineers around me. This post discusses mentorship practices that work well engineer-to-engineer. The practices come from my own experience, observations I’ve made people mentoring each other and from conversations I’ve had with half a dozen mentors in my network and on Coding Coach.

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Claire Lew, the CEO of Know Your Team, shares 5 not-so-often-shared ways to manage up and have a better relationship with your boss. You want to manage up – but what you really mean is that you simply want to work well with your boss. Who doesn’t? Especially when your boss is pestering you with questions via Slack after work-hours, or failing to give you enough time to complete projects… Based on research we’ve done over the past five years with hundreds of managers and employees, and the insights shared in our online leadership community, The Watercooler, here are the 5 distinct ways you can manage up to have a better relationship with your boss.

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A look at a new proposal for WebAssembly that will make it possible to easily communicate between WASM and pretty much any language/runtime. This will allow seamlessly embed code from one language into another… think “native modules” except you no longer have to re-compile them on the user’s machine, not to mention you can use them “for free” on the web, and you get sandboxing built in! Wow!

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