Hello my friends.

This week I've released Coding Fantasy. The next-generation platform for learning code by playing games 🎉

It solves two big problems of traditional learning to code, the lack of practice and low engagement, by combining tons of real-world practice with an engaging, interactive, and fun-to-play environment. No more boring courses, videos and articles. Learn to code in a completely new, fun, and effective way.

Check out it here: codingfantasy.com​

Let's kick off this week with 3 hand-picked articles from the tech world, 2 web development guides, and 1 best Tweet of the week.

🔥 Picks From The Tech World

1. Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming​

These reflections are just about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours. No lessons sum up to "programming is about people" or "how to be a senior technical leader".

My favorite takes:

• Delete as much code as you can.
• Syntactic sugar is usually bad.
• Know when to break the rules. For rules like "don't repeat yourself," sometimes a little repetition is better than a bit of dependency.
• There's no correlation between being a 10x programmer and a 10x employee (maybe a negative one).
• Good APIs are easy to use and hard to misuse.

2. Why Don’t Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?​

TL;DR

1. They can't afford it.
2. They can afford it, but use an old mental modal when you "can't" raise that much.
3. They can afford it, but it raises a lot of tough questions, like "what to do with the other engineers? to raise or not? if to raise, by how much?"

It’s easy to say “pay developers more,” but it’s never that simple. However, some companies, like Netflix, have figured out how to make your best talent stays.

3. Refactoring CSS: Strategy, Regression Testing And Maintenance​

A deep dive into the CSS refactoring process, from A to Z. It covers incremental refactoring strategy, visual regression testing, and maintaining the refactored codebase. Highly recommend.

⚡️ Web Development Guides

1. CSS Logical Properties and Values​

An introduction to logical properties and values.

2. How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs​

A guide to building a UI that won't break when something unexpected happens, as a network request fails, a third-party library breaks or a JavaScript feature is unsupported.

A brilliant guide to creating an outstanding UX.

Tweet of The Week

Brilliant thread.

If you are ambitious, there are basically two games you can play at a startup.

Game 1: Optimize for company outcome. Spend all of your time finding and fixing the highest leverage problems you can

Game 2: Optimize for career outcome. Seek external signals like title, scope, and team size. Make sure you're "learning the right things"

The question is, what to choose? This thread is the answer.

Dan Hockenmaier @danhockenmaier Short thread on something I wish I had understood much better 10 years ago: If you are ambitious, there are basically two games you can play at a startup Many people early in their careers (especially those from big tech, consulting, finance) play the wrong game, and lose both August 7th 2021 389 Retweets 2,202 Likes

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That's all for this week, take care and have a great one!

– Nick

Note: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my weekly 3-2-1 newsletter. Every week, I send out my "3-2-1" newsletter with 3 hand-picked articles from the tech world, 2 web development guides, and 1 best Tweet of the week.