Focus

There was obviously little activity in this blog during the recent months and I feel great returning here. The blog always gave me an opportunity to step back and think over my actions and choices. However, this year I was so focused on a single thing - my day job - that only one post had made it here. Now I want to check with myself what this attitude gave me and what it stole from me.

Last February my priorities changed dramatically. In about two months after becoming a team-lead I discovered that whatever I was doing was not enough to do good with new duties. I was both overwhelmed with the tasks and problems that fell on our team and saw clearly that we don't perform as good as we could do. Part of my natural response to this discovery was to ramp up the amount of time that I dedicated to the job.

There are lots of reasons why I'm happy with this choice. Firstly, putting more effort into work made me learn a lot and build up new skills in the areas of my responsibility. Because it was my duty to process all the requests that arrived at our queue, I learnt to do this efficiently and obtained a lot of domain knowledge. In other words, it turned out that it's enough to push me into a partially familiar field and show no way out to make me learn it deeply. My expertise grew enormously over the last year and being really focused on the job helped here a lot (yes, there are lots of things in my field that I still don't know or understand not good enough - I'm speaking only of the delta). Moreover, spending a lot of time studying and resolving various issues - some being totally unclear at first - I not only learnt new areas of the domain, but also developed a skill of learning faster.

At the same time, through spending extra hours on duty I came to see clear that sometimes one cannot address problems by simply working harder. When you do a lot and it doesn't help, you start to see deficiencies and acknowledge the need for changes in one aspect of the job or another. A different edge of this same idea is that one cannot do everything on his own. No matter how hard you try, there is always less done than left to do. These discoveries, combined with high exposure to the issues that we face, constant analysis of our work and search for means to improve it - all of these being enabled by having extra time - certainly brought positive results and helped me develop myself both as a developer and as a manager.

On the other side, the same willingness to work more than 5x9 had a negative impact on the manager role of me, because having more time I could in many cases take the responsibility for any new urgent issue or task. While this attitude helped me tackle problems in time and develop my own skills, it hampered the team's collective progress. Any problem brings new knowledge and shows ways for development, so I simply stole a lot of opportunities from my fellow team-members and hampered knowledge distribution.

Generally speaking, while my attitude helped me grow in terms of knowledge, skills and career, it also shadowed both opportunities and problems. It is a very important lesson for me: whenever one decides to tackle a surge in the amount of tasks by throwing in more (his own) manforce, he misses an opportunity to find more intelligent ways to solve problems and to use them as the points of growth .

These are the effects of the extra work on my job, but there are also those that go beyond my office life. First of all, I left the attempts to do programming and software development in the outside - this means all side jobs and projects. While these used to bring new opportunities and ability to study unfamiliar areas, that's not something that I regret much. Being focused on one area allowed me to grow more than attempts to handle both the main job and one or two similarly looking activities would permit.

What I do regret is that leaving less time for myself I started to pay less attention to continued study and learning new things - both around software development and outside this field. I totally stopped exploration of new programming languages and tools and did much less learning in other areas than I used to - namely, I didn't complete a single online course over the recent months. That's certainly something that I shouldn't have forsaken:  these activities could both help me do my job better and make me expand my knowledge and interests.

Another thing that I dislike is that I quit writing for the blog. Here the reason is not only that the blog has become a silent and lonely place - it was never crowded here. The real problem is that writing less I lost the habit to deeply think over whatever I do and to search for interesting problems and irregularities in my activities. Of course, I do reflect on my decisions and actions, but without regular writing I hardly do it in a systematic and efficient way. Moreover, without posting to the blog I avoid sharing my ideas, which is not a big loss for society, but a shameful cowardice of me.

