Category: Non F# Stuff

Change is How You Grow

I haven’t had time to really write anything too deeply lately for blog posts lately. I’m learning SO much at the pet store right now.

I’m really pushing myself to get to that point where I understand the code underneath the abstraction.

But, the old blog calls out to me yet again, dear reader.

EVERYONE in tech feels underpaid, because recruiting / hiring in tech is completely broken and crazy. Financially, we are incented to switch jobs WAY more often than we are incented to stay in one.

Salary and turnover and hiring is a fun topic but I’m going to hit you with something.

You are more than your job.

Do you believe that?

Honestly?

It’s OK if you don’t. Took me till I was about 38 years old to really believe it.

Think about a hypothetical situation.

Meet Nia. Nia is an Associate Software Developer.

She applied for a job, interviewed well, and got it, and now is happily coding away under the direction of Software Developers and Senior Software Developers.

After 3 years… Nia’s got quite a few releases under her belt. She knows a few different languages well, she’s ridden a few late nights with releases that went sideways, but she doesn’t make anywhere near the same mistakes she made before.

The job, Associate Software Developer, is still exactly as it was when she took it those years ago.

Her title hasn’t changed, nor has the role in any real sense.

Nia did though. Drastically. She grew.

But, assuming she does nothing, she’ll stay an Associate Software Developer, and will likely get around a 3-4% raise every year for satisfactory performance. 

If she started with an annual salary of $50,000, that means after 3 years at a 4% raise, she’s making $56,243.20.

What happened to our hypothetical associate developer? She grew faster than her job did.

Ask yourself these questions:

Do you believe Nia is worth more than her job pays?

Me? I certainly do! She has more experience than the position requires, knows more languages, and is simply a better developer.

If she was your mentee, would you tell her so?

Me? I would! But I’m a cheerleader for you all anyway…

Would you advocate for her if you were her boss?

Of course I would! I’ve happily done so for many others!

Would you tell her to look outside her role if her boss couldn’t get it done for her?

You’re damn right I would, and I hope you would too!

What if I told you that HR has been recruiting, and offers for new associate developers need to start at $60,000, otherwise we aren’t a competitive place to work, and we won’t get good candidates?

ARGH!!! GO GET THAT F@%!#&G PAPER NIA!!!

(This should be apparent, but the salary numbers above are purely hypothetical.)

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, ask yourself why?

Why would you advocate for a hypothetical person, if you aren’t willing to advocate for yourself?

But maybe you’re spotting a trick…

“But wait… what if they just gave her a raise that put her in line with what they’d have to do to hire her as if she was new?”

There’s LOTS of reasons!

  1. Her Boss’s Budget. Unless Nia’s reporting to the CEO or the CFO, her boss didn’t set the budget for her raise. The budget came from an executive committee that looked at total salaries for the group.
     
  2. Her co-workers.  A limited budget–and even a large budget–has to be shared with your co-workers. If her boss is given 3 percent of her salary budget (see reason 1) for raises and gives a spectacular performer 5 percent, that means there’s less for everyone else.
     
  3. Her own salary band. Many companies don’t just give people salaries–they set salaries within what’s called a salary band. Her job is evaluated and given a range. If she’s at or above the midpoint of that grade, she’ll see very, very small raises.

Remember this.

Salary budgets aren’t personal. Ever.

Your salary just FEELS personal.

Forget about Nia because I made her up.

But YOU. You are real.

So let’s get real.

I’ve been in the position where the bank account is hitting the single digits, and I’ve got multiple days left until the next paycheck. Sure, I can hit the credit card, but that balance just keeps getting bigger.

I’ve been in that position where someone got hired with my same job title and started making 15% more than me.

I’ve felt that ‘I’m worth more than this in this market’ when I looked at my paystub.

I’ve felt that same frustration, anger, fear and doubt and most decidedly the self-recrimination. I HATE feeling stupid, or like I’m a sucker.

