Dev Journal

Works Well With Others

2017-07-25T09:12:00-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about teams and, based on my own lucky experiences, what makes them work well. I've been at Fractured Atlas for almost three months now and am legitimately delighted at how quickly and easily I gelled with my new team. The one thing I keep coming back to when trying to describe why I've been able to connect so quickly and accomplish so much is this: Safety.

I'm so into my new team. My day has been full of awesome collaboration & feedback. pic.twitter.com/9kWkvs9go0
— angelique🦈🏳️‍🌈🌮 (@messypixels) June 1, 2017

"Safe spaces" have been the subject of much mockery (mostly through exaggerating their intent to suggest extreme coddling vs safety), so I initially shied away from this description. However, I keep coming back to it because it's honestly the best word to describe what's working. Because I feel safe at work and amongst my team, I'm not carrying the cognitive load of being defensive or trying to prove myself and, instead, I'm able to just get the work done and, in collaboration with my team, plan for and deliver on big goals.

Of course, I'm not saying anything new about the benefits of safety and empathy within teams and what it means to a company. Last year, an article on Google's Project Aristotle was published in The New York Times Magazine and widely shared:

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a "work face" when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel "psychologically safe," we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency.
—Charles Duhigg in the NYT, What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

What safety looks like and feels like may vary amongst individuals and teams, but this is what I've noted during my time at Fractured Atlas:

Clear, shared values with the company and amongst the team let me bring my whole self to work and let me know I will be respected and valued. During the interview process, I was impressed that Fractured Atlas's mission and values weren't dusty pages on a web site that had little to do with the day-to-day work, but instead were an active pursuit. Now that I'm part of the company, this is even more clear to me and I also know that our core behavioral values are referenced by our leadership and employees frequently.
The engineering team, specifically, has an enthusiastic culture of learning and improvement that, in order to thrive, requires that we accept mistakes and confusion and build up our communication skills. Folks I've paired with over the last few months have been excellent and encouraging teachers and, when reviewing my code, have been quick to call out when they've also learned something new. I would have never anticipated my first couple of months on the job would include learning a new programming language, and that's only been possible because of the encouraging collaborative environment on my team. (Did I mention the engineering team is fully remote? To me, that makes this all the more impressive.)
Furthermore, the culture of improvement isn't just around the code we deliver, but also relevant to how we work together and communicate. In weekly meetings, we reflect on and tweak our process and create time to talk about things that impact how we collaborate with other parts of the company. Team members and managers actively work to hear from every individual and consider every perspective. I appreciate that the commitment to empathy and communication isn't unilateral, but embraced and modeled by all.
Team members are invested in what we're building and making it better. In place of competition or us-vs-them dynamics, we're joined by an enthusiasm for what we're doing and how we're all contributing. This feels especially apparent to me in a UX/front-end role, which some developer cultures belittle. There's not even been a hint of that in my experiences to date—instead, my teammates celebrate my contributions and seek out my expertise (with a #UXLOVE tag on Trello cards that need my attention!). This, in particular, has made it frictionless for me to contribute, learn and share with the team.

Today in My Team Is The Best: Coworker left a comment on my UI changes that ended with "Scrumptious!" pic.twitter.com/mQ7fi7BYd7
— angelique🦈🏳️‍🌈🌮 (@messypixels) July 24, 2017

I'm grateful for this amazing experience and for the team members who have established these working norms that make it possible for a brand new person to swoop in and feel pretty quickly at ease, not just in my area of expertise, but also adapting to new tools and pushing myself to learn new things. I know many teams and companies don't get this stuff right or prioritize it, and I'm grateful to be contributing my energy to a group that does. Doing so does more than let me be my whole self at work, it lets me be my best self.

via GIPHY

As always, feel free to send comments to me via Twitter about your experiences with teams and company culture.

First week on macOS

2017-05-21T04:30:00-04:00

With the exception of an original iMac I worked on for a couple years after graduation, my personal computers have always been, well, PCs.

I've also had a progression of Android smartphones and tablets, plus a mostly abandoned Ubuntu laptop, but 99% of the time I'm sitting down to a machine with a keyboard, it's had a Windows OS.

Until last week—when I unpacked the refurbished MacBook Pro I'm using to type up this blog post.

