Péter Szász

Week 27, 2025 - Summer Break

This is probably the last update for a few weeks, as we’re preparing for our vacations. Taking big breaks is important to recharge, but I found that smaller pauses, making adjustments in the daily routine, to allow space for relaxing a bit, are important too. I mean things like

04 Jul 2025 3 min read

Week 26, 2025 - Markdown Collapse

This week on Leadtime.tech I addressed another reader submission — how to decide the necessary resources to operate a third-party platform. I usually write about the people management aspect of an EM’s life, so it was a fun detour to think about something closer to technical strategy. Read it

27 Jun 2025 2 min read

Week 25, 2025 - 10x Teams

Summer is coming in full speed to Hungary. I’ll launch this short edition, then head out to meet a friend to share some beers on a terrace. This week on LeadTime.tech I wrote about a difficult challenge: how to approach having to lay off a well-performing developer. In

20 Jun 2025 3 min read

Week 24, 2025 - Connections and Sheets

Coincidentally, this week, the power of in-person discussions came up in multiple talks. Written communication, while having the benefits like speed and asynchronicity, misses a bunch of nuances that can be critical during conflicts. A voice call is better; you get a lot of hidden meaning from the tone, speed,

13 Jun 2025 3 min read

Week 23, 2025 - Search and Burnout

This week in my Engineering Manager Challenges newsletter, I wrote my approach to building a platform team. It’s the twentieth week I’ve been publishing on Substack, and so far, I’m okay with the results: 127 subscribers with a roughly 50% open rate. I’m starting to run

06 Jun 2025 3 min read

Week 22, 2025 - Forests and Deserts

I’m sitting in the Hungarian Railway Museum’s amazing park, under the shadow of buckeye trees, in the middle of a chirping concert from at least a dozen different birds. Halftime of the 2-day Craft Conference, I arrived a bit early to be able to finish this newsletter on

30 May 2025 4 min read

Week 21, 2025 - Money for Nothing

(Feel free to scroll through the first part if you get annoyed by Bitcoin - I find it a fascinating invention, a celebration of mathematics, so I’m a bit biased.) Bitcoin broke its all-time high this week, climbing briefly above $111K, meaning its hypothetical market capitalization went just above

23 May 2025 3 min read

Week 20, 2025 - Consolidate and Move

The biggest Hungarian tech conference is coming up in two weeks, and I’ve been asked to moderate two panel discussions on AI Security and Engineering Efficiency. I’m super excited about this opportunity: I frequently visited and wrote about the conference, and had the chance to give a talk

16 May 2025 4 min read

Week 19, 2025 - Memory and Skill

It was 1995, springtime like now, and I was sitting on one of my first university exams. The subject was UNIX shell scripting, and our task was to write some code using grep/awk/sed to manipulate text files. We had an hour or so to complete the script, and

09 May 2025 3 min read

Week 18, 2025 - Silent Walking

Another unusual newsletter, because I only want to write about one thing this week. The topic of “silent walking” came up in a Hungarian leadership community, and it gave me a good opportunity to share some related thoughts. Some housekeeping before I jump into that: the new EM challenge I

02 May 2025 3 min read

Week 17, 2025 - Compressed Colors

Short edition after a short week. It’s spring break in the school of my daughters, so I spent more time with family and less time with everything else. It was worth it — for example, Chloé started teaching me how to paint with aquarelle! You can see the very first

25 Apr 2025 2 min read

Week 16, 2025 - Eggheads

Happy Easter weekend if you’re celebrating this, or just live in a part of the world where Friday and Monday are a day off. I’m planning to spend some time with family. We found an old LEGO BOOST set that my daughters played with a bit years ago,

18 Apr 2025 3 min read

Week 15, 2025 - Kung Fu

This week on my Engineering Manager challenges series I wrote about handling an ambitious developer who announces they want to be an Engineering Manager too. I wrote about goals, risks, details to discover, and ways to support this engineer regardless of current organizational opportunities. Read it here if you missed

11 Apr 2025 6 min read

Week 13-14, 2025 - Anxiety and Excitement

Back after two weeks, thanks for sticking around. These days I’m mostly busy with my first 1:1 training clients, who want to be (better) engineering managers; and thinking about how to organize and display the content I produce that’s scattered around the web under different platforms and

04 Apr 2025 3 min read

Week 12, 2025 - Managing Focus

This is a shorter edition than usual: life throws curveballs and makes me reshuffle my plans. Crises have a silver lining: they make prioritization easier. When there’s one obvious thing to focus on, the cloud of uncertainty and self-doubt disappears. In light of this, I’ll also have to

21 Mar 2025 5 min read

Week 11, 2025 - Structure and Freedom

I missed the regular Friday launch of this newsletter. Work is picking up, and the conversations I’m having are inspiring and rewarding — but draining my creative energy. A few days ago, someone took the effort to thank me profoundly for a positive feedback I gave, and this experience triggered

15 Mar 2025 4 min read

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.

10 Mar 2025 5 min read

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

07 Mar 2025 6 min read

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

28 Feb 2025 8 min read

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

21 Feb 2025 4 min read

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