I’m worth more than my job.

I have heard cheerleader blowhards (great #selfown, Mr. Brown) and new-age-hippie-types (#selfown-number-2) say it plenty of times.

But simply put, mathematically, it’s just true.

My first job as a programmer was at a tiny video editing software company. I made $27,500 a year. Minimum wage was 4.25 an hour, and I felt like I was BALLIN.’

The company no longer exists, but if they did, the position I had, Application Developer probably would pay someone hired off the street somewhere in the low 90s. 

According to some F# I wrote (did you wonder when I’d get an F# reference in?) if I stayed in that job and got a 3 or 4% raise every year.

module Interest = 
    type InterestCalculationOptions = {
        Compounding : Compounding
        Rate : float
        Principal : float
        TermInYears : float
    } 
    and Compounding = 
        | TimesPerYear of float 
        | Constant 
 
    let compound options = 
        let core r e = options.Principal * (r ** e)
        match options.Compounding with 
        | Constant -> core System.Math.E (options.Rate * options.TermInYears)
        | TimesPerYear f -> let rate = (options.Rate / f) + 1.0
                            core rate (f * options.TermInYears)
 
/// Christopher gets 3% a year.
let threePercentRaise = Interest.compound {
                             Compounding = (Interest.TimesPerYear 1.0); 
                                Rate = 0.03; Principal = 27500.0;
                                TermInYears = 21.0  };;

/// threePercentRaise = $51158!!!

/// Christopher gets 4% a year.
let fourPercentRaise = Interest.compound {
                             Compounding = (Interest.TimesPerYear 1.0); 
                                Rate = 0.04; Principal = 27500.0;
                                TermInYears = 21.0  };;

/// fourPercentRaise = $62666!!!

The thing is I grew.

I took jobs that were different. More challenging. More interesting. Different languages. Different scopes.

And, well, they paid more.

Three years ago, I took a Principal Software Engineer job at the credit union that paid much more than an Application Developer in Bellingham. And you know what? I asked around, and I was probably underpaid.

Three years later I proved it moving on to the pet store.

I’m not the only one who grew.

You know who grew a ton, and did it all at the credit union? Rihanna.

(Not the musician Rihanna. This is a reference to a person who is freaking awesome like Rihanna, but whom I didn’t ask about publishing their name in a blog post.)

I won’t speak to her specific numbers except the following.

Rihanna told me that she’s currently making around 10x what she was making when she started at the credit union.

The job she held when they started at the credit union still exists. There are people right now doing what Rihanna used to do.

Those folks do NOT get paid 10x what it was back when Rihanna started.

Rihanna had to grow. Sometimes uncomfortably. She moved into other jobs, 9 times, and in completely different departments. She had managers go to bat for her and win…

… and probably a LOT more times than she knew about, go to bat for her and strike out.

Do you think each manager wanted “turnover” when it was time for Rihanna to grow? Probably not. In the short term, her managers would have preferred she stay in the role she was in, because it would have been easier to not have to hire a backfill for her.

Why would we ever want to encourage higher turnover?

Because turnover is how you grow.

You are more than your job.

When I first heard that, there were all these pictures of my kids and my family going through my head. Of course I was more than my job. My life with them was my highest priority.

But that’s not all it means.

It also means you will grow faster than your job.

Your brain calculates 38 thousand trillion operations per second!

That is in YOU, dear reader. You. Are. Amazing.

No job will truly hold the amazing machine that is you, unless you absolutely love it, and want to remain in it, but please accept this:

Change is how you grow.

New Things

A big part of my career has involved change. Part of being a developer over the course of the late 90s to now involves a TON of change.

Technology change: The code I write, and what tools I do it with has changed drastically. I started coding professionally with C++ and Visual Basic. I got VERY good with C#, and made much with it. I made a fair amount of noise in F# and now I’m currently working in Java, Python, TypeScript and Kotlin.

