In previous issues, you've explored how to help others grow through education and content creation, but now it's time to invest in yourself. In this issue, you'll find a framework you can use to learn any hands-on skill. It's what I've used for years and what I recommend to students and mentees.

How to Learn Something New

The book The Pragmatic Programmer mentions the importance of learning a new programming language every year. This practice gives you new perspectives and helps you think about problems in new ways.

This isn't always something everyone can do at their day job, since your employer expects you to work on the things they pay you to do. Events like Advent of Code encourage people to stretch their skills, and some companies offer an end-of-year study break. So some professionals use the holiday season to do some self-directed learning.

In this issue, you'll look at a new way to work on multiple branches in Git simultaneously by using the git worktree command. But first, I'm going to challenge the popular belief that everyone learns things in different ways.

Everyone Doesn't Actually "Learn Differently"

In Issue 10, I wrote about the myth of learning styles and how there's no scientific evidence that learning styles impact a person's ability to learn. That myth, sadly, won't go away.

Lately, I've seen people using a variant of the myth: "Everyone learns differently."

I've used many content formats over the years, and while I love Markdown, I run into its limitations daily when I work on larger documentation projects.

In this issue, you'll look at Markdown and explore why it might not be the best fit for technical content, and what else might work instead.

Markdown Lacks the Structure You Need

Markdown is everywhere. It's human-readable, approachable, and has just enough syntax to make docs look good in GitHub or a static site. That ease of use is why it's become the default choice for developer documentation. I'm using Markdown right now to write this newsletter issue. I love it.

This month is about working smarter. Get more impact from the content you’ve already created, and use a popular CLI tool to make some common Git tasks faster and easier to navigate.

When "Make Something New" Isn't the Best Strategy

Shipping new content feels great. You've put in the hours, polished it until it shines, and now it's live with your name on it. It feels good to create; it's what you're supposed to do, right? After all, you're a content creator.

Content creation feels safe. You love learning about new things, you love building demos, and you love that feeling of excitement that builds right before you send this great new piece out into the world. You want it to be successful, and your organization does too, so it's easy to get caught up placing bets on new content.

In this month's issue, you'll look at how soft skills help you get better results from coding assistants and how you can help people find your content by bringing it to them.

Help People Find You By Bringing Content To Them

You're creating great content and following SEO best practices, but your traffic is dropping. Something fundamental has shifted: AI summaries are reducing blog traffic across the board. In fact, a recent study found that AI summaries are causing a "devastating drop" in online news audiences. When people search for information, Google's AI summary gives them what they need. They don't see a link to your carefully crafted blog post.

Your content strategy needs to evolve. Instead of hoping people will find your content on your site, you need to take your content to where people already are. This doesn't mean you have to abandon your blog or overhaul your SEO strategy. LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude still rely on traditional web crawling and search infrastructure to discover content, so your existing well-optimized blog posts remain valuable. You're going to expand your reach and build on your solid foundation.

Your next role may be just one organizational chart away, but only if you keep all the stakeholders happy. In this issue, you'll see how you can navigate a transfer professionally. Then you'll explore what you need to do with your content to make LLMs and coding agents happy without compromising quality for human readers.

Making The Leap... To Another Team

There's a role on another team and you feel you're the right fit, but how do you make the jump? Switching teams might look easy from the outside, but there's a lot you'll need to navigate. When someone moves internally, one manager gains talent, while another must start a hiring process they weren't expecting. Move too fast, and you risk damaging the relationships you've spent time building. Move too slowly, and they hire someone else for a role you'd be great at. Here's how to make the move and preserve every relationship.

First, learn the rules. Many firms require a 12-month waiting period or written approval from a manager before you can even click "Apply." Confirm the exact policy with HR so nothing stalls later.

Interviewing is hard, and you're competing against people just as talented as you. Managers don't just compare skills when evaluating candidates; they also look to see which candidate is less risky. In this issue, you'll see how managers determine that risk.

You'll also look at how to make documentation drive product growth and adoption by tying it to how adults learn.

Drive Product Adoption with Adult Learning Theory.

Docs are more than support. They play a crucial role in product adoption. Documentation is where technical practitioners go to see if your product is a good fit. The 2025 State of Docs survey indicated that 90% of respondents say documentation is important when making a purchasing decision.

In this issue, you'll use a tool that manages your programming language version, tasks, and environment variables at the same time. But first, you'll examine how your day-to-day behaviors can impact how people perceive you. You'll also see that not every reference is a formal one.

Your Career Has a Permanent Record

This might seem obvious, but many people act as if their actions exist in isolation, forgetting that careers span decades and industries are smaller than they appear. You build your professional reputation every day through every action you take. How you show up at work, interact with others, meet deadlines, and support your team creates lasting impressions.

When you ask someone for a professional reference, you're asking that person to put their reputation on the line for you. They're vouching for your abilities and character. If you excel, their judgment looks sound. If you underperform, it damages their credibility. This makes people cautious about who they recommend.

Discover how strategic silence helps you get better information from colleagues, strengthens negotiations, and more. Then you'll explore how to build your own AI tools with RubyLLM through a practical example.

Enjoy the Silence

You can strengthen your professional relationships, improve communication, and negotiate effectively without saying anything at all. In a world full of noise, silence is your secret weapon. Here are a few ways you can use silence to your advantage.

