(this amazing piece of furniture was used by rich people to lock away from servants their precious wine)
Hope this lands on all eyes, beginners and ninja alike.
There were times in my career I considered myself to be the best around, I couldn't have been more wrong so I started to look on things to improve around, you might find yourself in a similar situation and frankly if you're not you must have serious career issues (a plateau is an issue).
Enough with the bollocking, one thing we engineers tend to do very poor is estimating the amount of work on problems we have solved previously in particular, although it might look obvious that we struggle with new problems, people thinking that couldn't be in a deeper hole.
I amazed myself recently at how many things I tend to estimate at 15 minutes (I just made it a habit to estimate to 18 - devilish laugh - hi hi), I love the pomodoro technique and tend to apply that to whatever I can, even eating when possible.
These are my 18 minute items and the actual time that I dedicated to them, due to a plethora of reasons, yes a strong will does not count so many many times:
- writing a blog post on graph-ql after I already did the work and had the bookmarks saved - 52 minutes
- listening to technology news - 48 minutes, because youtube has awesome suggestions
- write unit tests in golang (having never done this before in the language) - abandoned after 4.5 minutes, because you can alway find better things to do :(
- write unit tests for a new python cli application - abandoned after 27 minutes
- read a chapter of "House of Morgan" - 2h 40 minutes, couldn't stop
- friendly reply to recruiters, even if not interested (keeping the brand up) - 40 minutes
- read on reactive domain modelling - 18 minutes
- centralise logs of a docker composition - 3h
- setting up a CI account for running the unit tests on a new python cli application - 18 minutes (so that some one else can write and execute them ;) )
What are your 18 minutes units ?
P.s. in trying to implement this techniques and systems for myself, I am trying to keep myself accountable through public shaming with posts like this, so keep close and comment if you enjoyed it.