I changed jobs in May and, with that, came a change of operating systems to stay in sync with my team. While I was given the option of sticking with a Windows machine, it would have been a painful choice to be the lone Windows box among a Rails team—just as it would have been to be the only dev on a Mac at my previous gig at a mainly .NET shop.

The switch has been mostly easy, and it seems it will be the little things that continue to confound me. How long will it take, for example, for me to stop moving my mouse to the upper right of a window to close it? Definitely longer than a week, it seems. Keyboard commands are still a bit foreign, and I definitely notice myself going for the mouse or touchpad to do things I knew almost instinctively at this point how to do via keyboard.

Speaking of using the mouse, one of the first things I added to my system was an app called Magnet because it was disappointing to lose the windows management options built into the latest Windows OS.

I also polled the hive mind and got recommendations for other apps and settings friends, especially other developers, found beneficial. From there, I discovered Setapp (affiliate link, btw), which has been useful for cutting down on the cruft of the app store and gives a chance to test out some apps I might otherwise ignore.

Other things I've installed and am enjoying:

Bear—While I've been an avid user of Evernote for years, I liked the idea of keeping my work-related notes truly separate and also wanted to take the opportunity to try something new. I enjoy the baked-in Markdown of this app, and it's clean look and feel. While the app doesn't include the sharing features found in Evernote, it was a pretty trivial task to export my notes on Elm and add them to Gist to share with my team. (Also kinda think this is a thing I could possibly automate, but didn't need to go down that rabbit hole at exactly that moment. More on automating things on my Mac in a later post. Hopefully not in 2019.)
itsycal—I appreciate having an at-a-glance calendar to easily coordinate meetings or suss out my after-work plans.
LaunchBar—Admittedly, I didn't do a detailed comparison of this versus Alfred or other launchers. Like Bear, time will tell if this is a choice I stick with.
Vanilla—While friends recommended Bartender, I couldn't wrap my head around paying $15 for something, again, that I was used to being default Windows functionality. I'm currently giving this smaller (and, yes, less pricey) app a whirl to see if it serves well enough.

Two apps that migrated with me from my Windows days:

Flux—I always notice when I'm using a machine sans Flux. After installing, I learned macOS has some eyestrain-reducing features baked in, but I haven't done a comparison, so flux is still there, running and being lovely
Visual Studio Code—I may be the only dev on my team using this code editor, but I have really grown to love it. I find it to be zippy and the Git integration to be awesome. 👍

One week in, my only current major pain point is my Razer keyboard; the Razer software seems to hate macOS (my custom settings occasionally delete/reset themselves?). I'm trying, at this point, to avoid going down the rabbit hole of researching new Mac-friendly mechanical keyboards.

I'll make an attempt to update this one month in (Will I still be attempting to close windows the Windows way? Tune in!). While there seem to be many blog posts about and for Mac power users, there is not as much discussion around folks making the switch to Mac (for the reverse, devs transitioning to Windows, check out the #davegoeswindows series by one of the ShopTalk guys). So, hopefully this can be a good resource for other old dogs learning new tricks.

As always, feel free to send comments to me via Twitter. Let me know what Mac apps you love or what customizations/settings make your life easier.

Vagrant + Middleman = Victory

2016-03-08T18:00:00-05:00

I finally conquered a technical challenge that had been stumping me for awhile. This blog runs on Middleman, which requires Ruby and a slew of other things that aren't necessary in my work dev environment (i.e., the laptop I usually take with me when I travel). This is clearly something I didn't think through when starting up this blog—clearly evidenced by the "location" metadata I set up and have filled in with "Baltimore" on all but one blog post. However, if you're reading this post and seeing "San Francisco" as my current location I can now take this show on the road, woo!

I'm currently attending Fluent (thanks, O'Reilly and Craigslist for your awesome scholarship!). The first half of the conference is hands-on workshops, while the second half is standard keynotes and presentations. Most of the workshops weren't relevant to the stack we use at work, but I was still interested to learn something new, so I spent this morning spinning up my first React project. Because I didn't want to muck up my work environment or frustrate myself by developing in Windows when the presenter anticipated an audience of Mac users, I got Vagrant up and running on my work machine (admittedly, with some of its own headaches).

