The Monday Byte

Welcome to the Monday Byte where I send you 4 things each week so you can improve your English and land a remote dev job.

📖 Word/Phrase - code freeze

Since the holidays are coming up here in the US, many companies institute what is called a code freeze. It essentially means stricter rules for merging code.

At my company, they’re requiring 2 approvals instead of just one during the next couple weeks. Companies do this because with Christmas and New Years, a lot of people are out of town so if production goes down, it’s harder to fix. But they also want to decrease the chances of calling people in during the holidays.

💬 Pronunciation - Shadowing works!

I’ve been doing it for about two weeks now and I can say it truly does help with pronunciation. One of the things I noticed was how slow I was talking compared to a native Spanish speaker.

I also found out Language Reactor has a free browser extension which is perfect for shadowing with YouTube videos. It makes the subtitles bigger, breaks them up line by line on the side AND it can pause the video automatically so you can shadowing one line at a time. Highly recommend trying it.

🗣️ Real World Conversation - Copilot is Amazing

I don’t know about you, but I finally got access to Copilot (free through my OSS contributions) and it’s amazing!

I use it everyday at work and it’s a gamechanger. Obviously it doesn’t solve everything, but if you give it specific instructions for:

• debugging error messages

• writing small functions

• writing test cases

It excels. It saves me SO much time. Highly recommend seeing if you can get free access or ask your company to pay for it.

🔗 Content - 4 Devs Build the Same App

My friend Jason made a video about a series he calls “4 Web Devs Build The Same App Idea”. I think this is a great video to watch as a non-native English speaker because:

• you get an overview of the idea

• you get to see 4 native English speakers build it, explain their thoughts

• you get to see 4 reactions from native English speakers as they try each app

The series is done really well and it’s a great piece of content to level-up your technical vocabulary as a non-native English speaker.

Enjoy the week, we’ll talk again soon.

- Joe