It's been a while. Pandemic hit, I got locked, the world stopped, I stopped. I could have persisted, should have persisted, I should have written when I had some time. Or found time if I really wanted to. But lots of things happened and I ended up sitting on this blog project for over a year. Until today.
Today I had a call with one of my mentees and we discussed a commom problem among developers: lack of focus! Well, if you are a developer – at any point of your career – I guarantee you lost your focus at least once. You decided to learn a new language, a new framework and something shinnier came up and you just dropped it and jumped to something else. It happens, it still happens to me and to a lot of other people out there. But what is not too common is to regain the focus quickly and get back to what you should be focusing. So we discussed some strategies (I'll probably mention this once this 'experiment' is over and my mentee shares his experience with me). But one thing I can say is that he committed to focus and produce something... and I committed too. And here I am, doing my part: I'll be writing or drawing or recording tutorials, I'll be creating something every day for 30 days! No matter what it is, I'll just ship it.
Paul and Mike
A week ago I had a call with Paul, the CEO at Filtered, the company I joined early this year. It's a privilege to be able to talk to the CEO on a weekly basis. And I can't judge how much I've learned in ever single one of these calls with Paul. We talk about a lot of things and last week, when I was sharing my concerns about a feature we were discussing and was half baked, he said: "Just ship it!". And then he reminded me of Mike Tyson's quote: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". I was afraid of releasing the feature because I wasn't sure how the users would take it. He said we would only know after we released it, that I should ship it. And here I am, writing about it and not worrying too much about the end result of this post. I hope someone will like it, that's my plan. So I'll just ship it.
Sometimes I get caught up trying to get something too pixel perfect. I spend a lot of time trying to get a button to look exactly like the approved designs. This was part of my job for years when I worked for a Digital Agency and did some consultancy jobs. I've learned by myself ways too achieve builds that were as close as possible to the designs clients approved and that great designers tailored and crafted with passion. So, it makes perfect sense to get caught up chasing "perfection", right? Well, it's painful sometimes. Although I think it's worth an effort and there's value in doing this, I must admit that it has some negative side effects: it's time consuming, it's a bit too much sometimes, slows down releases and it's a perfect excuse for a procrastinator like me. Yep, I admin, I procrastinate given the chance.
So, here's my stop to this cycle. It took me a year, but now I'm gonna be writing for a while. I won't judge my text and I'll see what happens. Almost nobody knows about my blog. Why should I worry if each post has a beginning, middle and an end? I just want to share things I learn, things I think by myself, things my unplanned and planned "mentors" teach me. Maybe one person out there will read this in the future and sympathise. Maybe this (or any of the posts to come) will make a difference to someone out there and then, I'll be happy. Even if I never know a post of mine helped someone, I'll be implicitly happy just because I'll have shipped it. One thing I'm sure: if I don't ship it, there's zero chance my thoughts will make any difference to anyone.
Anyway, it's enough for today. Let's see what comes tomorrow 😉
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