Pete Johns - Blog entries of the highest uptodateness

One evening right at the beginning of 2023, I got an email from Exercism inviting me to join The #12in23 Challenge. I was home alone and thought that this sounded like fun (you should see the number of Rubik’s cubes in this house to get an idea of how I define “fun”). I’d played with Exercism a few years ago to get myself up-to-speed in Elixir, which was looking like becoming popular when I was at Envato and I found it to be both educational and entertaining. I resolved to undertake one language per month and one exercise per day.

Let’s start this post with the assumption that synchronous, face-to-face meetings are a part of how a successful organisation operates. Reaching any other position is outside of the scope of this post, although is certainly something I would like to explore separately. Great!

In my last blog post, Keeping in the Development Loop, I listed a bunch of email newsletters that I enjoy as a technologist. Today I want to share one more email newsletter that I get a lot of value out of and that’s Better Allies ®. Each Friday (ish, depending on your timezone), Karen Catlin shares five tips on inclusion, from which I think have learned a lot. I’ll let my colleagues be the judges.

I was recently asked, “As an engineering manager, how do you keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the development world?”, which I thought was a really interesting topic and one that warranted further exploration.

This blog post has been brewing for a while now. I first started mind-mapping it about a month ago. I was going to call this “Considerate Slack Use” but this is how I use Slack and in no way a request that you do the same as me.

I’ve been enjoying Tim Ferris’ 5-Bullet Friday newsletter for the past couple of years (thanks to Jacob for the introduction). Most weeks this newsletter includes a Quote I’m pondering (this week’s didn’t, just because I was thinking about it).

In The Before Times™ we used to like to go to restaurants. Of course, part of the restaurant dining experience is being asked, “how is your meal?” Just as a forkful of said meal has entered the diner’s mouth. There’s a polite nod with the mouth covered by a hand, followed by a quiet acknowledgement, “very nice. Thank you!” And that is that. The review is acknowledged.

As we have lived through more than 200 days of Coronavirus-induced lockdown, finding reasons to be positive is increasingly difficult. I’m finding identifying reasons to be grateful is a lot easier.

This year has thrown a lot at so many of us with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. My family and I have been observing the restrictions since they came in… indeed K and I were working from home for a couple of weeks before the restrictions came into effect here in Melbourne, as we have K’s parents staying with us from the UK. I have missed my regular run commutes with my friends and parkrun, of course, but have made up for this by running 5km each day and catching up with friends online for coffees or beers, depending on the time of the day.

This weekend I completed my first 10km road race since June 2016. It wasn’t a personal best time for the distance nor was it my longest run, but I finished the event feeling more proud than I’ve felt in any running event. To understand why, I have to cast my mind back to February 2014 when our then three-year-old would leave me breathless running after him around the local park. I started doing the Couch to 5K programme to give me a hope of keeping up with him as he got faster and faster.