Things I've been doing recently

This blogpost is not the normal writeup about how I got into a new job, about the things that have been awesome or that suck. It’s not about love for my employer or previous ones and there is definitely no hate at all. So what’s left? This one is really about a bunch of things that I’ve been doing recently and in a somewhat different fashion:

• I switched my default working mode to “pair by default”. This was needed for me to get used to work with new colleagues, know them better and build a connection with remote members of the team. It turned out to be much better than that. It increases my concentration, improves the quality of the things I do and reduce risks. Everybody says that, but very few are using this as default way of working and I was definitely not doing it in my previous job, not because of any blocker, just because that was the way we were working (and it was fine). Well, I am enjoying this so much I’m myself very surprised about it.

• I take time in isolation every day. Seems like a contradiction, right? You cannot be all the time pairing. It is tiring and I need some time for myself as well. To solve that, I seek every single day some time to work in complete isolation, not long, maybe one hour. We have some nice little rooms in our office that are definitely not good if you suffer claustrophobia, but they work beautifully to regain full focus to crash a single specific task alone. It feels good in there.

• I learn new things. We have mandatory (!) personal development days, which means time dedicated to learn new things during working hours. During those days, I do only things I enjoy. If I haven’t written much code during the week (it happens, YAMLs are my life), I do coding. I can watch a long video or learn a new technology. What is important though is that it has to be something I enjoy, because I feel I learn much more when things are fun.

• I draw a lot of technical stuff. I do that because I realized that if I don’t draw things, I have problems visualizing problems and understanding how to solve them. Sometimes I even draw YAMLs! Where I work right now I’m not surrounded by whiteboards as I used to be for a long time and I really miss that… but guess what? You can just take some paper and make nice drawings on that. I’ve been using this technique for slides lately, instead of spending hours with digital graph tools, I just grab a bunch of sharpies, paper and start drawing, then I snap pictures… and the slides are made!

• I don’t allow myself to keep working hard when tired. Would you drink alcohol and drive at the same time? I bet you wouldn’t, cause it is irresponsible. The same applies to most of the tasks at work and being tired. Now, if you read my tweets you know I’ve been through some serious emotional storm lately due to the tragic loss of a dear friend. Well, sometimes my mood is not perfect or I feel I get tired easily due to some stress that is sticking around… guess what I do when this happen? I go home and relax! Of course this doesn’t mean that I work only few hours, but I try to apply reasonable approaches in which I try not to push myself too much over my limits.

• I trust (and I feel trusted). I mostly never need to know what my colleagues are doing and they don’t ask too much either. This doesn’t mean lacking care, more letting control go. We can work async. I can write this blogpost. They can take their time to do things. None of us need to know, we only make sure we enjoy working together and that we are more or less on track with what matters which is to keep doing the best for the company while becoming better at it.

• I take time to enjoy life. Taking a long lunch break to meet a friend from time to time isn’t a bad idea, it’s actually really fun! I’ve been meeting friends and building better relationships and if I can do this during the day, well that’s great.

End of my random selection of things. That was not an exhaustive list and it don’t know if there is any benefit in this but I hope nonetheless that you will find this useful!