An Unreasonable Amount of Time

When you witness something seemingly impossible with your own eyes, your first instinct is to deem it unbelievable. However, what may appear unbelievable is often supported by countless hours of preparation. Achieving the impossible isn't truly impossible, it merely demands dedication and mastery — which are far more attainable than the impossible.

Years ago, Teller performed a magic trick.

First, he’d have you pick a card. He would attempt to produce the card, but fail, indicating the card may have travelled elsewhere. He’d then lead you on a short walk to a nearby park, and then be inspired to dig a hole. Buried there, beneath undisturbed grass, was a box. When opened, the box would, somehow, contain the card you’d chosen. An impossible trick.

To create this magical moment, he had to do something you wouldn’t expect: he’d gone out into the park and buried a number of boxes, corresponding to potential cards one might choose. Then, he waited months – until the grass had grown over. Only then could he perform the trick.

It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

I cannot tell you how many times someone in an interview has mentioned reading one of my blog posts, using one of my open source projects, or even seeing one of my tweets (now Bluesky posts). Publicly sharing your work is something that very few people do, which is why it gives you an advantage, even if you only put something meaningful out into the world a few times per year. Best of all, that creative work is evergreen — to someone encountering your work for the first time, a blog post published five years ago is as valuable as a post written today.

The vast majority of candidates have little to no evidence of creativity in public at all. The same is true for many of the best engineers I have worked with.

As a hiring manager, this means you have to learn how to source candidates and interview effectively: you don’t want to miss out on a great engineer just because they spent all of their energy making great products for prior employers rather than blogging, speaking and coding in public.

But as a candidate, this means you can give yourself a big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd with a relatively small amount of work.

Start a blog. Post an interesting technical article to it once or twice a year—something you’ve learned, or a bug you’ve fixed, or a problem you’ve solved. After a few years stop bothering entirely, but leave the blog online somewhere.

Don’t Meet In The Middle

This trick probably would have saved me hours of my life, especially as a lifelong New Yorker. But even if you don’t ever take the subway, I hope this trick finds you well and gives you back some precious time.

Basically, anytime I go someplace that's more-than-walking distance away, I have to add a bunch of buffer for transit – in NYC at least 15 mins per journey, to account for randomness in the train-arrival time + seemingly-inevitable delays. That buffer-time is basically fixed, rather than proportional to the journey length.

As such, I think it's inefficient for both of us to pay this fixed cost whenever we meet up, rather than one of us paying the fixed cost and the other going an (invariant) 5 min walk from their own front door.