While I have no idea if or when I'll use the React knowledge I gained this morning, I put my newfound experience with Vagrant to immediate use by creating a new Vagrant box for myself that allows me to work on and build my Middleman blog when I'm traveling with my work laptop. This is ridiculously exciting to me.

Rough steps of how I've accomplished this:

Install VirtualBox and Vagrant per the pretty good "Getting Started" guide provided by Vagrant.
Install Git. (Because my team uses TFS for version control, I actually have never needed this on my work machine.)
Clone my existing GitHub repo of this site.
In my devj directory, vagrant init hashicorp/precise64 to create the necessary Vagrant files.
vagrant init creates a Vagrantfile but I replaced that with one created for Middleman projects and shared by Ricardo Rivas. NOTE: I updated line 15 to reference hashicorp/precise64.
vagrant up to load up my Vagrant box and vagrant ssh to dive into it.
Once I was on the Vagrant machine, I switched over to my synced folder by typing cd /vagrant. Then I had to bundle install to get everything from my project's Gemfile up and running on the Vagrant box. After that ran, I typed middleman s and was in business!

LiveReload still isn't working as expected, but, overall, I'm thrilled to finally have the capacity to update my blog with Vagrant and grateful to my experiences at Fluent for motivating me to finally tackle this.

Got Vagrant tips or woes? As always, I encourage you to continue this conversation via Twitter.

Encouraging Highs, Crushing Lows

2016-01-03T00:00:00-05:00

While this could easily be a commitment to a new year, a reboot for my blog (I know it's been awhile), first I have to look back, to write something that's been in my head since September and shares things beyond even 2015. (Spoiler alert: This post is going to be just a word dump and sans technical/code examples.)

Professionally, 2015 was the best year I've ever had, better than any I would have given myself permission to imagine, honestly. I have a great job with an awesome team who I've now worked with for 18 months. We've launched projects I'm proud of, I've learned new things and have contributed my own expertise.

During Baltimore Innovation Week, I was voted Technologist of the Year and our Girl Develop It chapter was named Tech Mission Org of the Year. I also presented a 3-hour intro to Sass workshop and a lightning talk with examples of what I've learned about themeing with Sass that was really well received.

#BIW15 @messypixels talking SASS and SMACSS pic.twitter.com/NchaBC3b0r
— Yet Developers (@YetDevs) September 30, 2015

.@messypixels is giving a great #sass talk at #BIW15. My first exposure to seeing #CSS written this way. Very interesting.
— Alex Viana (@AlexVianaPro) September 30, 2015

In November, I was awarded a scholarship to attend the amazing SassConf in Austin, Texas, and also spent a weekend in Philadelphia with 86 Girl Develop It leaders from across the country.

Our Chapter Leaders from across the country! #womenintech #gdisummit15 pic.twitter.com/Hp2LVqFih9
— Girl Develop It (@girldevelopit) November 8, 2015

Sharing and celebrating all of this, of course, shouldn't have been the cause for any writer's block, certainly not worthy of holding back for months on end. However, as with any accomplishment—our own or someone else's that we admire or even envy—it's important to remember those public victories are only a fragment of the story, that not everything in our lives is visible or easily shared on Twitter or Instagram. Even in 2015's many moments of joy and success, I carried with me a shadow self and the understanding that each of those moments was a gift.

Dial back a few years, before Girl Develop It, before the great job, before I'd even signed my first freelance client or had an inkling of a tech career, and that shadow had real heft and consequence, much like a concrete block pressing down into my chest, keeping my sense of self crushed and generally making it difficult for me to get up and do much of anything. I was underemployed, uninspired and generally felt like shit.

During this time, what I trusted as my logical brain harped on two things:

I couldn't possibly be depressed. The only time I was ever diagnosed with depression was when I was 28; my mother, who was diagnosed with cancer a year earlier, had just been placed into Hospice care and died a week later. I told myself what I was going through was in no way as bad as that, hence I could not be depressed.
Even if I had the gall to be depressed when I didn't have the care and emotional toll of parent dying, I simply couldn't financially afford to be depressed; the combined shabbiness of my income and health insurance would not allow for it.

