#The Balanced Engineer
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter May 2026 • Issue # 45 ATTENTION: We are 1/3 of the way through the year. 33% already! Where did the time go? These past two months have been a blur (oops I accidentally skipped a newsletter month again). I celebrated a wedding, did a…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter March 2026 • Issue # 44 Hello, March! In the interest of prioritizing balance in my life, I skipped this newsletter in February, so now I have a lot of extra stuff to share! This year has started out great. I'm enjoying what I'm working on, the…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter January 2026 • Issue # 43 It's January! I've spent the last few weeks cleaning, re-organizing, and spending time with family, and my heart could not be more full. I love the vibes of the New Year. Everything feels fresh and full of possibilities…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter December 2025 • Issue # 42 November is in the books and it was lovely. I went to Microsoft Ignite, which was huge and a ton of fun, and took a whole week off for the week of Thanksgiving! Every time I take time off I’m reminded how much a bit of…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter November 2025 • Issue # 41 Before we get to the good stuff–a change I'm making! After reflecting on what's sustainable (and what energizes me), I'm moving to a monthly newsletter. This lets me spend real time curating insights and writing the…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of October 06, 2025 • Issue # 40 A coding bootcamp, but for engineers that already have jobs I learned about Overclock Accelerator from a LinkedIn message this week (not an ad). What struck me as interesting is it's pitched somewhat like a…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of September 29, 2025 • Issue # 39 This has been a bit of an odd week and I'm going through yet another period of “maybe I should change everything about the way I write my newsletter” phase. And I'm debating if it's worth it to keep…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of September 22, 2025 • Issue # 38 I spent this week at CascadiaJS, a wonderful celebration of web and mobile developers in the Pacific Northwest. Given that I was at the conference, I didn't spend any additional time for the week looking…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of September 15, 2025 • Issue # 37 🔧 Technical Excellence Building skills that last beyond any framework GitHub Copilot coding agent 101: Getting started with agentic workflows on GitHub by Alexandra Lietzke on The GitHub Blog Summary:…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of September 8, 2025 • Issue # 36 🔧 Technical Excellence Building skills that last beyond any framework Revenge of the junior developer by Steve Yegge from Sourcegraph Summary: Steve Yegge argues that software development is rapidly…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of September 1, 2025 • Issue # 35 Labor Day In celebration of Labor Day, and in recognition of the fight made to celebrate organized labor, I'm sharing nothing today. If you're in the United States, I hope you enjoy a lovely day off. If…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of August 25, 2025 • Issue # 34 🔧 Technical Excellence Building skills that last beyond any framework Big O by Sam Rose ( Link ) Summary: Sam does an excellent job (as always) taking a complex foundational computer science subject and…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of August 18, 2025 • Issue # 33 ⚖️ Work-Life Integration Sustainable practices for long-term success The Best Years of Your Life by Hidden Brain ( Podcast Link ) Summary: This podcast isn't very software engineering focused, but it felt…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of August 11, 2025 • Issue # 32 🧠 Mental Models & Problem Solving How we think about complex problems GPT-5 failed the wrong test by Tim Kellogg ( His Blog ). Summary: This is a brief read by Tim Kellogg where he reacts to the paper…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of August 4, 2025 • Issue # 31 🔧 Technical Excellence Building skills that last beyond any framework It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA by Jono Alderson ( his blog ) Summary: This article argues that Single Page Applications (SPAs)…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of July 28, 2025 • Issue # 30 🔧 Technical Excellence Building skills that last beyond any framework Why it feels like AI can reason by Annie Sexton ( Youtube Video ) Summary: This philosophical video from Annie explained what reasoning is…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of July 21, 2025 • Issue # 29 🔧 Technical Excellence Building skills that last beyond any framework How to review code effectively: A GitHub staff engineer's philosophy by Sarah Vessels ( The GitHub Blog ) Summary: This article by Sarah…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of July 14, 2025 • Issue # 28 🔧 Technical Excellence Building skills that last beyond any framework Learnings from two years of using AI tools for software engineering by Birgitta Böckeler and Gergely Orosz ( The Pragmatic Engineer…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of July 7, 2025 • Issue # 27 🔧 Technical Excellence Building skills that last beyond any framework Prefer gaps to margins by Kyle Shevlin ( Kyle's blog ) Summary: This article argues that CSS gaps are superior to margins for spacing…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter Week of June 30, 2025 • Issue # 26 Hey there! I'm thrilled you're here for what feels like a fresh start for The Balanced Engineer. After some reflection, I realized I was trying to force myself into a weekly content creation machine–and honestly…
I just returned from an incredible week at Gophercon EU in Berlin! While I'm still battling some serious jet lag, the conference was absolutely worth every sleepless night. I had such a great time preparing for and delivering my talk (I'll share the recording once it's…
I'm writing this from Berlin as I get ready for Gophercon EU to kick off tomorrow! The long flight over gave me the perfect opportunity to do a major revamp of my website—and I managed to do it WITHOUT creating a new repository and starting from scratch. I definitely deserve a…
This week I spent some time with Dusti Arab from The Reinvention Co . She was absolutely incredible to work with and I learned a ton from her. We put together a strategy for my newsletter and some other things I have going on, like the Overcommitted podcast. Expect some changes…
We are in one of the best times of the year in the Pacific Northwest. It's warm and sunny, but only around 75F degrees (around 24C for the metric users out there). Everything is still lovely and green from the very wet winters we get. I spent most of this weekend planting…
Phew, what a week! Actually, I'm lying, I'm going on vacation the week of the 19th (to Disney world!) and am scheduling this email an extra week in advance. I'm sure it was a fun week, though! Or maybe incredibly stressful bringing a 4-year-old and 1-year-old twins to Disney…
I'm excited to share that we've hit another milestone - 300 subscribers! It seems like just yesterday I was celebrating 100. I'm not super into marketing so am cooling my jets on sharing the numbers all the time, but it has been a fun journey so far, and seeing that subscriber…
Hello, hello, and welcome to The Balanced Engineer Newsletter! It has been a crazy week! After spending the weekend before last at Boise Code Camp, I spent a week in Atlanta for my team's offsite. That included roughly a week of socializing, bonding, and asking very big…
I'm a bit late to finishing my newsletter this week, after spending part of the weekend in Boise for Boise Code Camp . I love Boise. The tech community is small, but gosh it's friendly. Some of my best friends I've made in my career are there and I love getting the chance to…
This has been a wild week as I am preparing for a very busy May and June. I’ve been working ahead a bit to prepare some newsletter content and podcasts in advance. Not my usual procrastination method! This week I am preparing for Boise Code Camp where I’m giving a talk on deep…
Hello, hello, and welcome to The Balanced Engineer Newsletter! I thought I would mix things up a bit. Instead of doing a Deep Dive article at the end of this newsletter, I'm instead including a Highlights section of things I've been doing this week and things I've enjoyed this…