As with any choice, there do exist both positive and negative sides to putting most of your effort into one area of your life. I see these and despite the cons I am going to continue along the road that I started almost a year ago. However, even though I will continue to pursue that sweet feeling of exhaustion, I do need to make certain adjustments to address some of the problems. In particular I will certainly pay more attention to the supporting activities like learning and blogging - these allow to widen perspective and spot issues that stay invisible when you are constantly inside the problem-solving loop. At the same time, staying focused on my job I will have to pay more attention to the things that I am busy with. After all, being totally occupied with the day-to-day activities is a direct way to keep doing wrong things. So I only need more thinking, more analysis, more writing and the same amount of job. Good to know the solution to one's problems, huh?

Courage

Recently (well, that is several months ago), I have changed the name of this blog from meaningless 'Not that important notes' to something that seems at worst equally meaningless, but probably less irrelevant. To make sense of it I should explain what I feel courage is.

 

First of all, there is the common meaning of the word 'courage' which deals with being not prone to fear. Because I am very diffident person it is sometimes quite difficult for me to share notes with other people - especially when it comes to the things written in English, since I know that my language skills are far from excellency. This way it turns out that while posting something to the blog - including this particular entry - I am in fact exercising my courage. The quality of being open to others and not afraid of sharing my thoughts and ideas is of great importance. I believe that the blog helps me foster this trait, so the new title apparently makes some sense.

 

 

 

On the other hand, writing itself allows me to better understand different aspects of the things I deal with in any area of my life as well as the ways I am dealing with them, thus directly or indirectly improving my decision making skills. This reminds me of the definition given by a samurai in Hagakure:

 

To rush in to the thick of battle and to be slain in it is easy enough, and the merest churl is equal to the task, but it is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die.

 

Although Hagakure is a book for warriors written by a warrior, the quote suggests that courage is not about being able to get into battle without any hesitation or fear. Instead it states that courage is more of an ability to know what to do next. Such a quality is as important for warriors as it is for software developers and for everybody else. Beside this, it is required and at the same time hard to master for me as a young man, because being a man, as opposed to a child, has a lot to do with making my own decisions and dealing with their consequences. Thus, as the blog is used to communicate ideas - and its title is not an exception of any kind - I am communicating an idea: courage is very important both for me and you.

 

One more quote encourages me to value courage so high:

 

Courage is a litmus paper for all other human qualities.

 

I am not sure where does this definition originate from and don't even remember who is its author. However, what I feel sure about is the fact that this blog may serve as a good test or indicator for all my personal traits.

Handwriting

This night after coming home about 4:30 AM and lacking the wish to sleep I've spent some time looking for one paper in me room. The thing is that, if one stores papers like I do - without any order and in lots of different places, then looking for a particular paper one will come across a bunch of different papers and some of them may appear surprising. Actually this night I've come across several papers of my own which surprised me, but I would like to mention only one of them here. 

The paper dates back to the year 2009 or 2008, although it was easy for me to remeber all the reasons which made me write it. That time saw a spike of my interest in writing and blogging, that is I used to write fairly frequently and didn't focus on any particular topic. The paper I am talking about for instance is devoted to my experience in Ultima Online MMORPG and the game itself. By the time of writing the note I have already stopped playing this magnificent game, although the memories of it prompted me to remember all the pleasure I've got when I was playing. Another reason behind writing this particular paper was my desire to analyse and understand why was the game so amazing for me, although in the case of this particular paper this reason was less important. However it was not the subject of the paper that surprised me. Moreover the style, haven't surprised me much too. That was my own handwriting that impressed me fairly strong.

The paper was written about the time when I turned to using a fountain pen instead of usual one. I know that shortly after getting the fountain pen I've changed my handwriting significantly. Partially it was caused by the fact that writing with a fountain pen differs from writing with a ballpoint, but mainly it was the result of my conscious efforts to make my writing look better, so the changes were evident. Nevertheless now the fact that I've changed my handwriting that significantly and the satisfaction of the result impresses me a lot. Additionally I suppose that if I came across some older paper - dating back to my school years for example - then the effect  would not be that strong, so actually the fact that 3 years ago my handwriting was completely different surprised me that much. 

Finally it is evident that it surprised me in this good and strong way because it is a sort of little confirmation of the suggestion that I've changed a lot over the past three years.