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Looking Back

2016 was a whirlwind of a year. On one hand, a lot of big things happened, on the other, I feel like I could have done more. Here are the highlights:

Downsizing

2016 was a big year for downsizing. Early on in the year, my partner and I  decided to move to Vernon from Lake Country since her work was closer to Vernon. It was a bit nerve-wracking at firt but once we started crunching the numbers, we realized it was an opportunity to reduce or housing expenes significantly. While our house in Lake Country was a unique find and we loved it very much, it was also bigger than we needed, took a lot to maintain (3/4 of an acre), and was a 30 min drive from the city. Between the commute, property taxes and maintenance, it was costing us quite a bit money but also time. It waxsn’t financuially out of reach by any means, but it meant less vacations, recreation time, and other life experiences. Once we started crunching the numbers, moving to a smaller place in Vernon would almost half our housing costs and put us within waling distance of lamost everything including the office I spent a few days a week in.

Moving to Vernon was a was a no-brainer.

In February, we started searching for homes, and after a few misses managed to land a comfy little home in one of thee most desirable neighbourhoods of Vernon. It was half the cost of our previous home, had a garage, yard for the dog to run around in and great neighbours. Downsizing and moving to our current home in Vernon was by far the best decision of 2016.

The other area we’ve downsized  in is “stuff.” We’ve sold, donated, given away and thrown out alot of our things. I estimate that currently, I own the least amount of “things” since moving out from my parents. I’ve sold most of my electronics, extra clothing, books, and furniture. We don’t even own a TV anymore. I also sold my beloved 1992 Land Cruiser. For those that don’t know me, this was a HUGE decision, as I’ve been a Land Cruiser enthusiast and have owned 12 different ones over the past 15 years, This truck was a super rare find, something I had spent 10+ years looking for.  In the end, priorities change , experiences are more important than things and I decided that the Land Cruiser was a carry-over of an older lifestyle. Stuff is over-rated and in my mind, a distraction from real happiness. Note, I still own a lot of recreation items for hiking, backpacking and camping but focus on quality over quantity there. More on that in a future posts

Finding my Work happy Place

2016 was also a year of soul-searching in terms of finding a new work that resonated with me. Downsizing was a huge help in this regard, creating much more financial room for me to experiment with different approaches. TO be honest I spent a lot of the year bouncing around between various companies, startups and freelance gigs. I even took on a full time “job”, quit it 4 months later and applied for a couple of jobs in the late summer. It seemed that every month, I was doing a different thing, but none of it really felt ‘right.’ SUre it was all fun an interesting work, and I got to work with a lot of awesome pople, but it felt like something was missing. In late summer, I took a break from all of it, and came back to it a few weeks later with more clarity. I figured out that I work best on teams of contractors that are farily autonomous, yet connected on similar goals, values and work styles. I also like working on a variety of things, so to that end I’ve determined that an idea mix for me is 50-75% agency work, leaving 25%+ for “social impact” type work. I’m not doing  tone of social impact work right now but hoping to change that in 2017

Giving Back

One unexpected highlight of 2016 was teaching a local developer bootcamp in the Okanagan.

 

Looking ahead to 2017

 

 

100 things I can do:

1. Summit Mt Hood
2. Run a 100k ultramarathon
3. Run a races in at least one other country
4. Run 1500km, total elevation of 50,000+
5. Summit at least 5 peaks in the Canadian Rockies
6. Get my Ham Radio licence
7. Achieve a net-zero electricty bill over the year
8. Get rid of (even more) stuff

It’s giving Tuesday and I’m going to sweeten up the deal. Make a donation to a registered charity and I’ll randomly pick one and TRIPLE your donation. So you donate $100 and if yours gets picked, I’ll donate an additional $300. If you’ve been on the fence about what to do with all that money you didn’t spend on Black Friday, now is your chance.

