Péter Szász

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

Mar 15, 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.

Mar 10, 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

Mar 7, 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

Feb 28, 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

Feb 21, 2025 4 min read

Finding Focus through Intention (and a Timer App)

Why and how I use the Session App to help me structure my days.

Feb 20, 2025 5 min read

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

Feb 14, 2025 4 min read

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

Feb 7, 2025 4 min read

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

Jan 31, 2025 5 min read

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

Jan 24, 2025 6 min read

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

Jan 18, 2025 5 min read

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,

Jan 10, 2025 5 min read

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

Dec 13, 2024 3 min read

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

Nov 29, 2024 6 min read

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

Nov 22, 2024 4 min read

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

Nov 15, 2024 5 min read

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.

Nov 14, 2024 6 min read

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

Nov 8, 2024 4 min read

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

Nov 7, 2024 3 min read

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

Nov 1, 2024 5 min read

Subscribe to my newsletter