amozoss

Been in a rut and burned out. Here's what has been helping

1. Exercise, keeps my energy up.

2. Wake up at the same time (helps me fall asleep at night)

3. Make a plan the night before for 1 thing I want to accomplish the next day.

I also found the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns MD helpful. He has several ways to retrain your inner voice to recognize when you're self sabotaging.

Maybe they were an intern

I do feel like it's rather mild most of the time.

As I said, I don't really understand it myself. It's very strange to lay awake at night though. I feel like it's triggered by stress, but like... not stress I feel like I even care about. Sometimes my body decides it cares to be stressed but my mind doesn't care.

I'm probably just normal and didn't prepare enough /shrug

Thanks for your perspective.

I like what you're saying in that I should stop worrying about being someone I'm not. Show up and be honest about what I am good at stop focusing on all the puzzles that might show up.

My interview today I felt went a lot better. I at least solved the problem, although it was super easy... but so were the others... I just felt unprepared (and hadn't slept), so I think my brain left me, maybe?

Today I at least had a plan: 1. Write a simple test case first 2. Get the most basic version working 3. iterate from there

It's what I do everyday. I just wish my brain would have remembered that for all the other ones.

My favorite interview in the past was when the company took a ticket off the backlog and I asked questions to solve it. Aka they hired me for a half day.

They were available to ask questions, but mostly I was there figuring it out by myself.

In this case, I had never used golang before, but by the end of the half day, I had a solution I was happy with.

Sure they took a risk giving me access to the entire codebase... But as a tool to assess my ability it was top notch.

Later, when I was working there, that same ticket got prioritized and it ended up taking 3 or 4 days to solve by other team mates (my solution wasn't quite right).

Thanks for the insight.

I've handled several high stress situations on the job. E.g. servers are down, customers are pinging support. Everyone doesn't know what to do.

I've solved problems several times in that environment. I have the battle scars and I'm used to doing that.

I am much more comfortable in a giant legacy codebase that I've never used before, trying to fix a critical bug that is losing the company thousands of dollars per minute than I am during these live coding sessions.

I realize tons of it has to do with practice so I plan to do that.

It's just confusing to have an entire decade of high performance (with references to prove it) to be judged on how well I can dance with a funny hat on.

I'm not whining, I'll do the work. I just don't have time right at this moment, if that makes sense.

I'm lucky in that I don't actually need a job yet.

Hence the reason I decided to go in pretty much cold-turkey. I wrongly assumed a decade of shipping 5 SaaS products from scratch (some completely by myself), that have real revenue, and thousands of users, sometimes millions.

They only want to see me dance with a funny hat on

Nothing else seems to matter.

I mean I get it, they need to screen people.

Is there not another way to screen people though that doesn't amplify my anxiety?

Thanks for the response, I really appreciate it.

For the most part, I've learned to live with it, but it has greatly been amplified by these interviews lately.

I've also had it happen to me when I'm on business calls when I'm acting on behalf of the business to make a good impression.

And of course, public speaking, but I feel like that's pretty normal.

I like what you're saying though, just knowing there is a backup plan when things aren't going as planned, in and of itself is treatment.

https://pushback.io - 3 year side project, total failure (money wise)

I originally started it to scratch my own itch. I wanted a notification from my temperature sensor when my new born son's room got too cold (we didn't have AC, so we left the window open).

I knew solutions already existed, but I wanted to get better at programming. Which I did.

Pushback has a little bit of everything and has been rewritten 3 times going from:

- go to rails to hybrid

- puppet to k8s to Ansible

- most react native libraries and their successors

- Hugo to Gatsby

After all of that I thought, hmm maybe I should make this a SaaS. That sparked interest in business development, which I learned a ton. Did startup school 2 times, but still didn't make hardly any money.

Eventually I cut my losses and made something new, Tellspin. I did everything opposite of pushback with my new product.

- landing page first

- didn't write any code of the actual product until I had initial user interest

- chose boring tech

- stopped chasing shiny things

- spent a large portion of time doing marketing rather than building the product.

