When I was mentoring a FIRST robotics team, the fundamental revelation I had was seeing how the robot the team built became a part of our identities. When we won a match, it was validation. When we lost a match, it was a reflection of our failures. Being a mentor gave me a level of detachment, but the students working on the robot did not have that luxury. For many, this was their outlet they took pride in. And losing gave that wretched inner voice (the voice of the bullying they had endured) hold to beat them down.

When I started working in the software industry, I soon came to realize that we are not that different (myself included). Even the terminology — team — evokes tribalism. Pitching a design to your team and having it fall flat feels much the same as losing. But often in industry, you don’t have the safety net of a mentor. You either have your previous experiences or you don’t. And there’s the pressure of financial stability. Fundamentally, this adds stress and hampers creativity. (Also open office plans, but I digress.) To me, that’s why I prioritize supporting my team above all else. The easy thing is to be critical of others; the right thing is to find how you can help them succeed. Creating something worthwhile usually requires vulnerability. Don’t exploit that: see it for the gift it is.

(Originally from a Twitter thread.)

As I’m shutting down my Tumblr, I took one last look through all my fandom blog posts. Not even my most wholesome fandom posts are safe from Tumblr’s new content policy. Good riddance.

This is my first post to this blog in a long time, and it is with a fully new engine! zombiezen.com is now entirely hosted by Firebase Hosting and generated by Hugo.

When I first joined Tumblr, it was a very different blogging service than what it has grown into. And especially now that I am working in open source and wanting to post more regularly about more in-depth technical content, I want to have a platform that I can post to and not worry about my content going away. As such, I’ve also copied my content on Medium into this blog.

In this blog post, I’m to do a deep dive into the specific steps and tools that I used to achieve this new mindfulness. If you haven’t read my first blog post about Getting Things Done, you should take a look. I’m not recommending the tools here in any capacity other than from my own personal viewpoint: I’m not getting paid to promote these. I still recommend reading Getting Things Done by David Allen to understand the theory and reasoning for why to use particular tools, and adapt for your own circumstances.

It was a packed day: all meetings that required my attendance. The only breaks were for breakfast and lunch and a lone 30-minute break between other meetings. I had to meet with my remote manager, my new product manager, one of my team members, and customer liaisons for a new customer we were hoping to work with. On top of that, it was Agile sprint planning day — I had to run the task planning meeting and moderate two design discussion meetings. In between all that, I needed to write up my top accomplishments to my manager for performance review. The previous night, I realized that one of my mentoring meetings tomorrow didn’t have enough time to actually accomplish my mentee’s goals. All the while, a wave of emails and pings were crashing in. How was I going to get this all done?