Welcome to my personal readme! I hope this helps give more context on how I work and interact best with my team members.
My goals at WP Engine include:
- Learning new technical skills and strengthening my ability as a software developer
- Understanding existing patterns in our codebases and how they can be improved
- Creating effective collaborations between engineering, product, and design
- Fostering good relationships within and across teams
- Helping create an environment where everyone feels listened to and psychologically safe to express thoughts.
- Growing interpersonally through the work that I do
I see engineering work as a creative endeavor, and I think approaching software development as an outlet for creativity changes our process and outlook.
A big value I have in team settings is that an appropriate amount of friction can improve our work. When I have an idea, I want to hear contradictory thoughts on it and will always do my best to understand those perspectives before I develop opinions about them. This is how we end up with great ideas that have team buy-in.
- Friction can improve the work.
- Curiosity before judgement.
- Make it work, make it right, make it fast - and understanding that sometimes this doesn't happen in a single ticket.
- Radical Candor - I prefer to work with people that will openly give frank feedback and appreciate when it comes from a sincerely positive place.
- Strong opinions, weakly held
- Bringing novel ideas to the table to discuss, but prioritizing practicality.
- Taking appropriate risks, intellectually and personally.
- Introspection and personal growth.
- Open discussion of ideas without personal attachment to them.
- Most of my experience is in React and Rails.
- Golang is an intermediate skill for me and one of the areas I'm focused on leveling up.
- DevOps topics are a relatively weaker area in my skill set and something I'm putting effort into improving.
- Before WPE, I primarily worked in products that had a monolithic architecture, so I've come here with a lot to learn in this area!
I check notifications and review requests periodically in GitHub but often can overlook them when I'm heads down - this is something I'm trying to work towards being better at. I often rely on morning standups to get the status of what needs to be reviewed. You will never bother me by sending an extra reminder or request through slack.
In many of my PRs I open (particularly in larger PRs), I try to use PR comments to highlight discussion topics, difficult decisions that I ran into, or specific items that I'm curious to get feedback on.
For larger PRs, both on reviewing and receiving a review, I've found Zoom code walk-throughs can sometimes be more efficient, and I'm always open to it on either side of a review.
Asynchronous communication is normally preferred due to efficiency, but I don't have any aversions to a Zoom call if the situation calls for it.
I will typically try to hold back on contacting others after hours and during breaks marked in slack statuses, but I don't personally mind receiving communications through slack after hours, during lunch breaks, ect. In non-emergency or low priority situations, I may wait to reply!
Whether it's meetings or other scheduled items, I have a preference towards grouping meetings together to allow for larger blocks of heads-down time.
Please reach out to me if you want to pair! I'm normally open to pair programming, and I think it can be useful as more than just a teaching tool. Even for two experienced developers, I believe the greater immediate cost of developer time to effective pair programming can almost entirely be offset by productivity gains. There can be tasks that are better suited to individual work, but in my view, most teams under-utilize pair programming opportunities.
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Creative problem-solving - I enjoy finding new ideas and patterns to solve problems and I feel excited to explore possibilities that are "outside of the box". Sometimes this means I've had to work harder towards prioritizing practicality, understanding community standards, and making sure I always think of horses before zebras when I hear the sound of hooves. Although on a good day, I can find ideas that are both novel AND practically useful.
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Curiosity - One of the greatest pleasures of this career is the amount that we get to learn on a daily basis. Curiosity is a useful trait for learning technical skills, but I also strongly believe it's crucial to a good team dynamic to be curious about other people on an interpersonal level.
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Solving interpersonal conflict - I don't always get things right the first (or second) time, but if you approach me with an issue of how I've interacted with you, then I am confident that we can have a productive discussion about it which we will both walk away from feeling better.
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Focus - People often describe me as a "scatterbrained" person. It's a challenge to stay on one train of thought sometimes, and this can become apparent when I'm trying to discuss new ideas or speak off the cuff about something that I have a lot of thoughts on. This can also come up when I'm trying to start a new piece of work that has many components to it that I want to think through first, even if it's better to just start the work and solve problems as they come. Making detailed notes to prepare for speaking about complex things and writing TODO lists for complicated tickets has been a big help with this.
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Organization - I don't have as methodic and well-defined process as many other developers do, and I think improving in this area could be a benefit to the teams I work with. I'm working on having a more defined process around regularly checking notifications and calendar events, scheduling review time, and staying on top of the day to day maintenance tasks that this job requires.
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Asking for help - I enjoy being useful to other people and sharing ideas and experience, but often struggle with asking for help in areas which I don't have as much experience in. Sometimes this ends with spending too much time spinning my wheels. I am trying to do a better job at time boxing myself when I hit roadblocks that could benefit from asking for help and I'm working towards tapping into all the resources and #help channels WPE provides!
