Happy 2025 High Growth Engineer 🎉
Special Announcement + 2024 Recap
Happy 2025, fellow High Growth Engineer! Jordan here 👋
Last you heard from me, I went on a short break. It was nice to get time to relax and hang out with family, girlfriend, and cats. I appreciate so many of you being supportive of the break too. Your messages mean so much 🙏
I also had the space to figure out what I want to focus on next, which I’m excited to share with you. I’ll jump right into it!
✍️ WriteEdge (Write tech specs 50% faster)
WriteEdge, a new AI tool you can use is now open for the waitlist.
Think of it like your favorite tech lead guiding you in the right direction at every step of your writing. No more dealing with writer’s block, staring at blank pages, or going through multiple rounds of review. You can write tech specs faster and with the quality of Senior & Staff Engineers.
It gives you the right structure for your use case, gets it started for you, and gives you specific feedback so your doc looks amazing when you share it with your team.
💡 2024 Learnings
Mental health above all else. Learn to say “no.” As a creator, opportunities come your way constantly. This is a blessing and a curse. It’s great because you always have things to do and ways to grow. But if you don’t learn to say no, you’ll quickly drown. I had to say no both to others and myself when I realized my mental health was suffering. This switch helped me quickly recover and get out of the trap I got myself in.
Match systems to goals. For 85+ weeks in a row, I wrote a LinkedIn post every day and a newsletter article every week. The consistency was great, and I don’t regret it. However, in December, my goals changed. They became less about audience growth and more about personal growth. Once my goals changed, I changed my systems to match. Rather than posting for the sake of it, I questioned what I do every day and whether what I’m doing will truly help me grow personally.
Change is the only constant. Learn to adapt. 2024, particularly with AI, teaches you that the industry is changing at a rapid pace. It’s hard to say exactly what skills will be valuable other than to learn new things quickly.
Traditionally, I haven’t been great at this because I like gathering a lot of context before jumping in and getting my hands dirty. This changed recently, though, after I “dove in” on a few personal tools and started WriteEdge with Sidwyn. I’ve built so much more and finished things quicker than I thought possible.
🏆 Top 5 posts of 2024
I removed the paywall on these for the next few days. Happy New Year, and I hope you enjoy them! These were all a hit. A huge thanks goes to all the guests who took the time to write and work with me on these 🙏
Why reading whitepapers takes your career to the next level (and how to do it) — Guest post by
5 Lessons I learned the hard way from 10+ years as a software engineer — Guest post by
Communicate like a Senior: Use clear deltas — By yours truly 😄
The one framework every engineer should know — Guest post by
Three career principles that got me to Director at Google — Guest post by
My personal favorite was Torsten’s guest post, “The one framework every engineer should know.” That one totally changed how I think about my communication, similar to when I learned Bottom-Line-Up-Front (BLUF).
Month-by-month review of 2024
Late 2023 into Jan 2024 - Started Path to Senior Eng Handbook. Now at 14k Github stars, more than most JavaScript libraries! Shoutout to
for the inspiration from his Data Engineer HandbookFebruary - Set up learning tracks for paid subscribers and started working on my first digital product, the TLDR Insight Library, a collection of all the TLDRs across every post.
March - Published Top 5 CSS Mistakes Frontend Engineers Make on GreatFrontend. Shoutout to Yangshun Tay for the collaboration 🙏
April - Joined Pinterest. It’s been an amazing experience so far ❤️
May - Published “Getting a Job as Software Engineer, Career Growth, Creating Popular Newsletter,” a YouTube collaboration with Raj, Principal AWS Architect.
June - Hosted a roundtable on brand building at Plato Elevate. I also met fellow writers
and in person. I also met my manager in person for the first time—we both hosted our own roundtables!July - Made a “Become a go-to person” course on Taro and hosted 21 Ways to Become a Better Engineer. Shoutout to Rahul and Alex from Taro for all the support in making these happen.
August - Wrote about my Pinterest onboarding experience in my first Pinterest blog post. Shoutout to my teammate Rebecca Yi for collaborating on it together!
September - Hosted the first High Growth Engineer Month of Collabs. Here’s a recap post of the best lessons from the industry experts.
October - Hosted 35 students from my alma mater, Lehigh University, at Pinterest for a learning event on what Big Tech is like and how to get in.
November - Finally started using Raycast and made huge productivity gains. I wrote about how you can use it here.
December - Announced my break and plan for December. Paired up with
on our new tool, WriteEdge. Also shared an open source repo for helpful Tech GPT prompts. So far, there’s one in there that can help your writing. Feel free to contribute!
🏁 What to expect in 2025
I’m digging more into AI, cutting-edge technical learning, and productivity. As always, I’ll share what I’m learning with you all and make it actionable. I’ll build out WriteEdge on the side and explore other ways of adding value, like sharing GPT prompts and helpful frameworks that help you grow as an engineer.
🙏 Thank you
Thank you for an amazing year of growth. I appreciate all the messages I’ve received throughout the year about how the newsletter has helped you, and I especially appreciate the ones I received in December after sharing about the shift I’m going through.
Looking forward to 2025 and more “High Growth” 😄 🫡
Happy New Year, Jordan! 🥂
Congratulations on such an amazing year. Wishing you a happy 2025 :D