Experience and expertise tends to gradually reduce creativity. Learning the key ideas, constraints and challenges of a field requires an entirely different mindset than that which seeks to break those rules.
In those cases where experiments can be done easily, it can thus be advantageous to just run the experiment instead of always thinking out a solution beforehand.
The power of just meeting people without the intention of getting anything from them. Just meeting them for being cool and interesting. Long-term doing that has benefited them [the interviewed researchers] the most in their careers. Consciously participating in conferences can transform the experience from one of passive attendance, to a real opportunity to build brand new connections. The curious researcher even prepares beforehand, reviewing what posters and presentations may occur, to see what’s worth attending and who they’d like to speak with.
Stoking the flames of your scientific curiosity is one of the most accessible and vastly underrated ways of tapping into inner creativity and “zooming out” of your local pocket of research. Certainly you don’t need to start a podcast, but it can help.
In fact, this attitude of curiosity for topics beyond one’s specialty is a common trait among many great scientists. With the explosion in platforms sharing science, there’s an imminent revival of students and researchers tapping into inspiration from various domains.
Good APIs are boring. An API that’s interesting is a bad API (or at least it would be a better one if it were less interesting).
If your product is valuable enough, users will flock to even a terrible API. If your product is desirable, any barely-functional API will do; if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter how good your API is. API quality is a marginal feature: it only matters when a consumer is choosing between two basically-equivalent products.