These so-called "facts," of course, didn't undo the fact that I was severely depressed, they just prevented me from using that word and reaching out for the help I actually needed. People heal and rebound in different ways; for me, I was helped both by having a partner who never lost faith in my best self (who certainly wasn't present in the slouch on the couch) and by scheduling a few sessions with a therapist. If I could have afforded it, I definitely would have considered and likely benefitted from more therapy and some degree of medication.

Getting off the couch and securing my first freelance client didn't put all this behind me, of course. As others have written, you do not overcome depression, you move through it. I still see signals in my life of depression swinging ominously around me, like that concrete block is lingering about, awaiting the right conditions to drop on me again. At various times in 2015, I overcommitted myself, did't treat my body right and had the voices in my head reduce me to tears.

But I also did right by myself: I started exercising regularly. I made better sleep habits a priority, not letting late nights be something to take absurd pride in. I ate better. I was more honest with myself about my emotions and how I was handling things.

But I was also present: I was here to walk across that stage and collect those awards. I reached out to a whole slew of new folks at SassConf, shared laughs and made friends. For twelve whole months, I was here to give and receive encouragement, advice and hugs.

And those moments were gifts. Which, reflecting on 2015, makes my heart swell and makes me hopeful for more good times in the future. And, for me, those good times aren't marked just by what I receive, but also what I give back. Part of what I want to do in this life is help others, to be of use.

…I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
—Marge Piercy, To Be Of Use

Which, of course, is a huge part of what I've enjoyed about being part of Girl Develop It. It's also why I'm always eager to help folks navigating the early stages of their freelance careers by offering up examples of my proposals, contracts, etc. I was sorting all that out while still dragging around the concrete block of my depression on a daily basis, so being offer to make any of that easier for the next person (whether depressed or not, whether they're struggling with imposter syndrome or not) is actually a bit of a relief and joy to me.

And it's why, even months later, it's important to me to write and publish these words. Michael Luchies wrote to encourage others to share their stories for the purpose of bringing courage to those around you, and I've definitely gotten courage from others who've written openly about their struggles with mental health issues (Thank you to Tim McKenna, Mike Monteiro, Shanley Kane, Greg Baugues). My story isn't uncommon among creatives, techies or women, but I still hope it's helpful.

I'm in no position to offer much outstanding advice about how to handle your own mental health issues or how to help a friend or loved one struggling with depression, but I will say the following:

I encourage anyone struggling to reach out—to family, to friends, to a hotline—sooner.
Don't forget the wise words of Jenny Lawson: Depression lies.
You're really not alone. So many folks, including those you think are fabulous, have struggles.

I hope we all have a 2016 that defies our expectations, and we encourage each other to be our best selves. Thanks for reading in 2015 and see you soon.

As always, I encourage you to continue this conversation via Twitter.

Customizing Your Windows Command Prompt

2015-07-20T01:00:00-04:00

I wrote previously about how to set up your Windows command prompt to work better and wanted to add to that ways I've customized my interface of choice (Cmder FTW) to make my command line more efficient and enjoyable for me to use.

Changing the appearance

First, as with all things—including this blog!—I get things displaying using Solarized Dark. Solarized is color theme for text editors and it's my theme of choice.

Adding relevant aliases

Aliases are just bits of shorthand for code I use frequently. By creating aliases, I can make my coding faster. You can find and edit your Cmder alias file in the config directory inside your cmder directory (for me, this is C:\cmdr\config). One of the aliases I've added is

1	subl=C:/PROGRA~1/SUBLIM~1/sublime_text.exe $1

This works for me because the path to the Sublime Text program is C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 2; if your program is in a different directory/location you may need to update this accordingly.

You'll see the alias above uses shortened names of the directories "Program Files" and "Sublime Text." This is a default Windows behavior for directories that are more than seven characters or have a space in their name. Need to figure out what the shortened name of a directory is? Open up Cmder and type dir /x "C:/" This will list all the files in that directory by their shorthand names! To find the shorthand for the Sublime Text directory, you would then type dir /x "C:/Program Files/"

Now, when I type subl newentry.md in Cmder, Sublime Text opens up with a Markdown file titled "newentry." If newentry.md doesn't already exist, this command creates the file (but it's not saved until I save within Sublime Text). Essentially, I can easily open files to edit them and combine creating and opening a file into one action.

I also like to make navigating backwards out of directories easier with aliases.

