2 min lesson
Tighten one writing sample to publishable
Take this case and make the call: "You have a portfolio of eight repos and posts, but none has a one-line framing and you've never verified the code in your most-shared blog post still runs. What two moves make this interview-ready?"
Step 1 of 2
Tighten one writing sample to publishableCorrectness first, then clarity
Pick your single best piece and bring it to the bar Cursor holds for docs: correct, clear and credible to a working engineer. The fastest wins are usually subtractive.
- Verify every technical claim against the real API, SDK or CLI behavior - not your memory of it. One wrong method poisons trust in the whole piece.
- Cut the hype adjectives. "Powerful," "integrated," and "easy" are the words developers skim past.
- Make the quickstart genuinely copy-paste-able: a reader should reach a result in under three commands.
- Read it aloud once. Anything you stumble over is a sentence a tired developer will bounce off.
- Show the workflow with real code or a real terminal, not a paragraph describing it.
On a clean machine or a fresh container, follow your own writing sample step by step without skipping. Every place you reach for knowledge that isn't on the page is a gap a reader will hit and every command that errors is a correctness bug in your teaching. This is the same verification discipline the work-trial demands and doing it on your portfolio first builds the muscle.
Run the surface-mastery self-audit from earlier in this track and fix the biggest gap before the loop, not during it. If you've never actually shipped an MCPModel Context Protocol. A standard that lets an AI agent pull in context from outside the repo, like Jira tickets or internal docs. Press Enter for the full definition. server or written a real .cursor/rules file, that hole shows the instant a power-user panel probes it. Closing one real gap with a small hands-on project beats rereading the docs and it gives you a fresh artifact to point at.