A lot of anxiety comes from uncertainty.
Not knowing one way or the other how something will turn out.
Especially if it's something you really want, and the possibility you might fail to achieve it is enough to make you second guess yourself. Your ego kicks in and you start thinking about what others might think if you fail. You're already running the scenarios through your head, and there's a million of them- and very few of them good.
"Purpose gives meaning, not happiness."
That was my thought for the week. I scribbled down some ideas that were coming to me as I surveyed my surroundings and made sense of why I was thinking about purpose.
I was asked to give a talk at an upcoming DevOps event, so I'm in the first stages of planning what I'm going to present.
I've never given a talk like this before, but I've done plenty of presentations to engineering teams of things I've built and how they work and where to find the documentation. I imagine this will be much the same- but to a bunch of strangers, instead of people I've worked with for months.
I'm okay with public speaking, my brothers and I grew up doing public performances for various church events, singing, dancing, choirs, church band, church plays etc. So that aspect of it doesn't concern me much.
It's not something I think people often think about.
I'm sure everyone thinks the way they are at work is 100% genuine (with a few caveats of course) and any deviations from a 100% authentic behaviour is expected because there are social norms to uphold and you don't want to make people uncomfortable when you don't abide by them.
Right? Sure.
So this week this idea of "Bringing your whole self to work" came to mind because of my new 100% remote-first team.
Happy New Year!
Yes. I know it's the 12th.
2021 is here, it's still January and I'm getting the first post of the year out early!
I know this is the time of year people will do their new year's resolutions, plan for the year ahead etc., but this is the first New Year's I've seen through not as a contractor.
What's the difference?
I'd usually be working through the break, and just be focused on the contract in front of me. The usual plan for contracting is just work on whatever contract you're on until the final month of the term (whenever that is- sometimes the client would extend, other time's you'd just want out) then either look for another contract, or take a break.
I read this brilliantly written piece by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff called "The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods".
And it made me think about privilege. My privilege.
I'm a mentor.
I never thought I would be, and it's not something I ever aspired to be at any stage of my life.
But here I am. Mentoring in 2020.
And not just to one person, but two people. And just this year. As in, literally in the last couple of months, I have taken on mentoring 2 people.
They're both Software Developers. Which is funny because I am not a developer.
This past week I've had a chance to reflect on 2 different projects I've been involved with at opposite ends of the lockdown.
At the beginning of Level 4, just before the lock-down, I was contacted to help out with what would end up being the NZ Governments WhatsApp channel.
The technology involved for the solution required some in-depth knowledge of cloud technology, container orchestration platform kubernetes, a secrets management CLI (command line interface), monitoring and dashboard building and deployment methods and configuration.
I'm not a great reader.
I still read with a voice in my head. I often have to re-read the page I'm on because I have a short attention span and my mind wanders easily. My wife has long suspected I have ADHD. I just think I get bored easily.
But all of these things -- attention span, reading, not having ADHD (jokes) -- are things that can get better with practice. I believe so anyway.
With the free time I have with the lock-down I decided I want to be a "better reader" (whatever that means).
I have to be honest, this side project journey isn't going how I had imagined.
I know its only been a few weeks, but I had an expectation that by now, mid March, I would be well on my way with my MVP. A small demo of the infrastructure setup, robustness and observability built on at least 1 of 2 cloud providers.
But what have I got to show so far?