Don't Think When You Code

Joel Karr is the Chief Technology Officer of Keller Postman, a national litigation firm, where he leads technology strategy and engineering. Over more than two decades he has built and scaled software organizations across public companies and private-equity-backed enterprises, including senior technology leadership roles at Redwood Logistics, Donnelley Financial Solutions (DFIN), and Restaurant.com. He speaks regularly at industry conferences on engineering leadership, deliberate practice, and building high-performing teams. Joel earned an M.S. in Computer Science, and an MBA, bothl from the University of Illinois, where he competed as a member of a Big Ten Champions Fighting Illini wrestling team. The discipline of deliberate practice he learned as a Division I athlete runs through everything this book teaches about how software engineers reach peak performance

Chapter 1: When the Same Work Feels Different.- Chapter 2: Why Experience, Without Deliberate Practice, Isn't Enough.- Chapter 3: Think Now, Build Later.- Chapter 4: Don't Use Your Eyes to See Code.- Chapter 5: The Question Behind the Ask.- Chapter 6: Where New Ideas Come From.-Chapter 7: When Good Enough Is Enough.- Chapter 8: The Illusion of Alignment.- Chapter 9: The Cost of Re-Deciding.- Chapter 10: The Feedback Paradox.- Chapter 11: Pressure Players.- Chapter 12: Reducing Uncertainty.- Chapter 13: Why Big Bang Rewrites Usually Fail.- Chapter 14: Turning Around Struggling Teams.- Chapter 15: Why Good Ideas Don't Spread.- Chapter 16: What Never Changes.