Newsletter - Péter Szász

A collection of 57 posts

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

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

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

14 Feb 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

07 Feb 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

31 Jan 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

24 Jan 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

18 Jan 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,

10 Jan 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

13 Dec 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

29 Nov 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

22 Nov 2024 4 min read

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