Methodology change: I mean “how we do the code we do.” Test-driven development came up in the development community just as I did. The ubiquity of containers. Agile work patterns.

Personal change: What used to drive me was the feeling of being ‘the guy.’  I LOVED being the guy you needed to make and fix the things. Now, I love being ‘the guy’ who helps people grow.

And now, a job change!

I’ll have to update my goals, because at this point, I no longer work for the Credit Union! I now work for a well-known an online pet store! I get to work with data scientists trying to make your search and product discovery experience better.

That’s the update… I wish it was longer, and more in-depth, but I’m still learning the space, so I’m in absorb-mode.

Moving The Goalposts

Goalposts that move are a pain. They feel unfair, like you’ve been duped into working toward one thing, when you should have been working toward something else entirely.

Or worse… that the progress you made wasn’t really progress at all. It was some larger step that you didn’t realize you signed up for.

Here’s the dirty secret though: Moving your goalposts is precisely what you have to do to keep growing.

As you improve, the goals you set will not really be challenging enough for you to keep.

As you learn, you realize the goal you set isn’t really what you actually want.

As you try new things, you realize and say “this isn’t as important to me right now.”

Weight Loss – My ‘I Improved’ Story.

I mentioned having a goal around fitness in a couple prior posts. Check ’em out: Post #1 and Post #2

Specifically, I wanted to lose a fair amount of weight at the end of year 1, with a slowly downward push in 10 years. My goal was to get to 230-235 by the end of the year.

After the annual ‘Fitness Challenge’ contest weigh-in from my CrossFit gym we do every January-March, I weighed in at a whopping 257.7lbs! The next day, I joined Noom.

As of March 6th, I was down to 234lbs!!!

Here’s my Noom referral link, if you wanna try it. I’m really happy with it.

I have already met my ‘annual goal’. Since it was only early March the goalposts had to move.

New goalpost: 220lbs, and once I get there, maintain it for 5-6 months while slowly adding more calories back into the mix.

Retirement Funding – My ‘I Learned’ Story

My retirement funding goals were mentioned same posts as my weight (from above). I was targeting a simple approach: fully fund my 401k and my IRA.

However, after watching a few lectures about retirement on my Great Courses Plus subscription, I learned there might be a better choice.

The speaker in those videos talked about 401k plans, and mentioned how some 401k plans also offer a ROTH option. I decided to check, and it turned out that yes, my 401K did allow for ROTH funds to be contributed, just as easily as I set the contribution for my regular 401K.

All I had to do was to put in a percentage and voila, the next pay cycle, I’ve got money going into the ROTH option.

So with the new learning, I decided move the goal posts. Instead of ‘fully fund both plans’, I moved to a new goal: Fully fund the 401K, with a mix of pre and post-tax dollars, then fund the regular investing goal, and finally do the IRA with leftovers at the end of the month.

Doing it this way, I mix up my taxable and non-taxable accounts, so that I have more tax options in retirement. Options are nearly always good, especially when it comes to sources of money in retirement.

Do I miss out on the tax write off on fully funding the IRA? Maybe a little, but assuming I don’t fall completely off the savings wagon, I should be good for at least a portion of that tax benefit.

Guitar Lessons – My ‘I Tried’ Story

This one hurts a bit. My uncle made these guitars, and they’re beautiful.

The thing is, the more I looked at it, me taking guitar lessons NOW or LATER doesn’t really have much of a difference in terms of my happiness.

I love my guitars. I play on them often.

I just don’t really care about taking lessons right now.

So, I’m moving the goalposts. For now, I’m calling ‘guitar lessons’ as a within 10 years goal, rather than a ‘do this in 2021’ goal. For now, self taught is good enough.

To recap, moving goalposts is a necessary part of goals. As you improve, learn and try, your goals must change with your new abilities and knowledge.

That’s just life. It moves from out from under you.

When it does, move your goalposts.

The Imposter

I have teenagers. I hear about how much I suck on a regular basis.

