Experimenting and viewing work as a play and Three Lessons from the Year

This past week I merged a pull request containing the last set of features that my team is planning to ship this year. Getting through this chunk of work got me thinking about some of the ideas and patterns that have made my work feel more satisfying this year. A lot of my day to day work involves tinkering with ideas, patterns, and trying out different approaches to solve technical challenges. And when all the pieces come together and we release the work to our users, I am happy to get validation of our teams' efforts throughout the way.

Here are three things that I have applied that have been helpful in making my work this year:

1. signing up to experiment and try out new ideas

When the team brings up a challenge to me that I haven't encountered before or don't know how to solve, I never say that it cannot be done or we do not have the skillset for it if I at least have not attempted to do my own research and consulted my colleagues on the topic. At work we call such investigative and open-ended work a spike. I love doing such work because they push me to explore unfamiliar territory. And almost 100% of the time I learn something new that later finds its way into a feature or a way of improving an already-existing implementation. Doing this has delivered the most compounding of learnings over time as I have applied the lessons in work that has come later in the year.

2. solve the hardest problem first

Usually when tackling a large-enough project, there's always one or two core technical challenges that make up a big chunk of the work to be done. These usually need more time commitment and tend to present an opportunity for learning something new. Getting to the core problems faster through rapid prototyping has helped me utilize my energy well by solving the most technically challenging problems when I have the most drive and energy. The rest of the work is mostly patching up the solutions to the core problems and cleaning out the rough edges.

3. understanding how I work best

For me, short bursts of getting several low-stakes tasks done paired with longer projects where I can focus days and even a week or more on is usually a good balance. For larger projects, I have found that I tend to shut out everything else when working on something and let it simmer and occupy my mind as I make progress. Then I can keep a steady rhythm of high focus until I get the work through the door.

These are a few of the main lessons that underlined my work this year and hope to keep building upon.