The One where I Go Back to Work

Back to work, after two weeks of glorious, sun-filled holiday.

I was actually really excited to go back. I had been the first time since the summer holidays that I had more than just a few days off and the first time ever that I had a long time off while working on a project where I could actually really be helpful. I had a hard time not looking at Slack every hour during my holidays. I actually once found myself thinking “Oh, this is a problem (with a bad input) that I have actually encountered before and I’m pretty sure my coworker hasn’t, I need to tell him how to deal with it!!!” while sitting in a beer garden on top of a mountain. Funnily I think of myself as both quite unuseful and expendable compared to my colleagues and feel the need to make sure they can go on without me. Both is wrong, I know.

I was greeted with no really exciting or disturbing news (good) and quite nice feedback from the last Retrospective they had without me.

And I have some things that I want to do in this new chapter of my work life (it feels like that, I don’t know why): - Use VS Code. I am the last one in my team still using Atom. When everyone started switching to VS Code, I had a MacBook that nearly died when I tried using VS Code. I’ve had a better one for a while now but never got around to switching. I know that I could be more efficient with an IDE, but I feel so comfortable using Atom. I know my way around, I know many useful shortcuts and it’s just so nice to have a quiet computer, even when opening a project. But I’m going to give it a try now, for the next month. If I still think Atom fits me better, I will go back to it, but I think I need to give VS Code a thorough try. - Get back to working on my dashboard project. It’s still unclear what I am going to do, partly because I don’t know what I actually want to do and partly because my boss keeps coming up with other things I could do. But I am going to pursue my first Epic, logging a Happiness Index. I actually almost started working on this in the second week of my holiday, but I couldn’t find a starting point. I’m trying to just jump in now. - Read more. I actually read a few books during my holiday (Extreme Programming Explained, Switch by the Heath brothers and I finished the Imposter’s Handbook) and even prepared blog posts, but they weren’t that nice and they are stuck on my shitty old iPad and it’s going to take hours to get it to send the posts to something where I can import them here. I started listening to a podcast about The Pragmatic Programmer yesterday, which I had started reading over a year ago but never managed to finish because it was too difficult for me. It might be easier now? And I have the podcast episode to guide me, maybe. And there’s a new version coming out next week! - Do less overtime in order to - Focus more on my phyical and mental health. These last two might sound weird in the context of this blog, but I really struggled with this in the past and I know it has affected my ability to work. So I am vowing to get better. Do less work and stress less about work to be able to work better.