Strategic apathy

I have a bad habit at work of saying “I don’t care” without qualifying it. It comes off as sarcastic or dismissive, when that’s not how I mean it – which means I need to find a new way to express it.

Most of the time, it pops out of my mouth when my manager asks me if I want to work on something and then she gives me a look, and I have to explain myself.

Here’s the explanation: I no longer care what I work on. I’ve built one of pretty much anything I’d ever want to build, and the what just no longer matters. What matters to me is how I work, and who I work with. I alluded to this in the post about ficlets, but the individual projects blur together. The thing I remember is the thrill of building something with people. I remember the people, and how I felt while we were building whatever it was.

I still believe in constant incremental improvement, and only competing with myself. I also now finally understand that just building something that’s technically superior doesn’t guarantee success. Success or failure in the eyes of the market almost never has much to do with the code that implements it. It requires the work of everyone on the team, every discipline, and a ton of luck.

And all of that means I’d much rather focus on making sure that I’m helping everyone else on the team do their best work, and asking them to help me make sure I’m doing mine. That’s literally all that matters to me at this point. Yes, I love big meaty technical problems, but that’s a very small part of the overall solution. The most important part is the borders where disciplines meet and making sure that those borders are seamless, complementary and supportive of the rest of the disciplines involved. That’s way more complicated, and way more rewarding when it works.

Bring me all the joys

I’ve co-lead Gusto’s Employee Resource Group for families for the last year and a half, and it’s been a ton of fun. It’s brought back a ton of memories from when the kids were little, and reminded me (constantly) that parenting never stops being stressful. The stressors just change over time, get more complicated and the mistakes get more costly.

And that gets even more precarious the more “sprinkles” that we discover in the lovely desserts that are our children. I love that phrase. I got it from one of the parents who leads one of our committees, and it’s just lovely.

My kids are both in the “non-boring” parts of the gender and sexuality spectrums, and it took me years to realize how much fear and worry comes with that. I am afraid for them all of the time. It never stops.

Which brings me to the joys.

I just finished Charlie Jane Anders’ Unstoppable series and I loved it. It’s full of queer teens and space battles – and joy. Joy at coming out to yourself, to your friends, and being accepted for your strengths. Read it. You’ll dig it. It was the most recent reminder that while I’m afraid, I also need to embrace all of the joys that come along with life with sprinkles.

More joy? One of the first communities I discovered when I joined Mastodon was the trans community. Seeing happy trans people, celebrating their transitions and the little victories along the way has been such a relief, in a way that I didn’t really understand for a while.

Joy is a vaccine against fear. Does it make the fear go away? No, but it makes it easier to fight and get through.

So, get out there, bask in the joy. It really does make the fear easier to handle.

Travel Tired

I used to travel for work a lot. I just started really traveling for work again, and… it’s exhausting. I’m not in travel shape anymore, and my back screams at me after every flight. Adjusting to time zone changes is harder.

I love seeing people in person, but getting there sucks and I’d like it to be more comfortable, more humane and overall less of a literal pain in my backside.

Forget going to Mars. Get me from Savannah to anywhere else and let me feel like a human being during and after.

Please and thank you.

App Defaults

Why not do an old school blogging meme for day 13? Well, that’s what I’m doing today, so… let’s go! I’ve seen it a couple of places, but I last saw it over here, which is where I was convinced that it would be today’s post.

I’m pretty much all Apple for end-user things. I’m also an Ubuntu users, but I pretty much only interact with it via the command line.

  • Mail Client: Mimestream on macOS, Apple Mail on iOS
  • Mail Server: It’s GMail all the way down.
  • Notes: Apple Notes
  • To-Do: Apple Reminders for long-term and recurring things. I use Day One for short-term to-dos and my daily work journal
  • Photo Shooting: the iOS Camera or Hipstagram if I’m feeling fancy/silly.
  • Photo Management: Apple Photos
  • Calendar: Fantastical
  • Cloud File Storage: Google Drive and iCloud
  • RSS: NetNewsWire everywhere, and I’m so glad it’s back.
  • Contacts: Google + iCloud (they’re a mess)
  • Browser: Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work, Safari for mobile. I’m polybrowserous and am fine with it.
  • Bookmarks: Firefox and Chrome (in profiles because you gotta keep things separate)
  • Read It Later: Pocket, but it’s mostly later because I forget to check it.
  • Word Processing, Spreadsheets & Presentations: Google Suite
  • News: The aforementioned NetNewsWire for following blogs like Talking Points Memo (which has been awesome for 20+ years), Apple News+, NY Times, Washington Post, The Ringer and The Athletic.
  • Music: Spotify and my Plex server for live shows and mashups
  • Podcasts: Overcast
  • Password Management: 1Password
  • Code Editor: VS Code, but I really miss Atom.

