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Wellness Wednesday for February 14, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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  1. Do you have colleagues doing the same work that you can benchmark yourself against? Not all feelings of inadequacy are in your head, but some are, and it helps to have a point of comparison. Especially if you're working with inscrutable legacy code where a slow pace is kind of inevitable.
  2. If you do have an actual skills / enthusiasm problem, who can you ask for help to improve? It may be that there are tools you could be using but aren't, or scripts that people have put together for debugging, or textbooks that dig into the theoretical side of what you do* in a way that you generally neglect. If your manager cares about results he/she may well be happy to help you develop rather than put the time and effort and money into finding somebody new and bringing them up to speed on weird legacy code. Likewise it's a rare colleague who doesn't enjoy explaining what they do and they may well be happy that you're putting in effort to hold up your end better.

*Building Microservices by Sam Newman has a good reputation.