Blog for July 2019
So, I haven't really much to discuss this month, it's kind of just flown by in what feels like an instant.
One thing I do want to talk about though is the notion of a 10x engineer that I somehow only found out about this month. Now, while I agree with the idea that in teams there are stronger and weaker engineers, I don't believe any individual could ever be worth 10 others. I'm not sure if the 10x is supposed to be taken literally or if it's just some nebulous idea that they're effectively worth 10 people because if you were to try and replace them you'd need about 10 people. If the latter I would be very hesitant in saying so, but I probably would say I am one of these fabled 10x engineers. It's not good to think this way however obviously, but when I think to my skill set and how varied it is, along with my deep understanding of how much of the software at my work operates (in no small part that I've at the very least needed to debug or slightly rewrite parts, if it's not something of my own creation), it is somewhat difficult not to think highly of myself in this very specific sense. This being said, I kind of wish I wasn't. Now I don't think I could be one of those "brilliant jerks" or have the mindset of not wanting to teach my colleagues stuff because it'd be faster for me to do it myself, quite the contrary, I like to think I'm pretty well liked in the office and any time I'm able to offer advice or help with programming something, I jump at the opportunity, in fact, I subscribe to the thinking that as a sort of pseudo-manager / project lead that I am, my ultimate goal is to make myself redundant, so the team is able to keep going without me around.
I guess another thing is that I've been posting a lot more on twitter lately, I think that's mostly I just haven't been motivated to sit down and write out a long blog post like this, I'm still not entirely focused on this if I'm honest, the only reason I am is because I said to myself this morning that I would, and I'm not one to back out of things I say I'm going to do, doesn't mean this is going to be a long post.
One thing that is good while I write this is that I have at long last found an old treasured song of mine, more or less after I had given up on finding it, Valence from the band Haberdashery. I won't go into much detail on this song I don't think, but the short of it is after my second girlfriend and I broke up, this song more or less acted as a good capstone for the relationship and our friendship going forwards, well I thought it did at least. There are a couple of very specific wordings within the lyrics which really only make sense as to why it's significant to probably herself and I. Some things should remain unsaid, and going into this any more is probably bordering on that, not that it's anything controversial or anything I'm embarrassed about, it's more that's something that was ours, and I think I'm going to keep it that way, which is something I've been meaning to work on more, having stuff that's just between me and another person, in jokes with an audience of two. Not that I'm incapable of it, just that it's something I enjoy having with people, so I should aim to do it more I guess.
Something else I suppose worth mentioning, a few days ago I renewed this domain, so I guess I'll be writing these blogs for at least another year.