Proof I can maintain something

The celebration image Duolingo gave me that says "I'm on a 1500 day learning streak!"

Today is my 1,500th straight day of doing at least one lesson on Duolingo. That’s over four years of learning Spanish (and trying out Korean, Chinese, Turkish and Portugese, but I always go back to Spanish). Am I conversational yet? Oh no. Can I understand more than I used to? Yes. I can even make myself understood in Spanish if the topic isn’t technical.

I just want to remind myself that I can stick to something because I missed posting for yesterday. I have a great excuse: I felt like garbage and didn’t do much other than take a nap.

I don’t feel much better today, but here I am, trying to make sure that I only miss one day.

And that’s really the thing with habits, isn’t it? It’s not that you never miss a day – it’s that you don’t let missing one day make you miss two, then three, then stop altogether.

Just go read this, and then write something

Thanks to Terence Eden for point me towards this lovely essay about writing on the internet by Henrik Karlsson. I’m not going to write anything better than that today, so… just go read it instead.

Just trying to be understood

If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Anne Lamott

The creation of all media is accompanied by a wish: to experience and to be experienced by another human mind. Above all this means to feel and to be felt.

Ze Frank

Today, you get quotes. So far, National Blog Post Writing Month has me writing longer-than-I-expected posts about things that I either wrote about a long time ago, or things that have been trapped in my head for years and I finally had a reason to write them down.

All of it is an attempt at being understood… and it’s my favorite thing about personal blogging. It’s one person, quietly sharing their heart, in the best way they know how, out into the chaos and cacophony of social media.

I’ve been doing it, somewhat inconsistently, for almost twenty-four years. This is the 2,800th post on this blog (here’s the first), and over 2,500 are mine, written by me (my wife also used to blog here once upon a time).

A lot of those posts are now kind of embarrassing. I don’t think I’ve ever gone back and deleted any (guaranteeing that I’ll probably never be able to run for office – a brilliant bit of subconscious self-sabotage). But, they provide a portrait of what I was trying to make sense of at the time, what was important, and again, all in an attempt to understand and be understood.

The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed.

Wendell Berry

People are always the problem

I’m now a very senior engineer. I don’t even know what the right title is (once I got “CTO” titles kind of stopped mattering), but at Gusto I’m an L6 and there are seven levels at the company.

One of the great things about working at a larger company is how many people I get to work with, and how many opportunities I have to mentor more junior engineers.

We spend so much time early in our careers just learning the mechanics of our immediate job: how to write code, make it maintainable, how to test it, how to make it performant, etc, etc, etc. That takes years, and is a lot. And then someone promotes us, tells us we’re now a “senior” engineer and we’re now presented a whole new scale of problems, and all of those problems involve people.

I think the industry does a pretty terrible job of preparing software developers to deal with people problems. We tell them to focus on code, which is important, because that’s the first layer of what’s expected of us.

If we think about the problems we deal with as we get more senior as layers, I think it’s easier to understand them. To me, in this very much first draft of me putting this into words, the layers are:

  • Code: We have to be good at this to be asked to do anything else (even though almost all code problems are also caused by people).
  • Individuals: We have a manager (at least one), people on our team, product managers, designers, etc. We need to deal with them individually and make sure we get what we need, and meet their needs.
  • Processes: Everything we do at work is some kind of process – the meetings we have, how we deliver code, how we get rewarded for our work, all processes.
  • Systems: Collections of processes in action – I think of them mostly in code, but “the patriarchy” is a system.
  • Organizations: Organizations are just groups of people who create systems in order to accomplish their goals. Depending on the size of your company, you may in a nesting doll of organizations and may interact with several more.

As you get more senior, you’re expected to be able to solve problems on and across all of those layers. The hard part is figuring out what layers are “crossed by the problem you’re trying to solve, and then peeling them off and solving them – because the tools you can use are wildly different at each layer and require different skills.

The good part is that solving problems across layers is extremely valuable to organizations, so if you can do it, you’ll be just fine. The bad part is that as soon as you start crossing layers, people are always the problem.

Looking back: ficlets launching

I was going to just post a quote for today’s NaBloPoMo, but I was looking for old posts and stumbled on this one about ficlets launching.

Re-reading it, sixteen and a half years later, a few things jump out:

  • How many people I worked with, and thanked in the post, are no longer with us: Cindy Li, John Anderson and Suzie Austin are all gone, and gone way too soon.
  • How often I think about the people I worked with on ficlets, and how much ficlets opened my eyes to what working at a small startup could be like.
  • I thought that ficlets launched in 2006, but nope, it launched in 2007, and I left AOL in May of 2008.
  • How happy I am that all the links to the stories actually work (because AOL never owned the domain name, and didn’t make me give it to them, I took it back around the time I set up the ficly archive, and ta-da, all the stories live again on the web at their original URLs). I couldn’t do the same for the blog posts, unfortunately.
  • How much ownership we felt over the product and the community. Jason, Joe and I spent a lot of time “rescuing” the stories (thank goodness for Creative Commons licensing), and then building ficly.

Most of the hundreds of projects I’ve worked on over the years (LOL, decades) blur together into vague lumps, but not ficlets. It was just the absolute best, most fun, weirdest thing I’ve ever gotten to do, and I miss it all the time (because working at a startup wasn’t really like that – it was way scarier).

The last thing is just how strong my feelings are for the people I’ve worked with. I may do a terrible job of keeping in touch, but I really do love all of them. The products we work on, they don’t matter nearly as much as the people we work with. And none of it lasts, not the products, not the jobs, none of it – but the people, the people are what’s important, so act accordingly.

Be kind, but have boundaries

After yesterday’s post, Amy asked another question that I’m ill-equipped to answer, but I’m going to try anyway:

Ok, tough question: a thing I struggle with, (maybe as a woman or maybe just my family of origin), is me behaving in a kind manner often means being seen as inherently weak or (shudder) useable to others. Any insights into how a woman might reconcile or boundary that in a patriarchy?

Amy van der Hiel

I think a lot of people mistake kindness for weakness, and I’ve never understood it. Being kind is work. Being kind when you’re in a bad mood, unwell, or struggling is even more work. So, to anyone who equates kindness with weakness or gullibility, you’re just wrong and I’d love it if you’d stop.

I’ve seen “do no harm, but take no shit” around the internet, and I think “do no harm” is too low a bar, but I definitely agree with the sentiment. We all need to set boundaries, protect our inner peace and make sure we’re kind to ourselves.

I think this can be hard at work – we want to be available to our coworkers and be helpful, but that’s a trap. If we want to be present when we’re working, we need to set some boundaries and make sure we’re taking care of ourselves and our families.

As for how to set them as a woman, as not a woman, this is what I’ve observed: people will try to take advantage of them because they see it as weakness, but if you’re firm with them then hopefully they’ll stop. Hugs are a good example. I no longer just assume people are fine with hugs. I don’t even offer to someone I’ve not hugged before, because I know it’s one of those “openings” men take advantage of. I think setting a boundary that you don’t hug coworkers you don’t already have a close relationship where there won’t be misunderstandings is one a lot of my female coworkers have had – and yeah, it can be awkward, but I think the momentary awkwardness is better than any unintentional (or intentional) misunderstandings later.

Being kind to myself involves the following:

  • No arguing with strangers on the internet. It’s draining and not worth it to me. I just don’t engage, which means I definitely share less than I used to on social media.
  • Turn off all notifications outside of working hours except those that are related to a real emergency (PagerDuty, for example).
  • Don’t try to do more than one thing at a time. Multitasking is a myth and I can’t do my best work if I’m juggling too many things.
  • Treat no as a kindness. Saying yes to something I don’t have time for isn’t kind – because I’ll either not get it done, or I’ll half-ass it. If it’s really important, then something else will have to not happen.
  • Admitting when I’m not well, and taking time to recover. This one’s really hard, because I work from home so the bar to call in sick feels higher than it should be.

I think enumerating your boundaries, needs and wants is helpful. Once you know what they are, you can communicate them to your family, friends, manager and peers. I love having the “exchange of needs” conversation with my manager. It helps set expectations for both of us, and makes working together a lot easier – because we both know what to expect, and have easy ways to measure if we’re asking for something that’s beyond those expectations.

I think a lot of us grew up thinking that taking time for ourselves was selfish, and it just isn’t. We can’t be effective for others if we’re not kind to ourselves – and part of that kindness is balancing the giving with recovery and personal growth.

I hope this helps. Healthy boundaries create healthy relationships.