Code, Coffee & Clarity ☕: EP.1

Apr 11, 2025

EP.1 — Start With You: The Best Development Begins Within

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Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves — their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.


A Simple Question… That Changed Everything


“What did I learn today?”


It sounds like a basic journal prompt — something you’d scribble in a tiny notebook before bed. But for me, this question transformed how I see work and life altogether.


As a full stack developer, my daily life revolves around bugs, pull requests, crashing APIs, and deadlines that come faster than coffee brews. But somewhere along the way, I realized: every single day has a lesson hidden in it — no matter how small.


But in the past, those lessons were just… moments that passed.

I’d forget how I fixed that weird bug, or how a casual conversation with a teammate revealed something deeper about life. It all just blurred into the background.

That is — until I read Managing Oneself. And something in me clicked: I needed to start “logging” my own lessons.



A Little Book That Helped Me Refactor My Thinking

Managing Oneself isn’t a typical how-to guide that tells you to wake up at 5 AM and hustle harder.

It’s more like a manual for understanding the “source code of yourself.”


Peter Drucker doesn’t mention code, tech, or startups. But what he talks about hits developers right where we forget to look — ourselves.


Instead of IDEs, he offers introspective debugging questions:

  • What are your strengths?
  • How do you learn best?
  • In what kind of environment do you thrive?
  • What do you truly value?
  • What role do you want to play in this world?

These questions aren’t just for improving at work. They’re a mirror to help us understand why we sometimes feel exhausted — even when “we’re just doing our job.”


When I reflected on them, I couldn’t always answer with clarity. But there was one question I could answer: How do I learn best?


And that answer became the foundation of this series.


Because when I set out to truly understand something, I often realize that if I can write it clearly — I can use it clearly. But the lessons I didn’t write down? I fooled myself into thinking I understood them. And when I needed them the most, everything fell apart.



A Devlog Not to Impress, But to Understand

When I started keeping a simple devlog each day, I realized:

You don’t need to write anything grand.

Sometimes, it’s just:


  • “Oh, that error was because of a timezone mismatch.”
  • “I snapped at a teammate today — they misunderstood the code’s intent.”
  • “Stayed silent in a meeting today… and actually learned more than I ever expected.”

Over time, I noticed patterns in these logs. It felt like I was building my own personal Feedback Analysis System — for life.



Feedback Analysis: From Code Reviews to Self Reviews

One of Drucker’s most powerful (and underrated) tools is simple but transformative:Feedback Analysis.


The method:

  • Before doing something, write down what you expect to happen.
  • After 1–3 months, review what actually happened.

I tried it in my dev work. For example:

  • Project A: Expected it to be done in 7 days. Took 14.
  • Thought B: Thought explaining the logic would help my teammate. Instead, it overwhelmed him.

It’s like unit testing your life.

You’re not testing code — you’re testing your assumptions.

And just like code, patterns begin to emerge. Patterns that help you grow.


This Devlog Isn’t Just About Code — It’s About the Human Who Writes It

Sometimes my devlogs aren’t technical at all.

They’re about:

  • Bugs that taught me patience
  • Meetings that revealed the power of listening
  • Failed deployments that reminded me to back up not just my systems, but my mental state too

Life Feels a Lot Like Version Control

  • We all have good commits.
  • We hit conflicts that need resolving.
  • We create experimental branches that don’t work out.
  • But in the end, everything gets merged — into the master branch of you.

The End of EP.1 (But Definitely Not the End)

If you’ve read this far, I want to say this:


You don’t have to change the world every day. But if you’re brave enough to pause and ask: “What did I learn today?” Your world… will never be the same again.


See you in EP.2 — where three lines of code taught me an all-day lesson on accepting what we can’t control.