Currently cooking:

• ElixirConf EU talk
  • Prototype talk at Elixir Community Krakow meetup, 16th of March.
• First proper video since picking it back up, currently being edited
• Next video script, currently in research
• Prepare a lecture for the local bootcamp-thingy campus, bunch of .Net folks, wtf? 💜

Side projects are a problem

You can never quite know what makes someone light up. And it is a challenge to find the exact thing that will make a developer in your team and organisation suddenly take an extraordinary interest. If you can hit that note though, a lot of things become more fun and easier. I'll hazard referencing a military think. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Pressure to perform at high velocity is generally a source of chronic stress. Whatever high means. Chronic stress is the main source of burnout. Acute stress is easier to handle. Someone got hurt, you have a difficult choice, you messed something up. Once handled, assuming you are not chronically shamed for it, it will pass.

Passion, excitement and fun is a much more sustainable way of achieving velocity. To enable people to find the things that excite them requires time and space to flail around, to fail around and to generally not succeed.

The way I learn most of my professional skills is that I build stuff in my spare time. As an employee sometimes it would spill into work time as well. I'm no saint. To this day most of my Elixir skill comes from a mix of learning new things, in experimentation and exploration based on my interests, and of repetition in client work. I take something I learned on my own and I do it over and over again, building LiveViews and GenServers being typical examples. I've done a lot of those now. 

For many people it is not sustainable or even in their interests to do all their exploring and learning in their own spare time. This is why the expectation of side projects is a problem. You need a model of how you work where there is space to both explore to learn and exploit that knowledge to execute.

We've been fighting some Grafana dashboards and alerting recently. Mostly figured it out. And after, suddenly one of my team members went off investigating a weird blip in request times. It was not an important blip, a 700ms average on a non-critical environment. But I rolled with it. And as we went I got the response "this is sooo cooool!". I had no idea they'd be excited about it. I spent some time with them and had them dig into it and root-cause it. Because that's what the boards are for. That's how we want to use them. It was not the most important thing on the table at that moment, for them or me. I certainly learned something about what makes them tick though. They would not be standing up Grafana and Prometheus in their spare time. They got better things to do.

Similarly, I often feel bored by the less exciting parts of the development process. Sometimes I only have really complex and annoying issues to work on because I filter better understood work to others, part of the role. When I feel less motivated I sometimes go wandering off and fix something that, perish the thought, is not even in the sprint. A long-standing papercut, or a regression in something I liked, or improve the dev tooling process. Things that make me happy and motivated. Because in a happy and motivated mode those annoying complex issues become more tractable.

A lot of companies say they want passionate people. Passion, excitement and drive tends to come from a balance of satisfying challenges, some sense of importance in the work and in doing the work, a sense of accomplishment. Getting to feel that you can do a thing that you weren't entirely certain was in your grasp. And your grasp will grow. Excitement really helps. Sometimes you find excitement in the domain, sometimes in a technical nuance and sometimes somewhere completely different.

Passion is not everything, it just helps. And it is really hard to be excited under pressure. Continuous pressure is the death of fun.

As per usual you can reach me by email or fediverse lars@underjord.io or as @lawik@fosstodon.org.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you spending your attention here.