But when my teenagers tell me I suck, it’s usually for something I’m pretty proud of: making them eat vegetables, do homework, save up their own money to buy something rather than buying it for them, ad parental nauseum.

The problem is, it isn’t usually the teenagers that have my ear.

Imposter syndrome is a helluva thing.

Imposter syndrome is what they call the feeling that you don’t belong or deserve the things you have. That your social status, your job, and anything else you have is completely and unequivocally unearned.

The feeling that you don’t deserve it.

That if the rest of the world only knew, they’d call you out as a fraud.

What if they knew that I pass off feelings and intuition for facts, like constantly. (You now know this, so read on with a critical eye.)

What if they knew I was a hick from nowhere. (Palouse region nowhere, thank you!)

That my “knowledge” was all off-hand bullshit I got from having not enough to do, and mostly came from being too lazy to get up from the computer.

Some say the best way to deal with imposter syndrome is to remember your empathy. That ALL people have similar self-doubts.

Frankly, it has never been a comfort for me to know that.

That only way I know how to combat imposter syndrome is to admit what I don’t do well, and hold myself to task on it. To shit, or get off the pot. Decide the priority on fixing it, and then get busy fixing it, or let it be.

Fundamentally, it comes down to giving myself permission. It’s perfectly acceptable to suck at some things. But the things I don’t want to suck at, I’ll work to improve.

A peach is a terrible apple, but both make wonderful pie.

In that vein of holding myself accountable, here’s a list of things I suck at.

I have a degree in English, with a concentration in creative writing from Western Washington University. With said degree, I have published nearly nothing. I don’t even blog all that often.

I still have pages I wrote twenty years ago. I recently read some, and it all sucked. It was preachy and self-important and one time, rather than using the world “mental” to describe a process happening in the mind, I made up a word.

“Mindic”.

In my word processor, there’s a red squiggly line that shows me that even my personal dictionary doesn’t include “Mindic” quite yet.

In tech, I suck at just about everything. Nearly all networking stuff. Kubernetes. Go and Ruby. Most programming languages that aren’t in my standard wheelhouse. Certificates. A lot of security stuff. Game development.

I do CrossFit five times a week, and after three years of doing it, I still suck at the following: double-unders, a pull up without a band, running faster than a 10 minute mile, Turkish Getups, Snatches, and pistols.

I am not a great boss. I’ve had many people report to me, and only a scant few of them are happy for it. Most simply tolerated it. Some had marked contempt for it.

I have 2 guitars that my uncle custom-made. I still can’t play anything beyond Mother from Danzig, or a slow version of Blind Melon’s No Rain.

I suck at cars, beyond checking the oil.

My wife rechecks the dishes after I wash them, to make sure they’re clean.

I’ve been told I need better aim in the bathroom.

See, the thing is, even after writing all that stuff out, it really isn’t all that bad. It ain’t my best work, but it’s honest.

If my boss (Hi Brian!) reads this blog and notices I’m not great at Kubernetes, well, I can work on that.

If my wife reads this and notices how the bathroom and dishes stuff was relegated to the bottom of the list, I’m sorry, and I’m working on it.

If my teenagers read this: Get back to your freaking homework! Eat more vegetables! And for the love of god stop begging for things and save up your allowance if you need it so damned much!

Photo Credit: Bobby McKay from Flickr
Used with permissions from the Creative Commons License 2.0

Getting Things Done, A Guide

I was inspired by Sarah Knight‘s, Get Your Sh*t Togther book here, and optimized her ideas for my needs. I read it once, then reread it right after, because it was so engaging. Buy it and read it yourself.

The Way

I start with four lists. First is my ‘To-do’ list, which is my generic catch all list for ideas. The next is my ‘Must-do’ list. This is the important list that requires daily attention. I take the highest priority items in the ‘To-do’ list, and pull over the items that must be done on the day into the ‘must-do’ list. The third list is the ‘Doing’ list. I pull one item from ‘Must-do’, and pull it into ‘Doing’ until it is complete. The last list is the ‘Done’ list, that starts out empty every morning, and is satisfyingly full at the end of every day.

