My weekly tech industry intake routine as a Staff Engineer

How I stay up-to-date, find impactful opportunities, and grow from 25+ mentors

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As a Staff Engineer, you need to be thinking on quarterly time horizons. You need to plan what you, and oftentimes others, will be working on months before it happens. Your manager will lean on you to tell them what’s important to work on. And you need to have answers.

The best way I’ve found to ensure you have those answers is to stay up to date with the industry. You should know what the major trends are happening within your domain, what’s coming out that’s new, and then form an opinion on whether to incorporate those into your work.

Today, I’ll share my weekly routine for just that! It’s how I keep up with what’s happening and continuously learn from 25+ industry leaders.

My weekly inbox

Everything starts here.

My email inbox in Superhuman

This is like my digital version of the newspaper. I look at this list of emails on Saturday and set aside a 2-3 hour block to skim them for important learnings.

For example, the article “How to write a great agents.md” showed up in one of my “weekly brews,” or weekly email groupings.

A helpful article showing up in my weekly inbox grouping

That article gave me:

1. Tips that I can incorporate into our actual AGENTS.md file on the job.

2. An article I can link to in a strategy doc.

3. An article I can link others to when they ask me questions about writing AGENTS.md files. Or even better, tips I can add to our documentation, then link off to that article as a reference.

In this case, it could serve as the foundation for static analysis rules applied to all AGENTS.md files across all repos at the company. Just one article gave me that much benefit, but I’m often coming across 5-10 of these every week.

Here are a few other examples:

• Discovering an article on how to build a testing framework that served as the foundation for my knowledge on how our unit tests run, making it significantly easy to debug and ship major version upgrades.

• Access to system prompts for major LLM providers and clients has been great for using similar patterns in our agent files. Similarly, I’ve seen multiple articles on how to build an AI agent, which has given me a better understanding of how they work under the hood.

• Non-technical learnings like effective 1:1s, giving feedback, resolving conflict, managing up, influence, and more.

My notes on many SWE topics I’ve built up from the articles I read

If that gets you curious, let me show you how the routine is set up!

How the weekly inbox is set up

Actual newsletters

Before anything, you need some newsletters to subscribe to. These should be tied to your domain you work in. For me, that’s developer productivity and AI. Before that, it was design systems and accessibility, and before that, it was general frontend.

But for you, it will be different. If you’re in data engineering, you should find info specific to that. The same thing goes for DevOps, FinTech, Crypto, etc.

Here are some great places to start:

• TLDR Newsletters: They have curated daily newsletters by topic area. Subscribe to the ones specific to you.

• Pointer.io: More general, but you can often find good articles in all areas.

• Hungry Minds: Another curation newsletter with a lot of different topic areas.

Subscribing to these three is a great starting point.

For even more recommendations, but a bit more tuned to what I subscribe to, check my path to senior engineer handbook and web developer technical newsletter guide.

Email client - Superhuman

Now that you’re subscribed to newsletters, you need to organize them so that you don’t lose them in your inbox, and you can easily batch-read.

The foundation of the inbox is Superhuman, an email client replacement for Gmail. I use the “Split Inbox” feature to create an “Articles” inbox. Then, for each newsletter I subscribe to, I configure the sender to always go to that split inbox using the Superhuman hotkeys.

“Articles” split inbox which groups all non-urgent emails together

With this set up, my non-urgent reading doesn’t get mixed with things like communications with my accountant or doctor—those stay in “Important.”

Email grouping - Mailbrew

Having all your reading in the “Articles” split inbox is a great start, but as you add more newsletters, you’ll quickly be overwhelmed by too many emails. That’s where Mailbrew comes in. It helps you cut down your inbox size by more than 5x.

You can create custom inboxes that group emails together and receive them at any cadence you want. I have two:

1. Weekly brew - A grouping of about 20 emails that I only read sometimes. I receive it once per week on Saturday morning. Instead of scrolling and archiving 20+ emails, I get a single email that groups them, scan what I want to read, click into it, then archive the single email.

2. DevEx Industry - A collection of company blogs that post about developer experience and AI. I also receive this on Saturday morning, but it’s nice to have these company blogs split into a separate “brew.”

Below is a preview of how my Weekly Brew looks in my inbox

Weekly brew of emails I only read sometimes

The Weekly Brew and DevEx Industry email groupings help me cut down my inbox from about 60 emails per week to 10-20.

My sifting process

So far, we’ve subscribed to valuable sources and made it easy to consume them. Now, we need to actually do it and sift for gold, or knowledge we’ll get value from.

I start with a piping-hot coffee at my desk on Saturday morning and open my Superhuman “Articles” split inbox. I intentionally haven’t opened anything this week until then. In the past, I sifted whenever I had time, but batching it altogether has made it much quicker for me.

Then, I follow a three-step process.

1. Queue for reading: I go through each email and article link by title only, clicking what seems valuable and opening it in a new tab. By focusing solely on queueing, I can clear out my inbox in about 15 minutes. Only about 20% of emails survive this stage and end up in a tab for reading.

2. Read: Now, I go through each tab one by one. No replacement for this 😄. It’s gotta happen eventually. As I’m reading, I’m thinking about whether I’m reading for pure enjoyment or if I’ll use it in some way, which is helpful for the next step.

3. Take action: After reading an article or email, I usually save it in my Notion, add a task or idea to my Todoist, or do both.

Taking action

Unless you’re solely reading casually for enjoyment, the third step, taking action, is most important. You only retain about 10% of what you read, so if you’re not taking action, you’re doing a lot of work for very little in return.

The good news is that taking action, especially just saving the article, is easy and already gets you a lot of value. Looking back at an “AI Development” notes page I made on Notion, I have 10+ sections and many pages within each section that I can lean on when I need to; things like building AI agents, prompting best practices, how to set up evals, and more.

After saving the article or a portion of it, my next optional step is to add an item to Todoist. These are often work-related, because what I’m reading naturally supplements what I’m working on.

Here are some examples of what I add to Todoist:

• Share an article or learning that would be valuable to the team or a project

• Note that I should link to an article from a strategy doc

• Tell myself to make a JIRA for an idea that an article gave me

• Apply the learnings from an article to a part of the code that would result in a big win. For example, it may be an article on how to speed up page load times, and I want to try it myself.

Some people may look at this and say, aren’t you working on the weekend, then? To me, no. It doesn’t feel like work at all. No one is asking me to do this, and if I didn’t do it, no one is coming after me. It embodies the definition of work-life integration. Some of what I enjoy reading happens to be helpful to what I do at work. When I find something, I’m effectively dropping it into a mailbox for my work-self to discover on Monday. It only takes me a few seconds to add an item to Todoist, and I actually work on it when I’m at work.

That “mailbox” of ideas and resources that I create for myself is a superpower. Think about how many times you’ve struggled on a particular problem for hours, only for someone to show you the exact line of code to apply the fix. That person showing you that line of code is like what this weekly routine feels like to me. I’m constantly getting ideas and learnings I can’t get anywhere else. It’s like having 20 mentors at a time. I’ve had this routine for the past four years, and it’s been a massive part of my growth. I’m glad I could share it with you, and I hope you find value from it too!

📖 TL;DR

• Keeping up with the industry makes you more effective at your job and is a great, more casual way to keep growing.

• The setup

  • Superhuman with “Articles” split inbox for separating non-urgent reads from regular emails

  • Mailbrew groupings for fewer emails and grouping by topic

• The sifting process

  • Queue interesting articles for reading as tabs

  • Read one by one

  • After reading, take action by saving for reference (I use Notion) or creating an action item (I use Todoist)

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