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

A coworker recently introduced me to the Lombok library in Java.  It reduces a lot of boilerplate, and is generally just awesome.  It lets you add getters/setters, builders, and a variety of other functions to classes without having to do all the mundane boilerplate. 

https://www.baeldung.com/intro-to-project-lombok

Becoming a T shaped person, and soft skills.

A coworker referred me to this great article on becoming T-shaped--not just professionally, but in life.  I thought it was a good read.  (To be honest, I scanned it for the bits I found useful--I was already fairly familiar with the concept).

The bit I liked was how the author presented ideas on setting goals, plans, and habits to grow one's skills consciously and not accidentally.

https://collegeinfogeek.com/become-t-shaped-person/

Instant Runoff Elections would really solve problems right now.

Also, it's an interesting idea for a software programming exercise.

http://www.fairvote.org/rcv#rcvbenefits

Mentoring; JSP template tags

JSP templates

This was a really useful Stack Overflow answer on how to do templates in JSP.
http://stackoverflow.com/a/13103364/116810

Mentoring

My mentors have taught me some good tips on mentoring and knowledge sharing with coworkers.  The first one I will share today is this:

• Tell them how to do it, but let them be at the keyboard doing it.

People remember more when they do it.  If you show them, they won't retain as much, and they won't be able to ask questions.

That said, I have learned a lot by watching other developers code.

• Occasionally, sit with other developers while they write code.

I've learned things about problem solving techniques, skills with the IDE, and tools and APIs they use that I didn't know about.  I won't list those specific lessons here, but I will say that watching other developers code and do their work is invaluable.

A third thing I have learned about mentoring and skills growth:

• Set goals to improve on your strengths, not just your weaknesses.

A while back I decided to work on my written communication skills with my manager.  I thought that writing was a strength, but as I started cc'ing my mentor on all my communications, I received feedback that helped me improve.  And I realized there are a lot of different skills that go into good written communication.  There were a few I could improve on.

I am inspired by the developer tea podcast, which shares small nuggets of insight and doesn't aim to be a long podcast.  Sometimes it's just 5 minutes.  Short podcasts are great.  So are short blog posts.  It makes me feel less worried about how in depth and helpful my blog posts are.