Happy Friday Food for Thought
A collection of thought experiments about Software Engineering, individual growth, leading teams, and oneself, augmented by a multidisciplinary mindset. Aimed at software engineers and managers, open for everyone working in tech companies.
What to expect
Shared personal experiences and reflections. I hope to provide an outlook that becomes the spark for someone else inspiration and the next step to action. In other words, a portion of food for thought.
A multi-disciplinary mindset. I believe in the power of connecting the dots in each aspect of our lives.
A collection of resources I find valuable and experiment with in my professional life, augmented by how they play out for me or others I am connected to.
An ongoing experiment. I’ve come a long way with writing and sketching ideas in my diary and second brain system. This year I have started to share a set of thoughts with my team every other Friday with an e-mail entitled Happy Friday Food for Thought. Lately, I figured this might be something worth sharing with everyone. Time can only tell, and I will surely learn to make my writing clearer and clearer along the way.
How will Fridays and food connect in this newsletter?
Who doesn't love Fridays? For me, they are more than the beginning of the weekend. Fridays are for inspiration, personal passion projects, fewer meetings, more focus time, and ultimately a day I consistently use for reflection and planning.
Since my Fridays involve a lot of coffee and reading, I figured they would be a good moment to publish a new post recurringly and hopefully give others a dose of inspiration on top of their coffee/tea. My ultimate intention is to come to a writing process that enables me to have each Friday augmented by a new post, yet I refrain from this commitment for now.
What about food? Reading and getting inspired is a healthy type of “food” for our brain, ultimately empowering its neuroplasticity. My ambitious goal is to provide this kind of food with each post I write.
Last but not least, you will see that the food metaphor will be consistently used in the HFFT newsletter, even in the structure of my posts, made of three main sections:
Entrée - In this section, I will introduce the thought, its origins, and how the current post attempts to address it further.
Main course - This will be the main part of the post, the juicy part where the main ideas will be shared in detail.
Dessert - The takeaway from your meal, i.e. HFFT post. Here I will outline the main idea I hope everyone takes away from the current post, plus further reading and resources that connect with it and might fuel even more your inspiration.
Bon appétit!
> whoami
My name is Bianca Costache, and I am a passionate Engineering Manager at Adobe Romania and a former Software Engineer.
At heart, I am passionate about programming and solving complex problems. This is what started my career in software engineering in 2013. Since 2020 I’ve made a lateral move to Engineering Management, leading an organization of 15 people with 3 cross-functional teams and a diverse set of individual roles: Software Engineer, Customer Success Engineer, Engineering Manager, Technical Writer, and Data Analyst. A perfect match for me to combine Engineering Excellence with Customer Success while applying a multidisciplinary mindset.
My contributions and development have always aimed beyond the moment and local context. I am passionate about contributing to global communities while sharing my learnings with others and developing a multidisciplinary mental model.
I love to read, and I read a lot about diverse topics outside my professional spectrum: science, history, culture, psychology, sport, art, and the list goes on. Curiosity and a continuous list of developing passions keep me going, and I use them intensively to develop a multidisciplinary mindset, which ultimately helps me think outside the box at work and home.