The To-do List

The To-do List is meant to be an open catch all for tasks and items that creep into my head over the course of a day. “Get to the grocery store…”, gets added to the list. “Get the bikes tuned”, check. “Workout for {date}”, added to the list.

Sometimes I get a random thought, and I just add it to the To-do list, if only just to allow myself the freedom to say “this is worth spending some time thinking about, but it’s not the priority now.” The value here is that those things that are ‘wishes’ become things I allow myself to treat as eventually ‘doable’, just not as important right now. This works well for my ‘I need to rewrite this in F#’ feelings.

Prioritizing the To-do list

One of the major functions of the to do list is to show me a pile of all the things I’ve been thinking about, and enables me to stack them in a simple list of most important to least important. Simple and small items tend to get to the top of the list, if only because I know how to do them quickly, and the process of getting things done feels good.

Pro tip: Hack of the to-do list by making tasks small and manageable. “Spend half-an-hour on Udemy course” is MUCH simpler to schedule and accomplish than “Get Better with Machine Learning and AI.”

Prioritization is function of my values. One of my values is making sure my personal finances are in shape, as they were not, for an embarrassingly long time. My to-do list consistently has budgeting and finance items right at the top of the list. Self-care with physical fitness is also a high priority for me right now, so daily physical activity takes the top spots as well.

The Must-do List

The ‘Must-do’ list is where I put top priority items from the to do list. My ‘to-do’ list will contain forty or fifty things. The ‘Must-do’ list I keep less than eight, and only add items to it as items are completed. That keeps the list doable over the course of a day, and creates a simple block around what is actually possible.

Items that are regular ‘Must-dos’:

  • Daily workout.
  • Daily budget/finances check.
  • Write for 45 minutes.
  • Log food for the day.
  • Correspondence.

Putting these items as distinct tasks allow for some distinct optimizations. A daily workout is a scheduled item that ends up on my calendar. In COVID times, that has been a Zoom session, and with the update to phase 1.5 in King County, it’s a small class session at my old gym.

Correspondence tasks can tend to elongate over the course of a day, e.g. who hasn’t spent multiple hours on a slack channel, but when I treat it like a task with a defined end things take on a different mode. Personal email is managed in the morning. Work email is managed immediately afterwords, and then once again in the afternoon. Slack communications can follow the same cadence, and once folks are aware that is how you are working, the immediacy of the medium is not as demanding as it seems.

Logging food is usually a simple task, which can <5 minutes after any meal, but can be done at the end of the day. The point is to remember the intent of the task. I log food to remind myself to measure portions and be intentional about my consumption, not to be 100% accurate down to the calorie. I accept the risk of inaccuracy (did I eat 100 grams of blueberries or raspberries in my yogurt this morning?) for time management.

The Doing List

The Doing list is the loneliest column because I allow one thing in it at a time.

I cannot multitask. At all. In order to do anything competently, I need to focus on one thing at a time.

One valuable feature of the single ‘doing’ list, is that, when my brain has wondered I can quickly glance at the doing list, and ask myself “Am I really doing what I said I’m doing?”

If I have Twitter open, and my ‘Doing’ task doesn’t read ‘read Twitter feed and get pissed off’, there’s a good chance I need to re-engage myself on what I want to spend my time on.

The Done List

The Done list is the most fun list, obviously. I start with a clean list and as I complete tasks from the Must-do list, I put them on the Done list. Initially, an empty Done list is underwhelming, but as the day progresses, it can get satisfying and full. What makes this particularly satisfying is the list ends up usually in the 15-20 items completed over the course of a day, and all of them are the priority items according to what I value the most.

I prioritized ‘daily workout’ and got it done.
I prioritized ‘developer coaching session’ and got it done.

