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I read +50 books/yr and I use highlighting to help me retain the most material. Highlights help in so many ways: they are physically attached to the material, it gamifies the reading process as you chase the next highlight, and you can easily skim past highlights to help you pick up a book you didn't finish or just to review the best parts.

After I've finished a book, I translate those highlights into written notes on my blog. Last year I consulted a reading specialist on retention and they said this process is also what they recommend.

I have about 100 software related book notes on my website that might help you: https://www.briansnotes.io/books/?sort=rating

Start taking on the role of tech lead, where you are still an individual contributor but demonstrating project management capabilities of increasing complexity. For more on this topic, read The Manager's Path.

In my experience frequent deployments increase system reliability and stability because those teams are decreasing mean time to recovery, leverage more automated testing, have better monitoring, and have less manual/error-prone processes.

I started a company like this and ran it for 2y. I spent most of my time doing sales and client management, not building or designing. Read The E-Myth Revisited for an idea of the underlying issue of being a technician vs. business owner.

The market is highly competitive. Google "web design $YOURCITY" and you'll probably find dozens or hundreds of local companies offering the same services. The winners I've seen typically focus on a niche market, which helps them break out of geographic limitations and expand up-market to more lucrative projects.

Peopleware, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Difficult Conversations, On Writing Well

If you're more interested in team performance metrics, read Accelerate. The primary metrics from Accelerate that I use are Deployment Frequency and Lead Time.

TrainHeroic: Strength and conditioning app for coaches and athletes

* Senior Software Engineer

* Denver/Boulder, Colorado

* https://www.trainheroic.com/engineering/jobs.html

The book Difficult Conversations is geared toward interactions with other people, but I think the lessons are also valuable for understanding your own mental state and behaviors.

I also enjoyed:

* Release It! by Michael Nygard

* System Design Interview by Alex Xu

TrainHeroic: Strength and conditioning app for coaches and athletes

* Senior Software Engineer

* Denver/Boulder, Colorado

* https://www.trainheroic.com/engineering/jobs.html

As a hobby I post my software engineering book notes online, adding 1-2 books each week: https://www.briansnotes.io/books/?sort=rating

Software is becoming more complex and sticking around longer which increases our expectations for candidates. Meanwhile many organizations have near zero ability to train and onboard junior level candidates and those that do see them leave within 12-18 months.

Reading Coders at Work, I discovered that even legends like Donald Knuth, Peter Norvig, and Ken Thompson rely on print statements for debugging.

There's No Speed Limit by Derek Sivers: https://sive.rs/kimo

Reading Coders at Work surprised me because this question was explicitly asked and each person interviewed basically said math is not very important, that the ability to write prose is more important.

Just ask your new company to push your start date back one week so you can take a vacation and come in feeling fresh.

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix, which has 4 quadrants with intersections of urgent and important.

I feel joy optimizing performance on a simple HTML and SCSS/CSS site. Removing every unnecessary bit of data transfer. Cutting all dependencies. Shrinking images. Just making the thing blazing fast.

More specifically, I would ask if time to hire offshore developers is a perceived existing problem? As a hiring manager, I already assume that I can get offshore developers started immediately if I want them - I just reply to any of the hundreds of LinkedIn and email spam messages I get from existing offshore agencies.

My hunch is that some companies are posting lower ranges because current employees can also see the posted range.

But like housing prices in CO, I suspect another factor is that prices are increasing rapidly so nobody has a great handle on market value. So a company might post a range they believe to be true, but be open to bidding higher pending other offers or concerns about not landing the candidate.

Hiring manager in CO here, watching salary ranges that get posted and having discussed it with more informed people on the HR side. Here's what I've been seeing:

* Yes, plenty of companies posting a lower range than they are willing to pay. Some are explicitly saying that's the starting range, others leave it implicit.

* Some but not many companies in technical compliance, but failing to meet the spirit of the law. Ex: posting a range of $50-150k.

* Lots of companies are still not posting the salary range. Many of these are out-of-state companies posting remote positions, but labeling them as Denver or Boulder to attract Colorado talent.

It sounds like you need to learn how to write testable code. For that, I would suggest two books: Working Effectively With Legacy Code and Clean Architecture.

Low cost index funds provided a 16% return in 2020 and require nearly zero effort.

I was in a similar position and the book Rediscovering JavaScript helped me understand syntax and structural changes, which made learning about new frameworks and tools easier.

Read Code Complete and Clean Architecture, then start incorporating those tactics and concepts into your own projects.

Good project managers turn chaos into clarity.

I don't speed read, but here's how I read faster (+50 books/yr):

* Read more. I find myself subvocalizing more when reading about new topics and less with familiar topics. The more you read, the more recurring themes you find.

* Highlighting helps me gamify reading. I'm basically hunting for interesting sentences.

* Appreciate which books are meant to be read quickly (self-help books usually fall into this category) vs. those meant to be read slowly. Give yourself permission to read at the appropriate speed for the given content.

I enjoyed these books:

* Strategy Rules

* How Google Works

* Founders at Work

A few things I've seen with null values:

* You're storing multiple types of data in the same table (often paired with a column indicating type). Some types have nulls in a column, other types have non-nulls.

* You've created an arbitrary limit on the data. Ex: a books table with author1, author2, and author3 columns.

* You add complexity to your queries making them less maintainable. For instance, you might start injecting COALESCE, IS NOT NULL, empty string checks, etc. all over the place.

* You need to be more careful with math. Ex: what is null + 10?

Null isn't universally bad, but it comes with issues you need to be aware of.