Symbolic Forest

It’s nearly a month now since I started the new job. It’s not been plain sailing all the way, of course, but it feels like it’s going reasonably well.

One aspect of coming in and taking over a team is that naturally I want to put my own flavour on things. I’m not saying I automatically think my ideas are always better than what the team already does, of course, but I do think firstly that new ideas can often trigger new thinking and give new energy to a team, and secondly, that some of the things are familiar to me are inevitably going to be new to my new colleagues, and things they might not have considered before. So, if I can bring in processes and practices that have worked well for me before, they may well work well in the new job too. If anything, as long as I can get the team behind them, they might be worth a try.

“As long as I can get the team behind them” is the key point there, of course; and it’s important to make sure we all feel we are a team and that we can all contribute to making change happen. I started writing down some Basic Good Principles along those lines. “We know we’re not perfect but we’re always improving,” for example. “We all review each other’s code, because everyone gets it wrong sometimes.” — I’m always surprised how many people don’t quite follow that one. “This document is not set in stone and is always changing, just as our processes are always changing and improving.” is another one, because when a particular practice or process turns into dogma is when it starts to impede you rather than work for you.

After a while brainstorming this stuff, writing down these sort of things, though, I started to get a bit of self-doubt. Is writing down these sort of principles really helpful, or were my notes just turning into meaningless platitudes in themselves? Was I at risk of accidentally coming up with the “Live, Laugh, Love” of software development?

Which of course, set me thinking. What is the “Live, Laugh, Love” of software development? Maybe if I deliberately came up with something quite so awful, quite so twee and nauseating, it would reduce the risk of ending up in that zone by accident?

I scribbled a few things down, crossed some out, shuffled some ideas around, and eventually came up with the following. I think it’s pretty good. By which I mean, I feel slightly disgusted with myself.

Code

Create

Care

One of our regular correspondents writes: Yeah, I think you might need a shower after that.

Most definitely. I felt dirty. If you ever find me giving that as advice to my team, please, tell me I need to take a holiday. All the same, if I was to pick a font and put it on a framed print, I wonder how many I could sell?

Keyword noise: work, coding, motivation.