Cate
@catehstn.bsky.social
fractional CTO. coach. quantum particle. in search of adventure; it’s probably fine ✨ Author of The Engineering Leader, published by O'Reilly https://cate.blog https://whatsmyjob.club
I like how "Explicitly. Out loud." is emphasized here - being seen as strategic is somewhat what you do, but often more about what you are seen to be doing. Which unfortunately does mean you have to talk about what you are doing, and why it is important. kieransnyder.kit.com/posts/be-mor...
"Be more strategic" and other lies
Be more strategic!
kieransnyder.kit.com
If you're systematically overwhelmed, working harder isn't the answer - and you know that, because if it was going to work it would have by now. The question that gets you out: what would make next week better for future-me?
What would make next week better?
Credit: Flickr / Christopher Bowley Just about everyone gets overwhelmed sometimes, and many of us deal with that by working harder. This is a reasonable response to a single unexpected thing, or a bad week, but it's not the right response to systematic overwhelm. Then you need to stop asking the question "what do I do next" (or worse: "how am I going to do everything?!?") and ask a different one:
cate.blog
On a boat this week 🚢 Haven't touched my computer in days. I love mobile because the smaller form factor forces you to be deliberate. Desktop gave us "make it do everything, settings everywhere." There's something beautiful about simplicity. Mobile set a higher bar 📱👩🏻💻✨🏝️
Dr. Toni Morrison is a good example of a genius, a term rarely if ever applied to women. Let’s change that.
JP@johnathanperk.bsky.social · last yr.“The grandeur of life is that attempt..” — Dr. Toni Morrison
Bought Claude Steele's new book the day I saw it, then left it unread for months. Chapter one explained why. Stereotype threat is the impact. Churn is what happens inside you while it's happening - and it’s the label for why I'm so much less strung out lately.
Book: Churn
Claude Steele’s first book Whistling Vivaldi gave me one of the most useful framings I have for bias. Stereotype threat: in a situation you care about, the worry that you're about to confirm a negative stereotype about your group degrades how you do. So when I saw he had a new book - Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It…
cate.blog
I need y'all to know that an offline friend (a doctor!!) just texted me saying she didn't know how online I was and had I heard of Jimothy. This has delighted me on multiple levels 😂🦝🦝🦝
WAIT - what's this?? our course audio in ACTUAL Apple Podcasts?!! 👩🏻💻 Now DRI participants can listen in a real podcast app!! We are at least 50% more legit, right?!? Also: I am an infra engineer now, bitches 🦝
About to go on vacation. Making peace with what I won't get to. Thankfully Claude's inbox management now offsets the AI-generated marketing noise. I've come a long way since I was obsessed with Inbox bankruptcy 🙈📧💥
We've decided, again, that we don't need managers. Yet there's more of that work to do than ever. Scaling has always been about finding and removing bottlenecks. The ordering and priority have changed dramatically. Your playbook is dead. Your toolkit is still useful. buff.ly/inokcYD
Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person team
Credit: Landiva Weber / Pexels We’re doing a big release this week for DRI Your Career. Mostly bug fixes and reliability work nobody will notice, but the two things worth mentioning: Audio ep…
cate.blog
Love my cousin discovering that I am the host of the revival of Reading Rainbow and proceeding to lose her mind with library joy 😂🥰📖🌈🦋
I reject the concept of impostor syndrome. It's used to pathologise women and other underrepresented people for a rational response to an unwelcoming industry. Is it a skill gap, or is it people making you feel like you don't belong? One you can work on. The other is about them, not you 👩🏻💻
ICYMI @catehstn.bsky.social and I chatted with Patrick Gallagher on the ELC podcast over a month ago. We cover a lot of topics, including our favorites of letting go of societal shoulds and crafting careers we love. sfelc.com/podcasts/bui...
ELC Podcast - Building an empowered career
In this episode, Patrick discusses what it means to build an empowered career & explore creative career portfolios with Jean Hsu (Fractional VPE @ Circuit & Chisel) and Cate Huston (author of The Engi...
sfelc.com
The engineer's response to feeling bad about something: what can I build, and what data would make the feeling go away. Six months of trying to measure my way out of the ick of self-promotion. Mixed results, but progress at least.
Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)
To be brutally honest, this (making Claude my social media manager) all started because I felt inadequate about self-promotion. And being an engineer, my response to feeling bad about something is to ask what I can build and what data would make the feeling go away. So at the start of the year I built social-brain — a CLI that pulls my content data off every platform once a week, formats it into a prompt, and lets Claude produce a report.
cate.blog
There are a few more spots for our DRI Your Career course (cohort 3!) starting Monday! If ever there was a moment in tech to get more clarity around what you want & equip yourself with the confidence and tooling to help you get it...this is a pretty good one! www.driyourcareer.com/dri-your-car...
DRI Your Career — Shape Your Career, or Capitalism Will
Figure out what you actually want — and make it happen. An 8-week async course with personal coaching feedback.
driyourcareer.com
There’s a thin line between creating a positive sense of urgency and management making their anxiety everybody’s problem.
A lot of courses promise to change your life. @jyhsu.bsky.social and I don't do that. What we've seen across two cohorts of DRI Your Career: people think differently, and then they take action. Which means, sometimes, they change their own lives. cate.blog/2026/07/07/t...
The Second Cohort
Image credit: Joe Groove After the first cohort of DRI Your Career I wrote that the first time you do something, you can believe in it but you can only really hope. But we just wrapped up our secon…
cate.blog
The billionaire co-founder of AirBnB wants you to blame the babies of undocumented immigrants for starter homes being unaffordable.
Trying to read a physical book and it's so inconvenient. There's no backlight. I can't clean it with a dettol wipe. And I keep dropping it on my head.
Never heard someone describe their workplace as "hunger games" until recently. What a messed up system. The relief of a no-drama small startup, where the only thing in abundance is work. New newsletter on the game - you might have to play it, but you don't have to believe it 👩🏻💻 buff.ly/VMcLWVZ
life is life, work is work
I love living in Ireland, in part for the distance that it gives me - a reminder that life is life, and work is work. But I also miss the sense of community...
newsletter.whatsmyjob.club
A package arrived this week. I thought about this book every day while I wrote it. And then when done I filed it as achievement complete and moved on to the next thing (a mistake: if you write a book you are actually supposed to tell people about it). A reminder to stop and feel proud of it 👩🏻💻✨
There's an idea that reading enough of the right books can replace an MBA. I've seen the value, and the limits. My gap was financial models. Never managed a budget, couldn't read a P&L. Asked to reason about an acquisition? Panic. Wrote about taking LSE MBA Essentials to fix that: buff.ly/W46z5E0
Understanding the Game
Credit: Unsplash / hpzworkz I used to panic when someone asked me what I thought about an acquisition. I had vague opinions, weakly held, because I didn’t know enough to reason about it. My o…
cate.blog
Intrusive thought: Mr. Darcy noting “My good opinion once lost is lost forever." is just regency era bitch eating crackers.
The more variety you have in your own life, the more empathy you can have for your users 👩🏻💻 Live and work only in English? You won't understand internationalisation 🌎🌍🌏 Only hang out with tech people? You won't understand users who do everything on their phone because they don't have a computer 📱
The stat of women making 87c on the $ always feels like a 🔪🩸💥 no matter how many times I hear it.