Tellspin has made way more than pushback in a third of the time. In fact, I don't think I'm even close in terms of hours spent. I'm pretty my hourly rate on pushback's is like $0.001 per hour.

With tellspin, all I did instead was focus on getting interest, talking to users, and distribution.

When a customer gave some feedback, I spent more time on the product. Then went back to marketing.

At this point, I'd say I've spent about 50% time on product, 50% on getting the word out there (blog posts, SEO, guest posts, etc)

Hopefully that's helpful to the ambitious people out there. Your product might be great, but if you focus too much on tech, no one will find out about it.

I wrote a detailed one year retrospective on tellspin's blog if there's continued interest in what I did. Nothing special really, just talking to customers and solving what problem they have.

Can also checkout https://tellspin.app for a directly in Slack solution

I agree writing good content and the tips you share about the title, meta description, headers, and valid html are spot on in my experience.

Here's a small tweak that helped me with one of my articles.

I wanted an article to rank higher when people searched for "slack user groups". Initially I had a question h2 with "What are Slack user groups?" and the first sentence started with "user groups allow you to group people...".

I got a tip from a friend that I could add "Slack" somewhere near "user groups" to help with ranking. So I changed the sentence to start with "Slack user groups allow you to..." and it improved my ranking by 6 about a week later.

Our meetings always felt like one construction worker digging a hole (doing work) while everyone else watched. Easily could have been solved with an agenda or someone telling to do the work post and not drag everyone else through the process of making a Jira ticket.

We eventually decided to have a meeting chairman, their job was to make sure there is an agenda and to keep it on topic. They also make notes of tickets that need writing and make sure it's done post. We decided to rotate the responsibility weekly since it's kinda a hassle, but it really helps having someone assigned to keep meetings moving.

We used a spreadsheet to rotate at first, but then found an slack app called tellspin that's been working really well for us. It reminds me a lot like pagerduty has a schedule, overrides, etc. Allows people to move shifts and stuff so the meeting leader role is always filled.

Their website was pretty trivial, but I beefed up the script to check for failure status code and also notify me if it wasn't 200.

I ran it every minute.

I had to include a unique uuid to cache bust, but other than that there wasn't any state.

I wrote about it here https://plainice.com/webscrape-notifications

My brother-in-law had just finished his pilot training and was trying to apply for a job as teacher to continue his training.

However, the jobs were first come, first serve so he was waking up at 4 am and constantly refreshing for hours trying to be the first one.

When I heard about it, I quickly whipped up a `curl | grep && send_notif` (used pushback.io for notifs) and it helped him not have to worry so much.

When a new job posting finally came along he was the first in line and got the job :)

Could pipe it to pushback.io too, super easy way to setup push notifications to your phone

Google cloud does checks (of endpoints or tcp connections). I've never been charged as far as I can tell. It sends me a text when my site is down, but it has tons of other notification options

Yeah true, it's not the best example, and completely unrelated to type systems, I agree.

Although warnings in someway are a safety mechanism so I think it could contribute to another section of the article, but it'd be much better to have a different example for that paragraph.

Thanks for the feedback

The idea for Tellspin came from a problem I had seen in two of my previous jobs.

They had #support slack channels that were out of control. Support team members were constantly using @channel for big and small problems. Most of the issues could be solved by any developer. The problems they raised were sort of urgent, but certainly not urgent enough to notify everyone.

Because of constant interruptions, developers shied away from #support channels. Some even left them completely, causing even more @channels...

At both of my previous jobs I made a simple rotation bot to help solve the issue. That's how the passion for solving this problem came about.

Now I spend my free time making a simple way to have an on-call rotation using slack's user groups.

I thought it'd be fun to mix up the typical explainer videos and make one with epic music. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I often feel like software engineering will be the last to go. Seems like it's easier to replace everyone else's jobs too with AI (like all the people who type things in spreadsheets all day).