..=cd ..
...=cd ../../../
....=cd ../../../../
.....=cd ../../../../
.4=cd ../../../../
.5=cd ../../../../..

Now, typing .5 will back me up by 5 directories and .. gets me into the parent directory.

If you use Git a lot, I also recommend checking out Phil Haack's list of Git Aliases.

Sort out the default environment

You can also use Cmder to run PowerShell (which might be awesome), but it's not the default behavior I want, and I've seen this particular thing confound people when commands that work in the Cmder command prompt replacement don't work in the Cmder PowerShell environment (e.g., git or touch).

You can avoid this behavior by opening up your settings (right click on the window title or type Win+Alt+P and specifying a named task under "Startup."

As always, feel free to send comments to me via Twitter. I'd love to know what your favorite tips are for improving your command prompt or what aliases you've added!

Improving Your Windows Command Prompt

2015-07-16T01:00:00-04:00

When I started using Git and later learning Ruby, the command line became a place I hung out regularly. Being a Windows user, there were some early frustrations because many of the commands referred to in tutorials and walkthroughs weren't available to me, e.g. pwd, touch, sudo. Since OSX, the Apple OS has been built on top of Unix, Mac users are able to open up Terminal and use the same commands as Unix users, but the same is not true of a basic Windows install.

I overcame those frustrations in a variety of ways, which I'll outline below.

I'm using and writing about Windows 7, and specifics of this post may or may not be relevant to earlier and later versions of the Windows OS.

Google that shit

My first instinct was to ask the Google bot this very obvious question:

This will give you some glossaries of Windows equivalents to Unix commands. Which works fairly well, especially if you're not on the command line a lot or relying on tutorials and docs that assume a *nix-based system.

Switch to PowerShell

Starting with Windows 7, there's a more powerful option to the default command prompt: PowerShell. PowerShell exposes some Windows admin stuff that you can't get to via the command prompt and also includes some of the *nix shell commands, like pwd and ls.

Of course, I did say some…

I actually discovered PowerShell after I already dove into some other solutions, so I haven't spent a lot of time using it. If you think PowerShell may be for you or just want to learn more, How to Geek has a good post outlining how PowerShell differs from the command prompt and a GeekSchool series devoted to PowerShell.

Install an alternative command line

Give up on the Windows default and go rogue with an app like Cygwin or Cmder.

Cygwin

Cygwin is free and open source software that provides a command-line shell that is compatible with *nix commands. I used this solution first as it was both recommended and described very well on Lifehacker:

As noted by those articles, it's also worthwhile to install an alternate terminal as Cygwin replaces commands but doesn't actually improve the interface of the windows command prompt. Mintty and Console are two popular options and Lifehacker also has articles about them, too.

If you're using Cygwin, you can actually install Mintty as a package. Cygwin has a lot of packages, which extend Cygwin in a variety of ways. This is awesome but, to start, it's also a bit overwhelming. Also, the way to install new packages is a bit wonky (you open the Cygwin install software, connect to servers and select packages).

Definitely definitely definitely read all the way through a guide to installing Cygwin before jumping in. Things that seem innocuous (like choosing an install directory) actually have import, so you want to know that in advance.

Cmder

After abandoning the command line for awhile, I had reason to jump back in when I went to Bmore on Rails workshop for women. I realized my Cygwin install was out of date at that time and it felt like a pain to get everything up and running properly again, so I decided to look for a command prompt replacement that didn't have the overhead and wonkiness of Cygwin.

It's worth noting here that I'm sure Cygwin does things Cmder does not; in fact, it's this sense that Cygwin is a bit overpowered and complicated for my needs that, to me, is a downside.

Cmder is built on top of ConEmu and is a quick and painless install (I recommend the full vs the mini install, as it gets you Git, too). Compared to Cygwin, it is much easier to get up and running, with fewer complications and choices. The full version of Cmder gives you all Unix commands, including pwd and touch.

After all these changes, you should have a fairly awesome Windows command line that won't frustrate you, won't let you down and will, in fact, empower you to code better.

I'll be back on Monday with even more ways to improve your Windows command prompt experience!

As always, feel free to send comments to me via Twitter. I'd love to know if you use an alternative program for the Windows command prompt and what your favorite tips are for improving your command prompt!