Top of the morning to you!

It’s already my second week in the new role. I’m getting there in terms of feeling comfortable and getting a reasonable routine going.

Interestingly, when I’m working at home, I think I’m not taking as many breaks as I need. Normally when you’re in the office, you go to the kitchen, make some coffee, walk back and forth, and with the commute, you probably accumulate a decent number of steps. At home, it’s been difficult to take those breaks naturally. I used to have a more “rigorous” schedule, I took breaks often and went for a walk before starting work, at lunch and immediately after finishing the workday.

The first time I discovered pair programming in the wild—outside of books and articles—was at Findmypast. Before joining the company, I had the strong intuition that things could be much better and a desire to improve, which drove me to look for answers, read books, watch conferences about agility, DevOps... In this journey, Findmypast was instrumental. It showed me that the things most developers would consider the “ideal world”, unattainable, unreachable, could actually be real. At the same time, my tenure there raised the bar of what good looks like at an engineering level.

Hey there!

The first week in my new role is almost done. It has been chaotic on a personal level, as I've been trying to adjust to it after the 8-month break. This Monday morning, planning the day in my journal, I got a strange feeling after blocking nine hours of the day and seeing how many blocks in the calendar were left.

Innovation is mostly referred as a good thing. We must wow our customers with new, better, delightful, more useful things or invest in new tools, patterns, libraries, etc. for enhanced productivity. Little do we discuss wasteful innovation and its cost and associated risk to the company, and in particular, wasteful innovation coming from engineers going wild.

I’ve already seen this a few times. A potential signal to identify wasteful innovation done by engineers is hearing the following words: “it’s more efficient”. If these magical words are used to justify suspicious architecture or technology choices, as a rough heuristic, that decision is wrong:

Hey!

It’s the last day of my long break since January. On one hand, it’s great that a new “chapter” is about to start, now with a slightly different approach, and I feel excited and nervous at the same time. On the other hand, as I’m writing this, there’s a bit of regret of not squeezing the break enough in terms of productivity, learning, and exploring other avenues or projects. If the possibility to rewind to January existed, I’d probably use my time better and pursue some ideas I had that I ended up not doing. Having said that, it’s been productive overall, although not groundbreaking, and a great experience.

I’ll be working as a senior backend engineer in Hectare, which is an agritech company that creates products around the food supply chain. It’s an exciting field, since agriculture plays an important role in a future where food security, sustainable and ethical farming will be key.

As always with a new job, the first weeks will be intense, as there’s a lot to learn and get used to, new architecture, environment, people… If anything, my last stint working as the only developer for months, and having to learn quick the architecture and codebase without much support, showed me that I can handle it just fine. Luckily, the initial part of the onboarding has been good, with a decent Macbook arriving a week before and all the credentials, tools, and company docs already available, and plenty of events in my calendar to know the company.

Top of the morning to you!

Next week’s the last one before starting my new role. It’s feels like going back to school after the summer holidays.

This week, we start with two awesome articles and a talk by Trond Hjorteland from the NewCrafts Paris 2023 conference:

• A Startup doesn't have to Grow into Product & Engineering

• The endpoint of Web Environment Integrity is a closed Web

• Thriving in complexity talk by Trond Hjorteland

Hey,

This week, I have signed a contract with a company as a backend engineer! 🎉 I start in September, two more weeks to go.

Firstly, it’s a relief to know there are no more interviews! I was already getting fed up with them and my energy was a bit low, answering similar questions, doing never-ending take home tasks, followed up by more technical interviews and behavioural questions.

It’s no secret that most hiring processes are “less than ideal”. In my opinion, hiring should be one of the most important aspects of the organization, specially startups, and should be done consciously, with purpose and humanly. There’s so much room for improvement that any process, just by being slightly better, sticks out like a sore thumb. I’m convinced that a startup that would invest in its hiring process to make it nimble, more humane, with a focus on diversity… would have an advantage.