I do see your point though to some degree. E.g. It's getting easier to make landing pages with no coding experience. At the same time though, landing pages get more complex requirements to stand out from the crowd. So there will always be room for customized software imo.

That being said, you could always make the AI that replaces your job now and let it run for 5 to 10 years or until they catch you

Yeah, I like servers are like cattle way better. The servers are like babies was more or less for an attention grabber, which it did a poor job of, haha

I've found the businesses I work with are very happy when I say I can get it to them by Monday. I often say this even when I know it will only take me an hour and it's Tuesday. Haven't had any issues.

Let me know if you need any help :)

Mine is https://pushback.io/.

It wasn't for 5 years more like 3 and wasn't consistently 15+ hours/week but definitely got up there when the passion was burning bright.

I've failed to implement a winning conversion plan (need to iterate my pricing, just never got around to it) and do marketing.

I've since moved on to another side project, but my passion certainly calls me back to Pushback from time to time.

Author here: I agree that what you're describing, if developers act that way it is really annoying.

My intention of the article was to give a good visual of the complexity that gets built up while coding and some tips for how I've helped myself focus better.

It wasn't intended to come off as whining, it was more to help me recognize that there is a great deal of complexity that happens and it's easy for me to avoid facing complexity by doing less intense work.

3 of the 4 tips were targeted towards things I can do to protect myself, from well, myself. I'm my worst enemy when it comes to interruptions.

My other tip was how teams can work together to make sure an interruptions is worth it.

I'm certain, like you say, the need for flow or focus is not unique to developers, but can apply to many knowledge workers.

Love it! I was really tempted to include this in my article, but it didn't quite fit since it's so tall :)

Author here: Thanks.

I actually spent 6 hours on Saturday writing it and another 4 to 6 other days getting it to where I was happy with it. So I appreciate the kind words.

Author here: Glad you asked

I laid out 4 tips that have helped me focus better.

I purposely made 2 of the 4 tips directed directly at myself. I create the most interruptions to my day.

My team has worked together to reduce unnecessary interruptions (see tip 1) as a courtesy to help me with my bad habits. The key point here is small interruptions are okay, but often not worth it, because I'll go off and do something else. If I could easily bounce back to what I was doing, I'd be much less frustrated at the interruption. My frustration lies with my inability to quickly go back to what I was working on, not the interruption itself.

Notice that I'm not passing the blame at others, I know my weakness. If I open chrome to check Slack, I'm gonna check HN, I'm gonna look at my email. This is something I need to work on personally

My hope was that it would cause self reflection on what types of interruptions are causing us the most grief. For example, in tip 3, I realized I obsessively check my business metrics to the point where I could never lay the foundation of a focus tower. So I decided to put it in a red tab group in chrome to remind myself not to go there.

Author here: My intention wasn't to whine or anything. In fact, 2 of the 4 tips I gave was how I protect against interruptions from myself.

The comments have inspired me to write a follow up, titled something like "My number one source of interruptions is myself", and maybe it'll avoid the mess of flame.

Author here: I agree with number 2. My intention was to show how context can pile up and that it decays over time. So in tip number 4, I show how I record context as I go. Think of recording context as archiving your focus towers.

I'm my own worst enemy when it comes to interruptions, which is why I kept 2 of my 4 tips aimed directly at myself for how I improve my focus.

At a team level, I made a clarifying point that small interruptions are okay, but often not worth it. While I can bounce back, there's a high risk I won't. I'm my own worst enemy (not passing the blame to anyone, I personally need to work on my habits to be better at bouncing back to what I was doing). So it's important our teams work together to make sure the interruptions are worth it. One way my team helps each other is we setup a @mention rotation in Slack (see tip 1). It allows us to schedule shifts daily, so only one person has to plan on their day being interrupted with brush fires. It's a win-win, because we share the load, but we also make it so frontline support knows who to contact (we use @devs).

I feel it's unfortunate the title made it come off as just another article whining about interruptions, that wasn't my intention, I'll do better on my next title.