Make your donation now and then post below (or message me)

Rules:
1) The donation must be made between now and 10am PST Wed Nov 30
2) It must be to a registered charity
3) I will contribute up to $500
4) The draw is at 12pm PST Wed Nov 3

Go!

What makes a great developer? Are they great at MongoDB or iOS? Do they know how to use Promises, ES6 and React?

Maybe. Or Maybe not.

The tech industry places far too much importance on technical skills. Language, frameworks, and platforms come and go, but approach and behaviour is what separate the good from the great.  .We need to shift focus and cultivate the soft skills in parallel with hands-on skills.

I’ve come up with a”Tao of being a great developer” to help bring these principles back into focus. It’s something that I strive to work by and I hope you can too.

Do the “right” thing (instead of just the “easy”, “cool” or “fun” thing)

This isn’t about taking the skipping out on shortcuts or avoiding new technologies. This is about paying attention and listening . This is about being honest with yourself in every action and decision you make

If there’s one group of people that can convince themselves they have to use technology X or methodology Y, it’s programmers. How many times has your team decided on the language before even starting  a project?  Have you met with a client, barely listening to their requirements while planning out the architecture in your mind?

Doing the right thing = being honest with yourself and putting the needs of the client and project ahead of your own.

Is <Framework X> really the right fit for the project? Or are you choosing it mainly to learn and add your resume (selfish reasons)?

WebSockets are cool and all but are they really the right choice for the customer’s blog product?

Ask yourself: “How will the end users benefit from this choice? How will <MongoDB>  make the user’s experience more enjoyable and more reliable? How will deploying this to Amazon Web Services make this a better product that more people will want?”

This can be a really hard question to answer honestly without bias (Some youy may  not even be aware of ). Play Devil’s Advocate in your own mind. Find others to do the same (especially ones that you know hold different views and will try and talk you out of it).  This ability is what seperates good developers from great developers

Be confident, but humble.

If you’ve worked as a developer for some time, it’s pretty easy to let your successes go to your head. It’s human nature to be good at remembering our successes and forgetting our mistakes, oversights and bad decisions.

When doing your work, be confident enough in your experience but open-minded to other input and perspective. Listen to everyone: juniors, non-technical people, sysadmins, marketers, etc. Everyone has a different (and potentially valuable) perspective. Be comfortable with saying: “I don’t really know that technology well, but am confident I can figure it out.” or “I don’t feel comfortable that I’m the right guy for x, and just want to be up-front.  But so-and-so is great at that, so lets loop him in”

I also want to call out is the bullshit technical debates that are (mostly) a waste of our time. We all have our preferences an choices, but getting into low-level, polarizing battles doesn’t help anyone. For example, NoSQL databases are a great idea for certain projects and a terrible idea for others.  To say “I hate MongoDB, it’s crap” because of a single anecdotal experience doesn’t help anyone. It might have been the right tool at the time, or a client requirement or a million other things. Service X might be slow with millions of records but if its great for MVPs and that’s what your building, it might be the perfect choice.  View anyone that issues blanket statements about a technology with a critical eye, especially if they don’t know the use case.

Solve problems instead of pointing fingers

We’ve all been in a meeting where something has gone wrong and the first thing to happen is fingers get pointed.

“This is DevOps fault, they should have been watching for those errors”

“This is the user’s fault, they shouldn’t be clicking the submit button twice”

Blame does nothing to help the user or the project or the client. The only thing that matters are the solution and outcomes.

A good developer is really good at owning their mistakes and fixing them

We’re all human and all make mistakes. It’s a surprisingly rare trait to openly admit a mistake (the sooner the better). Even better,  propose a quick solution and a longer term one to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The blamers will eventually get outed as projecting their shortcomings onto other people. These people are toxic.

You either succeed as a team or fail as a team, there is no in between

To be a great developer, your personality and style matters just as much as your technical chops. You need to do the right things, and balance learning cool stuff with making the right choices. If you are confident and approach mistakes as a chance to become better, you are on the path to greatness.