Rambling thoughts and reflections
#emacscarnival202506 #brainiac
Somewhere during the COVID pandemic I started checking out #emacs, because of a talk I saw on #orgmode that tickled my curiosity.
In the beginning I didn't dig into the manuals, as you should do, but started using the editor directly and customized stuff by integrating code snippets from different posts and blogs I stumbled upon, while looking for solutions for problems I faced.
Over the years as my proficiency grew, so did my Emacs config. Although I regularly removed packages I didn't use, at some point in time I did task management, note taking, blogging, news reading etc. with Emacs and kept on bringing in new packages into the mix. I didn't really reach the state of bankcruptcy, but I gathered some #elisp snippets I didn't understand or simply didn't remember why I got them at all.
So in order to force myself to finally start reading the manuals and to learn some proper Elisp, I started hacking on a new configuration for #emacs ... as this is what you do as an Emacs user.
The goal of the Brainiac configuration is to minimize the configuration to the bare minimum I need (e.g. tasks and notes) and try to stick to the built-in packages as much as possible. If I need something extra, I would try to implement it myself.
You can follow how the configuration progresses here: Brainiac. It is already fully functional and I am using it daily for private and work related stuff. When it reaches v1.0, I will write about my workflow that defined the configuration.
As a lot of other peoples, I am interested in self improvement. So I read related blog posts, books etc. All of these sources are filled with examples of good habits one should develop, in order to be healthier and happier in life.
Here are some I tried and failed at over the years:
As a manager one of my tasks is to do yearly performance evaluations of the employees in my team.
I take this very seriously, as although I speak regularly with my people about tasks and behaviors, this yearly review gives me time to pause and reflect deeper about the stuff I (and the company) find important and how does the employee measure against that.
During the year I keep notes of all 1:1 meetings we have and also of stuff that happens between them that catch my eye, positive as well as possible improvement points. During the yearly review preparations, I sit down and go thru all the notes in order to consolidate the feedback I want to give to the employee.
I read the nice book from Tiago Forte “Building a Second Brain” and in order to understand the concepts better, I created this small Mindmap as a summary.
For this I used PlantUML and generated the Mindmap using Org-mode.
So it's about 30 months now since I took over building and leading an engineering team.
Building is the right word, as on the first day I started there was no team. There were just 2-3 engineers in India, that started doing some testing in the last sprint and had absolutely no clue what they are doing. (Somebody told them they are the test team and that the software to test is in Artifactory …)
Something over 18 months ago a big change happened in my work life. After years of trying, learning, searching for ways forward, changing jobs on the same level … I was appointed team leader in my company and tasked with building up a team completely from scratch. I already wrote on the topic several times, this is a follow up.
Looking at the current situation in the Ukraine and the world, I am reminded at something I realised a couple of years ago in an another context.
Back then I was talking about the time before the big changes, thru Internet, Social Media etc., and made a remark that since then only technology progressed. We as mankind are having problems keeping pace, which is clearly visible in the toxic atmosphere on Social Media and the downfall of Internet from knowledge pool to ads infested big-tech owned shark pool.
Seeing what is happening in front of us in Ukraine, unfortunately I have to revise my remark. Not only did we not evolve since the 1990, we didn't make a step forward since 1930.
One side of the conflict NATO kept on pushing their agenda of expansion under a shroud of “bringing democracy”, the other side invested heavily in the military and just waited for the right moment to start re-building the old empire.
Both sides are saying to everybody willing to listen, that this is because “the others are simply on the wrong side of history”. Who are the others and what is the right side of history?
What's the result? Ordinary people getting under the wheels of “big” politics and dying. Children getting traumatized, families getting shattered. Just now the radio is bringing the news that people of Kiev are called upon to go out on the streets and start throwing Molotov Cocktails at the advancing troops.
I spent my childhood in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I lived thru a lot of things that these people have to face right now. There is nothing that can justify this. Nothing …
Had a strange discussion the other day in the project. We had a Release Meeting and my team was showing the current state of testing, defects and so on. During the presentation I intentionally said my Def-M, he should highlight in the Dashboard how long bugs are open in our product (we have a couple of them dragging on for more then 6 months). Of course this caught my managers eye.
In the discussion after the meeting we were talking how can we improve the situation. I was pushing for a time slot in the sprint planing for debugging and bug fixing, basically we have to see feature and bugs (at least) on the same level in order to have a good planing and tackle the bugs early in the development cycle.
Other idea was very strange to me. It was proposed, that we “open up a new bug fixing team”. In the beginning I thought we were talking about some sort of triage or debugging team, who would try to reproduce and create logs of the bugs. Then the feature teams, who have a bug in their code, can pick it up and find the exact root cause before fixing it. But no, the proposition was that this “Bug fixing team” also fixes bugs in other peoples code! So although this could be a good idea, when your product is already in the market and you have only limited resources to take care of the feedback, I think it's a majorly bad idea for a product in active development.
Why? Because people making the bugs should also fix them. With this special “Bug fixing team” you are basically saying to the developers: “Hey, just write code! Somebody else will pick up the slack, when it crashes and take care of your mess.”. Not really a good idea, if you want to have Built-In Quality in your product.
Now it has been a bit over 12 weeks since I took up new responsibilities, so time to give you an update what went on since the last post on this topic.
What I can already reveal is that it became easier to master a day at work and also some stuff started to fall in place :)!