No one likes surprises. I like to keep up to date on what other people are working on. Even if it is outside of our department. I will keep tabs on things in jira, watch spaces in confluence, lurk on slack, or just ask in person. I enjoy having personal conversations in person/zoom instead of in slack. Work conversations with a lot of detail are great in chat since I can easily reference it later.
Sometimes I give the worst solution to a problem right away. This is part McDonald's Theory and part me joking around. It is meant to get people thinking about something better. Even if that means we expand on the idea until all of the terrible parts are gone.
Looking/learning This could be checking Jira for my next task, browsing logs and metrics for possible issues, or reading up on something. I'll usually have headphones on low at this point and be looking around for something big to do next.
Focused work Involves sprint work, code reviews, or other big tasks that need a lot of attention. In this mode I have the volume up on my headphones a little high. If you can tell that I am listening to "industrial noises" (a previous coworker used that to describe what I listen to) please tell me to turn it down.
Issue Triage This is usually a headphones off version of focused work. I want to be available if someone needs my attention and we need to work together to get something done.
I never want to be a blocker of someone else's work. This is true even when focused on another task. During the day Slack is the best way to get my attention if I look like I am busy. I rarely mute notifications on my Mac but will if I need to focus. If I do, I will usually check Slack every hour or so.
I am used to detailed and sometimes nit-picky code reviews. Even if it comes down to spacing. I do not want to merge code that bothers another engineer later on. I feel like you shouldn't be able to tell who wrote what code based on style. Code should be readable first and then compact.
- Quick and easy solutions
- Reliability of 3rd party services
- Not monitoring or logging all of the things
- Technology that is new, complex, or commonly used as a buzzword
Stability first and scalability second. I don't want to wake up people due to an outage, and I don't want anyone to have to repeat the same task over and over again. If there is an alert that fires off once a day, or even once a week that is something that needs to be addressed. Even if that only involves adjusting monitoring to something more sensible.
I feel that rubber ducking is important. Talking a problem through can be therapeutic and possibly lead to a solution. Even if I don't 100% grasp the current issue I still want to learn what is going on.