tech etc...

sarah young

sre | dev | historian

Month note

10 Feb 2021

This past month has been busy. I’m glad I got my Linux Home blog out but that hasn’t left as much time for week notes. I’ve been caught up in the whirl wind of to-do lists and new responsibilities.

Here are a few reflections.

Tech leading: first impressions

I’ve recently shifted roles from Infrastructure Lead to Tech Lead on my team. The change has been both fun and challenging.

In my new role I get to do work which I find extremely fulfilling: develop a vision for the service, plan, prioritise, and help deliver work, practice and grow my leadership skills, and engage in pastoral care.

That’s the fun stuff.

So far the immediate challenge has been balancing the various spinning plates we’ve got going at the moment. I’m lucky to collaborate with wonderful product and delivery mangers, so it’s a shared balancing act.

The other challenge, which I’ll get to next, has been internal and is far more difficult than balancing spinning plates.

FFT

Brené Brown’s podcast on F***ing First Times captures how scary, awkward, and vulnerable it can feel to do something for the first time (like tech leading).

I can definitely relate; in the last few weeks I’ve had my moments of fear, face-palm-awkwardness, and a healthy dose of vulnerability.

Thankfully the podcast also has some ideas about how to stay grounded through those feelings (spoiler: just being able to recognise that you’re going through an FFT is helpful).

I’ve thought about what’s kept me grounded in my new role. It’s partly an acceptance that I’m experiencing something new and all the emotional reverberations that go along with that new experience.

However, I’ve also been grounded by the examples of leadership I’ve learned from over the last few years. The leaders I’ve admired have had a few things in common (I wrote about it here) and I’m holding on to those lessons.

Reminders

Another thing I’ve found grounding is putting up a few reminders near my laptop. Mainly these are practices I want to adopt or maintain.

BREATHE

The most valuable lesson I learned from Conflict Transformation was the importance of breathing. Breathing allows the prefrontal cortex (emotional processing centre) time to catch up with the amygdala (fight/flight/freeze centre).

When I’m stressed, this post-it is a helpful reminder to breathe.

Resist the temptation to add value to a conversation

I found this quote in the book Culture Code and I love it. I come from a talkative family and it’s a helpful reminder that as I leader I want to be listening more than speaking.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood

This is one of my favourite sayings from my former CTO. Over the last few years I’ve found it far more useful to ask clarifying questions than immediately respond.

It also speaks to “communicating generously”, something Denise Yu touches on in her blog “Habits of High Functioning Teams”:

I’ve thought a lot about this last point. Of all the ways that other people have said what’s in my brain, I think best of all, I like how Nat Friedman put it in a recent all-hands. He said something like, “Our communications with each other should be guided by the robustness principle: Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.” He went on to encourage us to adhere to the principle of charity, especially when communicating with each other during the very difficult current circumstances. But I think this principle is followed 100% of the time on high-performing teams.

Stay curious, not furious

This is to remind me not to turn into Hulk whenever I get a gpg configuration error. For whatever reason it just drives me up the wall.

There are occasional programming errors which I find infuriating. I have a lot of admiration for current and former colleagues who bring equanimity, patience, and curiosity to these problems.

I’m learning to do the same.

Remember your teacher self

Something I learned in teacher training (ages ago) was developing a “teacher self”, a persona I could adopt whenever I entered a classroom.

The training instructor recommended we imagine ourselves as confident and composed, visualise the person we wanted to be in a classroom, and learn to turn that part of ourselves off and on.

It was not unlike an actor developing or performing a role.

The goal, if you hadn’t guessed it, was to act confident until the confidence came naturally from experience.

I found this technique useful as a teacher and have found it useful in the last month.

Currently reading

I’ve worked through a few books since December:

Of those three I’d recommend Race After Technology, especially if you work in tech –– it’s a must read.

I’m currently working through Theodore Allen’s Invention of the White Race. It’s a classic in the field of critical whiteness studies which I studied a bit in grad school as a historian. However, it’s been quite some time since I’ve read a book which frequently uses phrases like “petty bourgeoisie” and “the proletariat”.

It’s dense, academic reading but I like that. It works a different part of my brain.