Learning from my Myriad Mistakes with Kindness, Forgiveness and Compassion

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Learning from my Myriad Mistakes with Kindness, Forgiveness and Compassion

I love myself. I love myself so much.

I am so proud of making it through all of the crazy and beautiful and wild challenges that I have made it through in my life. Compassion is my middle name. It has to be. To have made it through everything I have made it through in my life. I have required nothing but compassion. 

Compassion, compassion, compassion. Compassion.

But as Lupita Nyong'o said - true beauty is compassion.

And compassion for me involves being compassionate around my software engineering mistakes. Or challenges. So here are my compassionate software engineering learnings from today. With kindness. With an open heart. Never too full to write another blog post. Never too full to listen again.

Never to experienced to learn another lesson, or hear another lesson again that I have heard once before
A road drives through nature, with a bubble on it that has the pattern and colours of the earth (a giant bubble). Lots of pink love hearts everywhere

Lessons I Learned This Week

What to do if a Slack message is confusing me

If a Slack message is confusing me, I should
  1. Reply in the thread
  2. Say I am a bit confused
  3. Explain what I have gathered so far. "I think that what you are saying is X,Y, Z." etc.

What to do if a work ticket is confusing me

If the ticket is not clear to me, I should try the following.
  1. Go on the ticket
  2. Write a comment
  3. In that comment, write what I think the acceptance criteria are
  4. Send that to my manager, or anyone else who is involved in the ticket
  5. Wait and see what they say - is this completely the wrong direction

First steps towards approaching a ticket

I forget this one again and again.

Oh well. I have gotten this wrong so many times. Oh well. Oh well. Here we are again.

The very first steps with a ticket are

One more time now. I am so fed up of this. I am so fed up of going over this again and again. And forgetting this. And so on.
  1. Find the code in the repo. As I am frontend now, it can sometimes be possible to use a little string or whatever to find the section in the code. Either way, the very first thing to do is to find the problem
  2. Then, understand what the code in that file is doing. I struggle with this because if there is someone else there I can easily explain the code to them. I struggle when I'm alone. I try to write it out but it doesn't work. But what I could try is screaming it into Chat GPT in voice mode. Not the code itself but what I think the code is doing. That way at least someone is listening right? The main thing is for me to be able to articulate myself and get things out of my system.
  3. Then come back to the creators of the ticket with any questions. Or better still 
Be able to propose changes and fixes to the code. Solutions. Different possibilities. Changes to the Acceptance Criteria. And etc. etc. So on.

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