Getting done what I chose and prioritized is empowering.

Further Optimizations

One optimization I have made to this structure since starting it has been creating two other lists to assist some work items, and a few more ‘values’ based optimizations.

First, I created a ‘work week done’ list that simply contains the tasks I have done specifically for work. This helps me write full and accurate weekly status reports for work. In work-from-home COVID times, being able to communicate what I have accomplished over the course of the week seems invaluable.

Second, I created a ‘Do Every Day’ list that I use a simple copy feature to move to the ‘Must Do’ list. This saves me the few minutes spent putting the everyday tasks in the To-Do list.

Estimates: Time-Based vs Point-Based, and when to use them.

There are two general methods for software estimates, time-based and point-based. Here are some tips on when to choose either one.

Time-Based Estimates

Time-based estimates can be tricky. They are the simplest style of estimate and that simplistic nature lends engineers to treat them flippantly. Just about every engineer has said “That’s easy, it’ll take 15 minutes” about something trivial, and then spent a full workday working on it. Time-based estimates get a bad rap from engineers, because they feel punished for missing them. Project managers like them because planning work is simpler.

Time-based estimates work best for near immediate-priority bug fixes / feature requests, and costing and budgeting breakdowns.

Point-Based Estimates

Points-based estimates are a common model in Agile shops, and are largely the same except in terms of flavor when they are requested in terms of t-shirt sizes or Fibonacci series values. They are meant to be quick estimates that give a sizing gauge for the feature without the negativity associated with a missed estimate. Points-Based estimates get a bad rap from project managers, because the statistical approach to ‘backing into’ the time something takes is not accurate enough to get an ‘on-time’ delivery of anything. Engineers like them because they don’t feel as beholden to them.

Point-based estimates work best for high-level estimates of long-term work, or as a quick way to gauge consensus between engineers.

When To Use Them

A project team will generally follow a particular methodology (Agile, SAFE, Waterfall), so you may be held to the preferences and norms of that group, but in general, follow these guidelines for successful estimating.

  • When to use a Points-Based Estimate
    1. The amount of time dedicated to estimating is low.
    2. The priority on the work is variable; your product owner will use your estimate to assist in determining its priority.
    3. Engineers have substantively different approaches to the work, or the work is largely exploratory.
    4. Your dev-to-release cycle is fast.
  • When to use a Time-Based Estimate
    1. The work is your next immediate priority item.
    2. You will use the estimate to directly assess cost.
    3. There is an understood and correct way to do the work, and will not drastically change if done by one engineer or another.
    4. Your release cycle is slow, or singular.

The Wine We’re Drinking

I live three miles away from Woodinville, Washington, a town with over two hundred wineries in it, including two major labels and a smattering of medium sized ones. Living here and not enjoying wine is like living in Colorado and not skiing. The grapes are typically grown in eastern Washington, but the wines are produced here, or are simply sold here in a tasting room. As it is a very short drive away, a frequent weekend activity is to stop into a local tasting room. With the COVID19 pandemic, however, the tasting rooms have been closed since mid March until this weekend, when we have FINALLY been able to come back. These are the wines we were able to try this past weekend.

1. Lord Lion

We started at Lord Lion, as we had a club release pickup waiting for us, and we didn’t know precisely how tasting would really work in phase one point five, but the tasting was as wonderful as always.

We went in, sanitized our hands, and were directed to a table a good distance from the other patrons. We were handed small glasses, and proceeded a flight of six newly released wines. Aside from the distance the poor folks had to wander about to pour wine, there really was not much different between pre-COVID times and post-COVID tasting.

One thing we especially love about Lord Lion is that Graham releases wines later than other winemakers in the area. This recent release included a 2014 Petit Sirah, a 2015 Malbec, a 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon, and a 2016 oaked Chardonnay. Other wineries we visited were in the middle of their 2017s and 2018s releases. If you’re noticing that ‘everyone has the same stuff’, Lord Lion has an wonderfully atypical selection.

