Some of the things I've learned in more than 20 years in the tech industry.

You need to hear these.

🧵👇

Listen to more people who don't look like you, don't speak your language, and don't come from the same place you do.

We aren't doing this near enough.
Small habits compound.

No small improvement is too small.

Just aim for something new every day, and you'll be surprised at the end.
Take responsibility.

It doesn't really matter how you feel, I'm sure you could have done better.
Always keep the big picture in mind and never lose the forest for the trees.

Be the person that pulls everyone out of the rabbit holes.
Focus on the final goal, and don't worry too much about how you get there.

Great results will get you farther than processes, but good processes can help you achieve good results.
Be generous with your knowledge.

It's funny how everything you share finds a way to reward you back.
Who you are is more important than who you were.

We all make mistakes. Move on from them and focus on what's coming.
There are no stupid questions.

Ask away!

(There are, however, stupid people with fragile egos that get bothered when others ask. Ignore them.)
Change is the only thing you can always count on. (And death, and taxes, of course.)

Embrace change.
Better is not always best.

People fantasize about perfection, but perfectionism rarely wins.

Shipping more often will give you better odds than gilding the lily.
Learn to say no.

(I can't say this loud enough!)

Be gracious, professional, nice, but say it more.
Make a habit out of learning.

What you know today will be outdated tomorrow.

Make a plan to keep up and follow it... or you'll get behind.
Focus on one thing at a time.

Multi-tasking murders productivity.

(And turn your phone off!)
Job-hoping may be great for your bank account, but it does nothing to improve the impact you make in the world.

(And it looks horrible in your resume.)
Ideas are worth shit. Execution is worth everything.

Don't be the "idea person". Be the one that takes them and runs with them.
Good communication is a fundamental asset.

You can never invest too much in improving it.

(It doesn't matter how technically good you are if you can't properly communicate with others.)

More from Santiago

10 machine learning YouTube videos.

On libraries, algorithms, and tools.

(If you want to start with machine learning, having a comprehensive set of hands-on tutorials you can always refer to is fundamental.)

🧵👇

1⃣ Notebooks are a fantastic way to code, experiment, and communicate your results.

Take a look at @CoreyMSchafer's fantastic 30-minute tutorial on Jupyter Notebooks.

https://t.co/HqE9yt8TkB


2⃣ The Pandas library is the gold-standard to manipulate structured data.

Check out @joejamesusa's "Pandas Tutorial. Intro to DataFrames."

https://t.co/aOLh0dcGF5


3⃣ Data visualization is key for anyone practicing machine learning.

Check out @blondiebytes's "Learn Matplotlib in 6 minutes" tutorial.

https://t.co/QxjsODI1HB


4⃣ Another trendy data visualization library is Seaborn.

@NewThinkTank put together "Seaborn Tutorial 2020," which I highly recommend.

https://t.co/eAU5NBucbm

More from Tech

I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.


I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.

Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.

And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.

God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.

For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.

That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.
One of the best decisions I made during a very turbulent 2020 was to leave conventional coding behind and embrace the #nocode movement. @bubble made this a reality. Although my own journey thus far is premature, I’ve learned a lot so here’s a power thread on....


‘How I created @buildcamp sales funnel landing page in under 2hours’.

Preview here 👇

https://t.co/s9P5JodSHe

Power thread here 👇

1. Started with a vanilla bubble app ensuring that all styles and UI elements were removed. Created a new page called funnel and set the page size to 960px as this allows the page to render proportionately on both web and mobile when hitting responsive breakpoints.


2. Began dropping elements onto the page to ‘find the style’. These had to be closely aligned to our @buildcamp branding so included text, buttons and groups - nothing too heavy. Played around with a few fonts, colors and gradients and thus pinned down the following style guide.


3. Started to map out sections using groups as my ‘containers’ to hold the relevant information and imagery needed to pad out the sales pitch. At this point, they were merely blocks of color #ff6600 with reduced opacity set to 5% to ease page flair.

You May Also Like