The Monday Byte

Welcome to the Monday Byte where I send you 5 things each week so you can improve your English and land a remote dev job.

📖 Word/Phrase - mitigate

Very commonly used when talking about problems or bugs that come up as a software engineer. And, what’s even better is using Twitter/X to find examples of this used by other engineers. Here are a few: 1, 2, 3

💬 Pronunciation - Critique of Mexican Programmer’s English

I’m finally back in a place where I can do these. This one is of someone with a high-level of English. Watch this to see an example of someone who probably has a lot of experience working with native English speakers.

Want me to critique your English? Reply to this and let me know!

🗣️ Real World Conversation - What tense to use on your LinkedIn

There are typically two tenses you might use: simple past or present participle.

Examples using simple past for jobs you had in the past:

• Contributed thousands of lines of JavaScript

• Helped migrate app to serverless backend

Now for your current job, you’d want to use present participle like this:

• Contributing thousands of lines of JavaScript

• Helping migrate app to serverless backend

Some people also like to use simple present for current jobs which is fine too:

• Contribute thousands of lines of JavaScript

• Help migrate app to serverless backend

It’s a minor detail but one you want to make sure you get right.

Thanks Guido for DM’ing me on Telegram to suggest this question for this week’s nwesletter!

🔗 Content - How to Have Team-Level Influence

Selfishly, this is something I want to develop at my new job. Why? Because it’s how you move up the career ladder. It’s on thing to be an internal contributor (IC) but it’s another to be a leader.

Scroll down in this article until you see the Team-level Influence section and read it. You may not have native-like English (yet), but that won’t stop you from moving up at your company 🙂 

💪🏼 Exercise - Is this section helpful?

I’m debating whether or not to remove this section. For me, email is a passive thing. Which means, I’m reading to read, not to take action. Therefore, I’m thinking about removing this section.

What do you think?

Bonus: Read this section on Work Communication to learn how to write better emails and Slack messages.

Enjoy the week, we’ll talk again soon.

- Joe