Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills about web development.
My Ramblings This Week
What do you value in your professional career?
When you get too close to a problem, the bigger picture disappears. Stuck looking for a bug in the wrong place for several hours, anybody?
The best way to unstuck yourself is to ask somebody for help.
Many of us have the same problem with our jobs. You show up, get a bunch done, and go home without a second of contemplation.
Would you be able to list your professional values? I wouldn’t and it sucks, but I discovered a trick.
Apply for a job.
I’m not suggesting sending a thousand curricula a day to random companies. Neither applying for chief rocket aviation at SpaceX (unless you have the credentials.)
And, even if you are not willing to switch right now, going through the process will teach you a ton. Including networking at a company you respect enough to work for in the future.
I did a couple of interviews. Here’s what I learned:
- Show don’t tell. Don’t say what you can do; show them you are doing it (or at least trying).
- Move the competition to a place where you are unbeatable. An excellent position attracts many applicants. Don’t focus on what everybody else does; show them why you are different.
- A boring CV is a sign of laziness, not professionalism.
- “What types of projects would you like to work on?” I didn’t have a great answer for this one.
- Describe yourself in a couple of sentences (without listing fifty technologies nobody cares about.)
- DevRel is a fantastic role that I’ve never considered.
Not to count, I got a couple of excellent bits of advice on something I’m working on. My employer should be happy I’m applying for jobs!
Most importantly, I got to chat with a few folks who inspired me to do and be better. This is priceless.
Happy job hunting!
Elsewhere on the Web
(Riccardo: I don’t know how Gosia pulled it off, but these backgrounds make you look prettier.)
POSTGRESQL: DETECTING SLOW QUERIES QUICKLY by Hans-Jürgen Schönig
I believe the best and most efficient way to detect performance problems is to make use of pg_stat_statement, which is an excellent extension shipped with PostgreSQL and is used to inspect query statistics in general. It helps you to instantly figure out which queries cause bad performance and how often they are executed.
(Riccardo: Good to know this stuff exists.)
Draw Entity-Relationship Diagrams, Painlessly by holistics.io
A free, simple tool to draw ER diagrams by just writing code. Designed for developers and data analysts.
(Riccardo: If you keep getting lost in your database schema, this will help.)