There are many things things to sample there. Graham always does a fantastic Viognier, and the 2019 was lovely, if a bit sweeter than the year before. His 2019 rosé of Sangiovese has been lovely for the past two years. The star in this release was the 2014 Petit Sirah. Full, inky dark, and lovely paired with a ribeye, or even something like a beef short-rib.

2. Adrice

Adrice was our second stop. Frankly, we stop there fairly often. With phase one point five, they were able to really open up the tasting room with large tables, a bar. and food served! Heather and I stopped in after calling ahead to make sure they could fit us in.

Heather waiting on pour number three at Adrice.

I do not have enough data to say for absolute certain (still working on collecting that), but Pam from Adrice may be one of the top 3 winemakers in the state. She simply does NOT make a bad bottle of wine. Her cheap stuff is great, and her expensive stuff is absolutely worth it! She is one of the few local producers that I will happily spend $75 on a good bottle for, although as I am budget conscious, I do enjoy my club discount for that particular bottle.

The tasting included a flight of six wines, and Heather and I also grabbed two charcuterie plates to keep up our strength. The takeaway favorites were: a damn near perfect 2019 Sauvignon Blanc from Yakima Valley; an award winning 2017 Red Blend called ‘Lift Off’ (which is a crazy steal at $25 a bottle); and a beautiful 2017 Malbec. Pam also poured us a pre-sneak-quel of a Cab / Barbera blend she’s got coming out in July, that will be some lovely stuff.

3. Long Cellars

Our final stop of the day was to an old favorite, Long Cellars. Jason is a mad scientist back there, but when he makes contact, he hits nothing but home-runs. Never one to stick with the same-ole ideas, the trick to tasting Long Cellars is to taste not only what the wine is now, but what it will be in 5-8 years.

Tasting room welcomed us warmly again, with a giant Frankenstein statue right up front. The room is small, but we were able to sneak into a table in the back, where we had been to two Long Cellars-hosted burlesque shows. Barrels everywhere, Heather was tempted to hunt around for a barrel thief, and eventually found one hidden away.

Be careful about putting Heather near the bottles, Jason!

We tasted two whites, and two reds before our daughter called and requested a pickup from a ‘social distance pickup’, so unfortunately our tasting was cut short. The steal of the show was a 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon, which tasted like fresh strawberry jam, which was unique and intriguing for a Long Cellars Cab. You could pair it with a light salad, and it wouldn’t be out of place. It was inexpensive, fresh and fruity with that classic peppery pull at the end that let you know it was a Cab. His 2018 Reserve Malbec proved absolutely wonderful and deep to finish the tasting, but as I said at the beginning, the best part will be waiting on it.

Resolution

Clearly, this hasn’t been the most updated of blogs, and being that it is the 31st of December, I think we need to resolve to change that, among other elements of my life.

So, here goes: My resolution this year is to be a little more rigorous and diligent in my life and goals. Simply put, I resolve to decide what kind of person that I want to be, and then achieve it.

I resolve to publish more, blocking off at least an hour a week to write. To help with that, this blog will change a bit. I’ll include a bit more about my life / family / coaching / CrossFit and all those other things that will help me be a whole person. F# is still a passion language for me, so most posts will have SOMETHING to do about my favorite language. But I might need help making that hour-a-week goal, so I might include stuff like “My son really wanted a Switch this Christmas…” If that ain’t for you, well fine. There should be enough content generated to let you skip a post.

I am resolving to to get down to 205lbs by December 2020, at 17% body fat. That means sticking with my 5x a week CrossFit schedule, and adding some regular distance running to the mix so I can hang out once a week with an old buddy of mine. I want to be in the kind of shape that I could hear about a 5K run going on somewhere, enter that week, and be in good enough shape to run well. I have an Excel sheet for tracking against my target, and I will post details, if only to ensure myself a little accountability.

