#039 - Tackling big challenges and overcoming decision fatigue with Anthony Shaw

This week we have a very special guest on the podcast, our mate, Anthony Shaw.

There are so many things we discuss in this episode but we essentially discuss his career path, his switch from a managerial to a software dev / advocate role at Microsoft and, his process for writing his book, CPython Internals.

Most importantly though, we dive into the mindset involved with every one of these endeavours.

Thanks so much to Anthony for joining us and having such a deep and raw chat about his experiences. We couldn't be more grateful!

Some of the valuable takeaways:

• Getting a tech job? Make sure you interview them too!
  
  
• You can actually wear many hats (more than you might think) in a big company.
  
  
• How to keep your tech skills up if your main role is not that of a developer?
  
  
• Finding the balance between individual contributor and manager, is there even one?
  
  
• Sometimes you have to take chances to find out what you really like doing the most.
  
  
• How getting out there / sharing knowledge is one of the best things you can do in your career.
  
  
• Dealing with impostor syndrome, especially if you're up to a massive technical endeavour with little prior reference materials.
  
  
• How do you break down such a big endeavour, where to even start? How to approach it?
  
  
• We talk about how to effectively learn a programming language / technical topics (no more tutorial paralysis / embrace reinforcement learning).
  
  
• Specific methodologies Anthony used to really learn the CPython internals.
  
  
• How to overcome decision fatigue.
  
  
• And more...

As you can see this episode is jam-packed with things that are dear to us developers.

You can reach out to Anthony here:

https://twitter.com/anthonypjshaw
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonypshaw/
https://pybit.es/community (our Slack channel)

Every serious Python developer should get a copy of his book:
https://realpython.com/products/cpython-internals-book/