Newsletter - Péter Szász

A collection of 42 posts

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

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

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

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

Oct 25, 2024 4 min read

Week 42, 2024 - Various Quittings

Random thought: If you have multiple urgent and important tasks for the day, your priority somewhat counterintuitively is to put all of them away for a minute, and focus on prioritization. Working on the thing that you and your goals will benefit the most from half an hour later is

Oct 18, 2024 6 min read

Week 41, 2024 - Assumptions and Learnings

Busiest week in a long time. I worked on an interesting assignment for a remote manager of managers position about resolving conflicts in an async culture. The most interesting part was the self-reflection I did after my first draft. As I was piling back the layers of my answer with

Oct 11, 2024 5 min read

Week 40, 2024 - Calendars

Our Austrian bike trip was cut short by an unfortunate accident (we’re OK), but as a small silver lining, I managed to progress on multiple stuff above what I planned for this week. Apparently, even small breaks, stepping away from the usual day-to-day, can recharge my batteries. The latest

Oct 4, 2024 5 min read

Week 39, 2024 - Old and New Gadgets

This week went by fast and busy. I’m in multiple interview processes, and the preparation takes considerable time. It’s weird to sit on the other side of the table again, I'm a bit rusty in selling myself, but some discussions were truly exciting. Episode 9 of

Sep 27, 2024 3 min read

Week 38, 2024 - Floods

Sunday evening, out of boredom, I checked my blog's stats and saw that 239 people were reading my site. I don’t share visitor statistics much, so you have to believe me that it’s not usual that 239 people read my site concurrently. Having a handful at

Sep 20, 2024 4 min read

Week 37, 2024 - Sick Data

In 2002, a friend of mine used to work in CERN on a cool project: writing the software stack for a new generation of network cards that could transfer an unprecedented amount of data in a very short time. You know, all the stuff you want to record when you

Sep 13, 2024 6 min read

Week 36, 2024 - Photos and Fires

Yesterday I published the first non-hiring-related Engineering Leadership article since May: How to Lead Your Team when the House Is on Fire. I felt the desperation in discussions with various peers, especially line managers, about the pressure of the current wartime climate in tech companies, so I spent a day

Sep 6, 2024 5 min read

Week 30-35, 2024 - Endless Summer

I’m back from a month of travel around France, something we try to do every year (we’re a French-Hungarian family living in Budapest). This is an opportunity to get a lot of cycling done, meet friends I rarely see, spend more time with family, and enjoy long drives

Aug 30, 2024 5 min read

Week 29, 2024 - Summer Break

We’re starting our yearly family vacation very soon, so this is probably the last Friday update until the end of the summer. We haven’t managed to publish more The Retrospective episodes, editing is a tedious process and we got distracted by life. Watch this space though, we have

Jul 19, 2024 3 min read

Week 28, 2024 - Riding the Heat

It’s another crazy hot summer here, like at most of the northern hemisphere I guess. What do you do when you’re stuck in a big city on days when the temperature is nearing 40ºC? Well, we went to a museum to cool down and watch a photo exhibition

Jul 12, 2024 3 min read

Week 27, 2024 - This Too Shall Pass

As I guessed in the last issue, there was not much else I got done this week, so this will be a short update. Part of this newsletter was written on the train home from my three-day bike trip around Hungary. I love the feeling of freedom these trips give

Jul 5, 2024 2 min read

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