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journals/2020_10_20.org

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5fbaf828-b991-4983-9e23-84314473ae1e

2020-10-20

DONE Journal

CLOSED:

- Note taken on

I finally got the documentation for Workday done today. That felt nice. I had been avoiding it, but happened upon a note from Paul Graham about the importance of writing where he suggests that the hardest thing for people is just starting. So write a rough draft that is not good and then start editing it. So I sat down and just started on something for the docs, and it turns out they sort of wrote themselves. A lot was cribbed from Lattice, to be fair. But I got it done.

In the meantime, the hackathon for our virtual Eng Retreat is supposed to take place tomorrow. I'm a little nervous that we don't have a ton of direction or time to work with Marcin in EEST time.

Silas built a birdhouse with Bubba today using a toolbox he got for his birthday yesterday. He was pretty excited about it, and Bubba made sure he was successful with the project. The more I look at it, I think it might have come out of a kit, but still.

[[id:d71d6a7c-a5c9-41e4-b40c-acbd1afd6aee][One-on-One with Harry]]

<2020-10-20 Tue 9:00-10:00>

[[id:878643e1-c15b-4029-855f-5b2757d6040a][Virtual Engineering Retreat]]

- How can we best share knowledge

+ Bart - There are teams that write good tests, and other teams that don't do it

+ Don't have a straight process that we follow

+ *A lot of things aren't worth sharing*

+ Even API docs, which have a process, don't get followed or updated

+ Ze - Have the doc hub, which combines a lot of links

+ Writing docs have to be a project in and of itself

+ With PLG, if docs and sharing knowledge is side-effect, secondary, not very good at it

+ Out of your time in the week, do you get moments to share something?

+ Mostly in production mode all the time

+ Bart - How are you treating adding docs?

+ Not about finding the time, but treat it as part of the process

+ There are some parts you don't want to do

+ Ze - In our company, we're not all of us strict about having tests in PRs, let along docs

+ Nat - Is there a line between hard and good process?

+ Bart - Generic decisions, you can have different level of decisions about a process

+ We should write tests -- process decision

+ How you write those tests -- finer grained decisions

+ Always enforce we do have tests, question of granularity

+ Gabriel - Find ways to ask about what you're sharing

+ Process of learning must come from yourself

+ If you don't want to learn you wont

+ Nat - bigger problems with current process

+ Colin - Jira commenting on a more regular basis

+ Start or end of day, brain dump what you've been working on

+ Bart - Daily standups, go through context we are currently working on

+ Serves a similar purpose, everyone hears the update,and you provide inputs

+ Bart - Piping python into pyplan, go through slack archives and jira comments

+ We don't have a good way of sharing knowledge about projects

+ Ze - Find out about new things via code reviews

+ We write a lot of business logic

+ Not always excited about new business logic from another squad

+ Our business logic doesn't instill curiosity

+ Rotating teams is the only real way to encourage sharing knowledge

+ Any work outside of business logic, has to come in the context of an INITATIVE

+ We don't find time to work on initatives

+ We're all just django/frontend engineers

+ Don't have hats or positions to push forward ideas

+ Temporary roles, no official role for data architect, rotational roles where you get to focus on arch for two months

+ Chuky - What's the 15Five way of building APIs?

+ Custom API v DRF ... sigh

+ General concensus

+ Gabriel - Some pro/against DRF, result is there is no easy way to fix this

+ Conversation has been brought up a lot, but we end up divided into squads

+ Bart - Jon came up with functional DRF,

+ Actually works to have different conventions depending on what you're working on

+ Tech demos can get boring, not a great way to showcase work

+ Ze - Seeing a little new feature is not so useful

+ Toolbox sessions provide a much better way to learn

+ Like to see Olesky or DevOps guys showing what they do

+ If we all had a few times a year to go deep on something

+ Chuky - PR is a good way to see what people are working on

+ Tech demo is boring, if we have them, should be optional

+ Bart - Cross PRs from another squad, lots of time commitment

+ Context is often missing in what we're working on

- Summary

+ Don't have a straight process that we follow

+ *A lot of things aren't worth sharing*

+ Even API docs, which have a process, don't get followed or updated

+ Out of your time in the week, do you get moments to share something?

+ Bart - Generic decisions, you can have different level of decisions about a process

+ We should write tests -- process decision

+ How you write those tests -- finer grained decisions

+ Process of learning must come from yourself

+ If you don't want to learn you wont

+ Start or end of day, brain dump what you've been working on

+ Bart - Daily standups, go through context we are currently working on

+ Don't have hats or positions to push forward ideas

+ Temporary roles, no official role for data architect, rotational roles where you get to focus on arch for two months

+ Temp process could involve office hours with engineers with deep product knowledge

+ Ze - Seeing a little new feature is not so useful

+ Toolbox sessions provide a much better way to learn

+ Like to see Olesky or DevOps guys showing what they do

+ If we all had a few times a year to go deep on something

+ Bart - Cross PRs from another squad, lots of time commitment

+ Context is often missing in what we're working on

DONE Write up user docs for [[id:48ec7ad9-9d6e-47ec-878e-6d1dce1a830a][Workday Integration with 15Five]]

CLOSED:

DONE [[id:524e3b70-161b-4173-8ee7-a43d725d7273][Running]] 8 [[id:acc626d4-d423-433c-9428-0ac3b5cfc725][Easy Miles]]

CLOSED:

DONE [[id:613d469f-e076-4b42-a880-895bd2ed337f][Nature Talk on Lichen]]

CLOSED:

DONE Make some decisions on Question Playlists

CLOSED: