How To Praise
The potential of positive feedback and the framework to construct and deliver it, reinforcing the right behaviors to help individuals reach their full potential.
Péter Szász
Week 10, 2025 - Quality Hikes
Last week, I forgot to mention that I continued my Engineering Management Challenges series with an uncomfortable feedback email. This week, I shared my approach to that situation and posed another challenge about a low performer.
I started this series on Substack seven weeks ago, and it’s about time
Week 9, 2025 - Trust Issues
I had an overdue catch-up call with a friend this week. He shared experiences of frustration and shock from a job he recently left. Decades-old codebase, people who built or even understand it long gone, incompetent leadership. When I asked him what did he learn from this experience, after some
Week 8, 2025 - Exponential Potential
Writing proper, longer articles on this blog took a bit of a backseat recently, but yesterday I finished an article summarizing my experience with the Session App, putting the Pomodoro technique in a bigger context.
On the “small sister” newsletter of this blog, I published my approach to skip-level manager
Finding Focus through Intention (and a Timer App)
Why and how I use the Session App to help me structure my days.
Week 7, 2025 - Goose Chase
Yesterday, I visited the new exhibition at the Light Art Museum in Budapest with my daughter Chloé, where the above installation is on display too. Years ago, when I first heard that they were turning a struggling market hall into an exhibition center, I was frustrated. Our office used to
Week 6, 2025 - Smooth is Fast
Another focused week on building my mentorship and coaching business under Leadtime.tech. This also means that the “small sister” of this newsletter, my weekly substack about Engineering Management problems has a new issue. This week, I explained how I would’ve handled the harsh Pull Request comment from a
Week 5, 2025 - Happy Birthday!
This Sunday will mark the first anniversary of this blog and newsletter. Re-reading my Hello World post and the first Friday update, not much has changed. One of my strengths is consistency, but I need to stop sometimes and look back, to ensure I’m still going in the right
Week 4, 2025 - Baby Steps
I mentioned last week that I started to develop a pet project around the quantified self area. I have two kinds of things I want to track: goals (like weight, sleep time, productivity, etc.) and efforts (what I do to reach those goals). Learning from earlier experiments, I want to
Week 3, 2025 - New Horizons
It was a busy week. Indeed, it was so busy that I overplanned my Friday and didn’t have enough energy left to finish and send out this newsletter. Usually, I don’t like to work on Saturdays, so this is an exception.
This week I left behind thousands of
Week 2, 2025 - Boot Up
Welcome back! I hope you had a great wind down and are starting the new year with energy and optimism. I managed to step back a bit from this site, turn work off a bit, recharge, and think about what I want to do in 2025.
On the podcasting front,
Week 49-50, 2024 - Wind Down
It's a slow end of the year indeed, hence the lack of a newsletter last week. This is probably the final issue for 2024, and it will only contain a few updates and articles I didn’t want to sit on any longer. To start with, I had
Week 48, 2024 - Ghosts and Elves
Happy belated Thanksgiving to my American readers, I hope you found someone to be grateful for, and had a chance to tell them. And a joyful Black Friday to everyone participating in the global discount hunt craze! I like every aspect of what Mountex is trying to do with the
Week 47, 2024 - Talk Talk
This morning I woke up to a beautiful, snow-covered city. Winter is my least favorite season, I often find the dark, cold days bringing down my mood. Still, I try to focus on the good sides of it, and fresh snow is definitely one of the few ones.
I spent
Week 46, 2024 - Solo Games
Yesterday I wrote about a topic I’m far from being immune to: Impostor Syndrome. As with many of my articles, I focused on new Engineering Managers, but the patterns and mitigation mechanisms I found working might be useful for a wider audience too.
We’ve also launched a new
Managing Impostor Syndrome as a New Engineering Manager
That persistent feeling of being a fraud hits hard when stepping into engineering management. It's not just about doubting your abilities anymore - suddenly you're responsible for other people's careers while trying to figure out your new role. Let's look at how to handle it.
Week 45, 2024 - Launch Experiences
Important week in the US, but I don’t think I want to bring politics into this newsletter, regardless of how the events could shape our personal and professional lives.
Side note: I disagree with the movement of ignoring news – but I strive to select when, how much, and what
Notes on the 2024 DORA Report
This is the 11th time DORA (acquired by Google in 2018) publishes their yearly Accelerate State of DevOps report. I went through the 100+ pages, and listed a few points that surprised me — surprised often not in the sense of radically new ideas, but more like earlier beliefs that are
Week 44, 2024 - Beginnings and Endings
We have a new episode of The Retrospective Podcast live, the second one where we focus on one subject only. This time, we covered the scenario when an Engineering Manager moves to a new team. We discussed the challenges of this situation from the angle of the three main roles
Week 43, 2024 - Interviews and Narratives
These days were dominated by various potential work discussions, one of which led to my biggest learning of the week. While preparing for these interviews, I realized that the topic of discovering potential issues at a new employer was somewhat missing in my EM Hiring series, and this led to