Been in a rut and burned out. Here's what has been helping
1. Exercise, keeps my energy up.
2. Wake up at the same time (helps me fall asleep at night)
3. Make a plan the night before for 1 thing I want to accomplish the next day.
I also found the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns MD helpful. He has several ways to retrain your inner voice to recognize when you're self sabotaging.
As I said, I don't really understand it myself. It's very strange to lay awake at night though. I feel like it's triggered by stress, but like... not stress I feel like I even care about. Sometimes my body decides it cares to be stressed but my mind doesn't care.
I'm probably just normal and didn't prepare enough /shrug
I like what you're saying in that I should stop worrying about being someone I'm not. Show up and be honest about what I am good at stop focusing on all the puzzles that might show up.
My interview today I felt went a lot better. I at least solved the problem, although it was super easy... but so were the others... I just felt unprepared (and hadn't slept), so I think my brain left me, maybe?
Today I at least had a plan:
1. Write a simple test case first
2. Get the most basic version working
3. iterate from there
It's what I do everyday. I just wish my brain would have remembered that for all the other ones.
My favorite interview in the past was when the company took a ticket off the backlog and I asked questions to solve it. Aka they hired me for a half day.
They were available to ask questions, but mostly I was there figuring it out by myself.
In this case, I had never used golang before, but by the end of the half day, I had a solution I was happy with.
Sure they took a risk giving me access to the entire codebase... But as a tool to assess my ability it was top notch.
Later, when I was working there, that same ticket got prioritized and it ended up taking 3 or 4 days to solve by other team mates (my solution wasn't quite right).
I've handled several high stress situations on the job. E.g. servers are down, customers are pinging support. Everyone doesn't know what to do.
I've solved problems several times in that environment. I have the battle scars and I'm used to doing that.
I am much more comfortable in a giant legacy codebase that I've never used before, trying to fix a critical bug that is losing the company thousands of dollars per minute than I am during these live coding sessions.
I realize tons of it has to do with practice so I plan to do that.
It's just confusing to have an entire decade of high performance (with references to prove it) to be judged on how well I can dance with a funny hat on.
I'm not whining, I'll do the work. I just don't have time right at this moment, if that makes sense.
I'm lucky in that I don't actually need a job yet.
Hence the reason I decided to go in pretty much cold-turkey. I wrongly assumed a decade of shipping 5 SaaS products from scratch (some completely by myself), that have real revenue, and thousands of users, sometimes millions.
They only want to see me dance with a funny hat on
Nothing else seems to matter.
I mean I get it, they need to screen people.
Is there not another way to screen people though that doesn't amplify my anxiety?
I originally started it to scratch my own itch. I wanted a notification from my temperature sensor when my new born son's room got too cold (we didn't have AC, so we left the window open).
I knew solutions already existed, but I wanted to get better at programming. Which I did.
Pushback has a little bit of everything and has been rewritten 3 times going from:
- go to rails to hybrid
- puppet to k8s to Ansible
- most react native libraries and their successors
- Hugo to Gatsby
After all of that I thought, hmm maybe I should make this a SaaS. That sparked interest in business development, which I learned a ton. Did startup school 2 times, but still didn't make hardly any money.
Eventually I cut my losses and made something new, Tellspin. I did everything opposite of pushback with my new product.
- landing page first
- didn't write any code of the actual product until I had initial user interest
- chose boring tech
- stopped chasing shiny things
- spent a large portion of time doing marketing rather than building the product.
Tellspin has made way more than pushback in a third of the time. In fact, I don't think I'm even close in terms of hours spent. I'm pretty my hourly rate on pushback's is like $0.001 per hour.
With tellspin, all I did instead was focus on getting interest, talking to users, and distribution.
When a customer gave some feedback, I spent more time on the product. Then went back to marketing.
At this point, I'd say I've spent about 50% time on product, 50% on getting the word out there (blog posts, SEO, guest posts, etc)
Hopefully that's helpful to the ambitious people out there. Your product might be great, but if you focus too much on tech, no one will find out about it.
I wrote a detailed one year retrospective on tellspin's blog if there's continued interest in what I did. Nothing special really, just talking to customers and solving what problem they have.
I agree writing good content and the tips you share about the title, meta description, headers, and valid html are spot on in my experience.
Here's a small tweak that helped me with one of my articles.
I wanted an article to rank higher when people searched for "slack user groups". Initially I had a question h2 with "What are Slack user groups?" and the first sentence started with "user groups allow you to group people...".
I got a tip from a friend that I could add "Slack" somewhere near "user groups" to help with ranking. So I changed the sentence to start with "Slack user groups allow you to..." and it improved my ranking by 6 about a week later.
Our meetings always felt like one construction worker digging a hole (doing work) while everyone else watched. Easily could have been solved with an agenda or someone telling to do the work post and not drag everyone else through the process of making a Jira ticket.
We eventually decided to have a meeting chairman, their job was to make sure there is an agenda and to keep it on topic. They also make notes of tickets that need writing and make sure it's done post. We decided to rotate the responsibility weekly since it's kinda a hassle, but it really helps having someone assigned to keep meetings moving.
We used a spreadsheet to rotate at first, but then found an slack app called tellspin that's been working really well for us. It reminds me a lot like pagerduty has a schedule, overrides, etc. Allows people to move shifts and stuff so the meeting leader role is always filled.
Google cloud does checks (of endpoints or tcp connections). I've never been charged as far as I can tell. It sends me a text when my site is down, but it has tons of other notification options
Yeah true, it's not the best example, and completely unrelated to type systems, I agree.
Although warnings in someway are a safety mechanism so I think it could contribute to another section of the article, but it'd be much better to have a different example for that paragraph.
The idea for Tellspin came from a problem I had seen in two of my previous jobs.
They had #support slack channels that were out of control. Support team members were constantly using @channel for big and small problems. Most of the issues could be solved by any developer. The problems they raised were sort of urgent, but certainly not urgent enough to notify everyone.
Because of constant interruptions, developers shied away from #support channels. Some even left them completely, causing even more @channels...
At both of my previous jobs I made a simple rotation bot to help solve the issue. That's how the passion for solving this problem came about.
Now I spend my free time making a simple way to have an on-call rotation using slack's user groups.
I thought it'd be fun to mix up the typical explainer videos and make one with epic music. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I often feel like software engineering will be the last to go. Seems like it's easier to replace everyone else's jobs too with AI (like all the people who type things in spreadsheets all day).
I do see your point though to some degree. E.g. It's getting easier to make landing pages with no coding experience. At the same time though, landing pages get more complex requirements to stand out from the crowd. So there will always be room for customized software imo.
That being said, you could always make the AI that replaces your job now and let it run for 5 to 10 years or until they catch you
Yeah, I like servers are like cattle way better. The servers are like babies was more or less for an attention grabber, which it did a poor job of, haha
1. Exercise, keeps my energy up.
2. Wake up at the same time (helps me fall asleep at night)
3. Make a plan the night before for 1 thing I want to accomplish the next day.
I also found the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns MD helpful. He has several ways to retrain your inner voice to recognize when you're self sabotaging.