One week in the bag!
I have to say, this felt like a long week. While none of the days this week had long hours, and we had plenty of breaks and full hour-long lunches, I still feel pretty wiped! This is what happens when you go out on a limb and do something different.
Friday has plenty of meetings, so I only spent about 2 hours with my mob. In the morning, we did an exercise as a team where the most recent member of the team (before me) got to draw up the architecture of our application. I have to say, this was a very neat exercise, and was also a really delightful meeting between team-mates. This was the first time I got to have the whole app architected out for me on paper, with the technologies used to build each component listed out. I asked as many questions as I could,
Meetings have been really pleasant so far. I think it's because most of the meetings are just programmers, talking with each other to increase understanding. This is so different than any of my prior jobs in this industry. My last job specifically subscribed to the process of having probably 4-5 hours of meetings each sprint, so every two weeks. Most of these meetings aren't run by the programmers/engineers themselves. Probably the biggest reason the meetings at Hunter don't feel over-done is because the teams of programmers have ownership of the meetings, and feel responsible for making them effective and equitable. It doesn't take working here very long to realize that this is better, more sustainable, and generally more enjoyable.
Friday afternoon was really fun - one of the members of my mob organized the quarterly Open Space conference for the mobbing teams, so we all attended that together. We used Gather.town as the platform for the conference, and the setting we were in had apparently been modeled after the building that the team has been in prior to the pandemic! I had never attended an Open Space before, so I really enjoyed observing and coming along for the ride!
There were two sessions for this Open Space - the first session I attended a talk on getting faster feedback, and why would we want to. This was followed by a Lean Coffee so the speakers could gather feedback on the talk, which they plan to give sometime next year. It was a really excellent talk, but I couldn't help but want to tally up all the filler words - too many Toastmasters' meetings I guess!
The second session was a "demo" on air-fryers from one of the women in my onboarding process, who I already really like! The "demo" was really a demo, in that she brought her laptop over to show us how she makes French fries in her air-fryer for her sons. There were links shared in the chat for air-fryers people recommended. We exchanged recipes. When we began talking about other beloved counter-top appliances, I shared a link to my beloved popcorn maker. Right from the get-go, the session host freely admitted that the point of the session was to allow casual, non-engineer discussion between teammates. I really needed that by the end of my first week as a mob programmer at Hunter.
Another thing that was great about my Friday was I leveraged one of the privileges we have, which is about stepping away from the mob if you feel "full up." In the hour after lunch, but before the Open Space, I was feeling "full up" because I'm such an Angular JS n00b and I wanted some private study time. My lack of familiarity with Angular JS is making it a little difficult to drive through these TDD practices. Its not that I can't work with the mob, or that anyone had excluded me - I just had this intuitive sensation that my time for this single hour would be best applied to some personal study. I found a course on PluralSight and gave it a go. Knowing myself, I may need to try a few different classes to find the right one fo me, but I won't learn it if I don't start trying.
Even though my job is so new, I can already see all the benefits of mob programming and following these XP principles and practices. Here are some of my take-aways at the end of my first week at Hunter:
- I need to make the most of this chance to truly practice these practices. Things like coding by intention and TDD and even mobbing require discipline and repetition to learn and eventually master. I want to learn them and eventually master them. Ergo, I need the discipline and repetition to do so.
- I really have some technical catching-up to do. I'm glad I didn't submit to the pressure to study during my three weeks in-between jobs, as I realize now I would have practices the wrong languages/technologies! That said, I work in web now and need to learn these web technologies.
- I have the time to slow down and really learn. I don't have to feel internalized urgency. This is #NoEstimates. I should feel safe when taking my time, unlike at prior jobs
- Its going to take me some time to get to the place I aspire to be, and that's okay
All I have to do is take it day-by-day, one tiny step at a time.