Monthly digest April 2021
Tags: writing, productivity, education, digest
Published: 2021-04-26 13:18:55

Welcome to a new monthly series on the blog. In the monthly digest, I will share articles and blog posts that I have read during the month that I found interesting and worth sharing with you!

## Hiring process

In the article [Don't hire for top talent, hire for weaknesses](https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2021/04/10/dont-hire-top-talent-hire-for-weaknesses/) the author really made me realize there is a different way to look at hiring new people. At companies, we always try to make sure we get the most talented engineers. But what if we hire with the mindset to make sure the teams we already have will be stronger?

> Instead of _“how can we find the smartest people?”_ think about _“how can we find people who will make our team stronger?”_
> 
> Benji Weber

The article explores the benefits and downsides of both talent-oriented hiring, and weakness-oriented hiring. In general, it is a great in-depth article that really made me rethink the way I see hiring.

## Personal growth

The article [Understanding bandwidth](https://smallbigideas.substack.com/p/understanding-bandwidth-f29119e7eb83) by Padmini Pyapali explores your mental bandwidth. Mental bandwidth is described as your capacity to execute difficult tasks. There are some hands-on tips on how you can protect your own mental bandwidth, and help you preventing burnout.

A more practical thing I have been trying lately is to be less negative. A fun and interesting challenge that I found is the [No complaining challenge](http://www.jongordon.com/positivetip/no-complaining-challenge.html) by Jon Gordon. It is a great way to bring some more positivity into your life, and how to turn the negative energy around into something positive.

![Personal growth](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/yez1mqp1jxfwnxcrgypi.jpg)

Personal growth

Atomic Habits is a book that is on my to-read list, and I am seeing it appearing on blog posts lately. A great post by Katherine Peterson on [how reading Atomic habits can make you a better developer](https://blog.katherinempeterson.com/takeaways-from-atomic-habits-that-can-make-you-a-better-developer). The blog post dives into the main takeaways of the book and gives you some great insights into how you can use them to become a better developer.

Something that popped onto my feed while I was writing [the most important skill for a developer to master](https://blog.jellesmeets.nl/developer-basics/the-most-important-skill-for-a-developer-to-master/). Is an article about [setting explicit help timeouts](https://www.swyx.io/help-timeouts/) by Shawn Wang. Shawn shares a story of how a task that was supposed to last 1-2 hours, took up 2 weeks of his time. The article explores the idea of setting timeouts for your help requests so you prevent letting a task spiral out of control.

## Teams

One of the most important pillars of a high-performing team is psychological safety. Without psychological safety, a team will be limited in what it can achieve. David Burkus really dives into [How to create psychological safety on teams](https://davidburkus.com/2021/03/how-to-create-psychological-safety-on-teams/). He shares 4 methods of creating psychological safety and gives some great examples.

While doing some research on how I could improve the guild meetings we were having internally, I found this article on Google. [Getting your guilds going](https://agilestrides.com/blog/getting-your-guilds-going/) has some great tips on how to start guilds, and how to tackle to most common obstacles you can face starting guilds.

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