I resolve to be more diligent about my health. Specifically, my teeth. No more of this poor-kid thing of ‘not bothering’ to go to a dentist until something hurts. Just simple checkups. 2 of ’em a year. I pay for great dental insurance. Better use it.

I’ll talk about the other resolutions I have in the next post.

I’m still alive

December came and went. January came and went. February came and went…

Yes, I’m alive. I’ve been going through a whirlwind this past few months. Here’s a few things that have gone on.

A promotion!

Yep, the wonderful folks I work for at {redacted} have given me the grand title of “Principal Software Developer.”

Having worked here for 5 years now, I am officially to blame for most all the code here. I’ve been here long enough to own it. It’s my bad, folks, but it’ll get better, I promise.

Softball Season

I help run a local girls’ slowpitch league, and have been coaching and umpiring for 5 years now. Softball season starts around the beginning of March, but the work up to the season starting is substantial.

Coaching and helping out my league is meaningful for me. I don’t have better words for it. It’s just an amazing thing that I love to do.

Conferences

I was at Agile Open Northwest and a local programmer introduced a concept he was excited about called “tiny objects”, wherein he used C# to make objects that had:

  1. No state.
  2. Content that was immutable.
  3. Just methods.

Finally, he had constructed a few rules as well, to make mocking and testing easier.  Specifically, there was to be no static methods on an object.

var example = "some string";
var stringUpper = new StringUppercaser(example).Result;
Assert.That(stringUpper, Is.EqualTo("SOME STRING"));

It. Was. Surreal.

This developer was exactly where I had been. Frustrated by state logic. Completely tired of dealing with new ways to worry about async and threading issues. He just had not heard of or even considered that the language itself was part of the problem.

That is simply why this blog exists.

Immediately, I setup a quick session in the conference to go over how functional programming works, and where to learn about it. Hopefully, I helped some folks see the light, but I doubt it, as I didn’t have a great talk already ‘set up.’ My note to self after that session was that putting together a half-hour talk on What and Why F# is just something I should have in my back pocket.

So there it is.  With a new promotion and getting my team ready to go, we are knee deep in a hundred different maintenance projects. Too many projects, not enough F#!

Thanks to the folks at F# Weekly finding my Fishful of Dollars post!

Managing Expectations

Non-F# content warning: Skip to the next one if you’re not interested in general stuff.

Generally, a working programmer doesn’t have too many difficult “non-programming” tasks. Difficulty is the name of our game, and we like it that way. That said, one of the most critical skills a developer has is to manage folks’ expectations of you. Thought-work, in general requires a level of communication that seems nonstandard and maybe a little unnatural to your work.

The reality of being a working programmer is this: Your boss probably doesn’t exactly understand what you’re doing. Your boss may be relying on you to do a good job, regardless of his/her detailed understanding of your work. Making sure those expectations are set properly is key to keeping this relationship copacetic.

An Example: A customer asks you to sneak in a quick feature. You’ve taken a swag at it, and it looks like it won’t take more than a few hours and doesn’t impact anything, so you agree. Your customer leaves you happy, and everything seems fine. Fast forward to a week from now. The feature you were supposed to be working is late, and blocking everything going out. Your customer, who felt like his request was tiny, and shouldn’t impact anything, complains to your boss that the feature is late. Your boss, who has no idea that you agreed to anything, has now the unpleasant task of defending why the feature is late, even though she/he didn’t know it was part of the release. That makes her/him look disorganized and incompetent, and that’s not how you want to make your boss feel or look, even if you hate her/him.

Take a look at your day to day interactions and communications. Do folks know what you are doing? Do they know when you releasing your work?

Here’s a tip. Don’t assume that folks are reading every email, or “making the connection.” Make yourself very clear about what you are doing, when you expect to be complete, and if there are any items blocking you. If you are not sure yourself what to be doing, there is a very good chance you have not managed expectations well.