Scribbled notes: Good snacks

It's important to have healthy snacks at your desk.

I like trail mix, specifically "Forest Bery" by "Wild Roots".  Also, peanut butter filled pretzels (Sam's club), kettle corn, nuts of almost any kind, and certain breakfast cereals.

For a while, I trained myself not to eat snacks during the work day.  Sometimes, that works too.

I also try to have snacks that I don't LOVE.  Because I'll eat too much.  I have to strike a balance.  Convient, yes.  Nutritious and filling, yes.  Delicious?  No--just good enough that I won't get up and go to the vending machine or candy corner instead.

What are your favorite (semi) healthy snacks?

Choose to see other engineers as students

How we see the people around us helps us change how we treat them, interact with them, etc.

Here are a few helpful paradigms:

• See other engineers as students.  See yourself as such.  Humbly accept that you and others are all learning the craft.
• Assume you can learn something from everyone.  Some experience is repeatable, some unique; usually a good helping of both.  Learn from others.  See your experiences as malleable, with new insights possible from later reflection and input from anyone.
• See others as people.  Not as a group, abstraction, a label, or stereotype.
• Reset your expectations often.
• Remember experience != expertise.  
• Not all kinds of expertise look the same.  In fact, the more you learn, the less you should feel you know overall--yet you should gain confidence in what you do know and that you can know more.

Choosing boring technology (limiting new tech) to limit complexity and increase productivity

This article talks about limiting new technologies to an appropriate level to avoid bogging down the org, especially teams and ops, in maintaining too many technologies and the cognitive load of too many customizations.  Adopting new tech is a good idea, but should not be done too freely nor too little.

https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology