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 senior engineer and posed a new challenge about a surprise from a colleague back from vacation. Check it here if you missed it - and subscribe if you’d like to receive similar management puzzles in the future.

📋 What I learned this week

This site also got attacked by the weird signup spam using email-to-sms gateways that’s going around amongst Ghost blogs. I noticed a few suspicious subscribers with @txt.bell.ca email addresses first (who reads a newsletter in text messages?!), but it didn’t seem significant A few days later though, I received an unexpected invoice from Mailgun, which, despite the small amount, prompted me to look into this. Turns out, the Ghost community is equally puzzled by the goals of the attack: what's the point of this if you can't spam comments (no way to log in) or control the content of the emails? Anyway, the company reacted well, quickly publishing a configuration option to block the domains used in this attack, and then elevating this feature to the Ghost Admin interface in v5.109.2. (Iterative product development!)

Here’s how this all looked like on my Mailgun dashboard:

Before the 20th of January, all you can see is regular upticks due to the weekly cadence of this newsletter. Around that day though, there was an increasing volume of emails going out, lasting until the 5th of February, when I closed this door. It turns out that the few successful signups I saw were just the tip of the iceberg of thousands of emails! I don’t mind having to pay a few dollars as much as I worry about the reputation of my domain, and the future of this newsletter if my sender address ends up on blocklists.

If you’re reading this, I’m still good. 🤞

🤔 Articles that made me think

How To Stay Calm Under Pressure?

A very actionable, straightforward article about managing sudden stressful situations, with real-life examples. What’s common in all those situations is that the perceived threats are activating the sympathetic nervous system, getting us ready to fight or flight. An example: Unexpected constructive feedback is perceived as a threat of performance problems, which by reflex tries to push us towards fight (being defensive) or flight (agreeing without processing the information to escape the discomfort). The framework in the article advises us to resist the reflex and calm down, understand the situation first, and only act after. No wonder that many military trainings include the philosophy of “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”, teaching methodical task execution under stress.

The reflex of rushing into quick reactions is especially common in people who recently gained a different or bigger scope to own (for example, after a promotion). I remember having a junior project manager work for me who I was reluctant to challenge in live conversations because they often fell into this reflex of being defensive or agreeing without understanding, to escape the painful situation. It was frustrating to see because I tried to build a culture of transparency and empowerment, where people are not just comfortable to challenge each other, but it’s even expected from them. Finally, I started sending my feedback async and asking them to discuss on an upcoming 1:1 live, so they could prepare their thoughts better. I wish I had been experienced enough to recognize this pattern and address it head-on, with concrete advice, like the BAA framework in the article.

📚 Something cool: Chat with your Highlights

I’ve been a longtime user of Readwise. A lot of the new content (RSS feeds, newsletters) I read is arriving to my Reader, and I save important web articles there too. The quotes I select from these and the books I read are stored and regularly reviewed in Readwise.

Up until now, searching was not the most pleasant experience: I often looked for a quote I vaguely remembered that I struggled to find. That feature is still to be improved, but meanwhile, the team launched one that makes me abandon search entirely: chat with your highlights.

This feature simply allows interactions with an LLM that has the context of all my saved highlights. I’ll demo instead of explaining: here’s a simple question (”How can I manage my time better?”) answered by Claude’s 3.5 Sonnet model, the one I found most capable of handling these kinds of tasks:

This answer is not bad, but it feels like a fruit bowl of random tips and techniques without any higher-level perspective. (ChatGPT gave similar answers.)

Now, here’s the same question answered by Readwise, based on my highlights:

I love it! It immediately takes a step back and looks at the question of time management in itself, adding a bigger context of making conscious choices about spending time. Plus, I have immediate access to the actual quotes to follow up on!

Sure, you could prompt a generic LLM to be more holistic in answering questions, use quotes to underline the message, etc. But having this all ready and fine-tuned, and based on my personal library, is a great feature to play with and use in my mentoring work.

That’s it for today, slow down for a smooth weekend,

Péter