Let explanations unfold.

Remote work offers a lot of freedom, but it comes with some traps. Thankfully, you can mitigate some of those traps with the advice in this month's issue.

I completed my 13th book recently, and I'm working hard on another, so I thought it would be helpful to explain why I'm still producing books when everyone has access to LLMs.

Let's look at remote work first.

How to Work Remotely

Presenting an idea to a busy decision-maker can be challenging. The key is to be clear and concise. In this issue, you'll explore the Minto Pyramid and how you can use it to pitch your next idea. You'll also explore a CLI tool for testing links in your content.

Scan Links with Lychee

If you're maintaining content, you'll find that part of that job is ensuring the things you link to are still intact. Lychee is a fast command-line tool for scanning links, and you can use it as a GitHub Action as well.

While it can scan live websites, it can also find links in Markdown documents and local HTML files, so you can integrate it into your development process.

This issue marks three full years of this newsletter. It's a significant milestone, and I'm thankful to everyone who's been a loyal subscriber. I look forward to sending this out every month and I appreciate everyone who reads this.

In this final issue of 2024, you'll explore one of the most crucial skills you can build to grow your career: the skill of discernment. You'll look at it through the lens of prioritizing your work to identify what's most important.

But first...

Things To Explore

In this month's issue, you'll explore how senior employees operate so you can move in that direction. Then, you'll see how to accelerate your slide development by turning Markdown into Google Slides.

What Separates Juniors from Seniors?

The difference between junior and senior employees isn't about how long they've been in the role. It's about how they show up, how they think, and how they work with others.

Here are four areas where seniors stand out and how you can start making those shifts yourself.

Hello, friends. This month, I'm excited to share with you a great way to improve the flow of your content, whether you're giving a talk, writing a chapter, or conducting a workshop. I'll also share how your company evaluates you.

Let's get right into it.

Guide Learners with Intentional Transitions

At some point, you learned about the importance of introductions and conclusions when delivering content, whether it's in a written form or as a presentation. A good introduction motivates people. It engages them and lets them know what they will get into and why it matters. A strong conclusion wraps everything up.

In this issue, you'll walk through what it takes to figure out a sustainable hourly rate that hits your desired target and covers your expenses, along with a link to a calculator I built to help you figure it all out. Then, you'll look at how to throw away all your changes in a Git repository, including any new files and folders you made.

Compute Your Rates

I've been doing some sort of consulting and freelancing since I was in college, and I've lost count of the number of times someone has asked me, "How do I know how much to charge?"

Most people ask around to find out what industry rates are and then charge accordingly. That might work if you are doing some side work to supplement your current salary, but it's not sustainable if you want to strike out on your own. A proper hourly rate factors in more than the time you're spending.

In this month's issue you'll explore if people management is right for you, and you'll look at how to take changes you've made to your code and split them into multiple commits.

Split Changes into Multiple Commits with Git

When working on a project, you might make several changes before you commit. However, these changes might relate to different features or bug fixes. For example, you might change a file to fix a bug, but you might see something else in the file that bugs you, so you fix it while you're there.

This was a busy month. I've been working on finishing up my latest book and preparing for a conference talk. But I have two small things to share with you in this issue. First, I'll explain why I dislike a particular word, and then I'll explain how I quickly copied thousands of small files between two machines. I've also added a new section at the end called "Things to Explore," which covers some resources I'm looking at that you might find valuable.

Please Use "Use."

I don't like the word "utilize." I wince when I read it. As an editor, I will strike that word from prose in almost every situation I can. Anyone who's worked with me knows how I feel about that word. My friend Mason recently asked me to explain why, and he suggested I write about it for this issue.

George Orwell and George Carlin explain my feelings well. George Orwell famously said, "Never use a long word where a short one will do."

If you're a freelancer who works with multiple databases, you'll love this issue; you'll explore a tool that lets you connect to multiple databases using a common interface with syntax highlighting, and you can use it to migrate data between databases.

You'll also see one way to think about content strategy and how to use it to drive product awareness and adoption.

But let's start with the database tool.

A Universal SQL Tool that Also Migrates Data

Hello, friends.

If you're going to put hours into creating content, you owe it to yourself to measure its performance and impact. You can use what you learn to determine where to spend the rest of your time. I recently updated the analytics backend on one of my sites. As I looked at the data, I saw some surprising things about several pieces of content that quickly changed where I plan to prioritize my efforts going forward. In this issue, you'll look at two metrics you can use to evaluate your content and how you can use them to predict future growth.

You'll also see how to rename multiple files with some Bash scripting.

Measuring Your Content's Performance: Pageviews and Unique Visitors

Have you taught, or did you just present to a group of people? Did your audience learn, or did they just read your words? In this issue, you'll explore how to add assessments to your content to nudge learners toward more active participation.

In addition, you'll use a command-line tool to run two background services simultaneously, so you don't have to juggle multiple terminal windows when developing apps.

Involve Your Learners In Your Content

Thanks to the Internet and a wide array of professional tooling, anyone with an idea to share can create content, publish it, present it, and even get paid for it. However, content alone isn't the whole story if your goal is to teach someone a new skill. Watching someone build an app isn't enough to grasp the complexities that lie within.