A Technical Admission, and a Bit of a Ramble

I... need help establishing a technical practice, but I'm not good at doing much alone. 


Is there such a thing as a coding club? Is that what a coding dojo is? Is there a way to start a coding dojo? Is it a coding dojo if its just me?

I really don't want to do streaming. I know of so many wonderful people who use Twitch to stream their wonderful coding work, but I just couldn't get into Twitch right now, there's like a giant mental block there. I can't even get set up to stream No Mans Sky, and I would be the most awesome No Mans Sky streamer. 

Can I pay someone to help me set up my No Mans Sky streaming set up? Is that a thing I can do? 

Maybe me and a friend could stream the coding club together, like we could do Project Euler problems together, like mobbing?
or pairing, but we trade off? would that actually be helpful for learning anything?

Because I just can't study like I did in school anymore. I don't think I could do it.

I just heard an anecdote by a woman engineer I work with and deeply respect and admire, who told me that at her first job, her manager told her NOT to ask questions unless she had done a lot of her own research first.

I couldn't help but remember my own first years as a fledgling engineer - fraught with insecurity and anxiety, always worried about making a fatal mistake. Admitting you had a question or didn't understand felt like a huge vulnerability being exposed. Knowing your peers could answer questions you had made you feel like you'd fallen behind somehow, even though you'd just started. 

The least favorite trait I see in engineers is this idea that the questions of juniors are somehow beneath you. The concept that it's a burden to be asked to help other solve smaller, less complex problems than what you would solve yourself. 

This thought process is pernicious. 

It damages new generations of engineers and ripples out into the future.


There's no room for passive-aggression in psychologically safe teams

I care very, very much about safety at work.

By safety, I refer to a few specific types of safety - technical safety, safety to be authentically yourself, psychological safety...

Especially in programming, it's vitally important for all players to feel safe and protected to speak their minds, raise questions or concerns, and most importantly to try new things and take risks. Although the agile manifesto does not explicitly speak about safety, I believe that by valuing individuals and interactions over process we must value the safety of those individuals and foster positive interactions between them to succeed.

It's possible that most of your work day is spent at home on a computer, interfacing with teammates via Slack or on Zoom. If this is the case, the psychological safety you may experience as a member of an agile team may be more tenuous than when you were all in the office together. Because we spend less time "doing business" in-person as a collective, each interaction you have with your teammates becomes heavier with significance and meaning.

This is why there is no room for passive-aggression in teams that value psychological safety. The moment that passive-aggression shows up on a team, psychological safety is damaged for all members. Even if that person being passive-aggressive is only doing it because they themselves are experiencing fear or insecurity because of their own lack of psychological safety on a team.

Passive-aggression can be both a symptom and cause for decreased psychological safety on a team. Its important that you follow-up with that individual and make sure you understand what's going on when this starts to manifest.