Week notes
16 Oct 2020Katas
I picked up programming in my downtime again for the first time in a year.
Just katas for now, mostly in Java because it still feels the most comfortable for me.
It was way more fun than I expected.
Most of my time these days is spent click-ops-ing in AWS or writing terraform. I’d forgotten how joyful problem solving code could be, even if it’s just little problems.
I also underestimated how much I missed the red-green-refactor cycle of TDD.
The next step is to use this time to practice python.
Power of laughter
This week my team had its first Fika and team lunch.
There was a lot of laughter, it was great.
But it also got me thinking of an NPR story I heard this week on the psychology of laughter.
Laughter is a “play signal”, it signals to a deep part of our brains that we are in a safe space.
It also brings us together –– especially shared laughter.
A bunch of research indicates shared laughter helps people feel more connected in a group.
Some social psychology researchers think this could be because shared laughter encourages “perceived similarity” (a connection booster) between people.
Can’t let it go
I’ve got two this week.
The first is Brené Brown’s podcast on the psychology of burnout, an interview with Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of Burnout.
The interview focused on how we experience and hold feelings and stress somatically (in our body).
This connects to what I’ve read about trauma as well, from Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands, a study of racialised trauma, to Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score which explores trauma’s impact on the body and brain.
The second can’t-let-it-go was stumbling on the work of coder, poet, and developer advocate Lola Odelola, founder of blackgirl.tech.
I’ve especially enjoyed reading her blog lostinthesource (“Demystifying WebRTC By Calling Beyoncé” is brilliant and exactly what I needed to read as I delve into FreeRadius and how wifi/networking work).