Dude, I totally learned… like, stuff!
Working at Rouxbe is like being in a million roles all at once: CTO (heh!), project manager, business analyst, developer, systems admin, and consultant. Here are a few tips and tricks/lessons that really helped me get by.
A project plan saves everyone’s sanities! Oh God yes, project plans are TEH SHIT! It does 3 things: (1) it organizes you, the coder/project manager/CTO, (2) it organizes everyone around you and (3) it makes sure that everyone knows how much work you’re doing. Did you see that the development team has 20,000 things in the project plan? Yea, thats right 20,000 items. And where would you like me to schedule your 1000 items?
Panic is something that trickles down. So you think you look calm and collected? But your deadlines are not being met, the to-do list seems to be growing exponentially ever hour as well as that bug report with that IE7 CSS bug that seems to keep coming back? If you start a panic attack, everyone will get it. You may look calm, collected and composed from your internal monitors but when externally you look like you’re about to commit suicide, slit your wrists and overdose on Valium, it doesn’t help anyone.
My suggestion is find a way to catch yourself when the panic starts. Fix it internally (somehow), then go and help everyone else. Your team will appreciate you more.
Make your first instinct: ‘yes’. My developer instinct always seem to initially start with: Oh Hell! No! This results in negativity and seems to bum everyone out at the same time the defensiveness starts to fester in everyone’s tone. However, saying ‘yes’ first seems to keep my mindset in a more open tone. It helps me understand the ‘why’ of the problem rather than the ‘do-it-yesterday’ part of it. Of course, a dancing chicken in the middle of a web page really does suck and a ‘Oh Hell! NO!’ response would be completely appropriate in that situation.
I mean seriously, a dancing chicken? C’mon now.
Turn off your phone and email at 10pm 11pm. Although it might not seem logical to many people, this tip is very much a lifesaver for me. I made it a point to start unplugging by 11pm. No more ‘work’ related items unless it is some sort of a production problem. I will deal with things tomorrow morning and because I knew that I was going to stop at that time every night, I worked more efficiently and spent less time procrastinating.
Get the right tools! Have you ever tried to gouge someone eyes with a spoon? Doesn’t work that well, try a melon baller. It works wonders! Trying to code Ruby code with TextEdit doesn’t work as well as BBEdit or VIM. Trust me!
12:19 am 5 Comments
