DEV Community: Artjoms Haleckis

Gamification of Life - Teamwork

Artjoms Haleckis — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 20:22:26 +0000

I play video games since I remember myself. It's a huge part of my life and I'm sure it will always be. It helps me to fight anxiety, to unwind, as well as to sync with friends that are far away, and sometimes learn something new.
When something becomes such a big part of your daily life, you start applying and mapping related concepts from it to other life aspects and daily routines.

Gamification is claimed to be extremely helpful when it comes to work, study, and coping with life overall. Animals, cats, for instance, keep playing their whole life and this helps them to release stress and keep in contact with relatives. It's also how they learn. This applies to almost all animals.
But for some reason, human beings decided that at a certain age this should be dismissed in favor of "being an adult" - sticking to your routine of brewing coffee, discussing the weather with colleagues near the office cooler, walking around with a serious face and being drunk and depressed in the evenings.

Gamification of your life, even if you don't play games yourself anymore, can help a lot. That's something I try to use and that's something I would like to share with others. This will be a set of small posts that try to map some parts of our daily life to gaming concepts. Maybe it will help you to look at these things from a different perspective, maybe it will allow you to make them more interesting and approachable.

Life is a social game. We can say that it's an endless MMORPG of some sort and almost everything we do can be mapped to this wonderful and deep game genre. While it's somewhat possible to have a single-player experience for all your lifespan, it's almost unavoidable that you will have to talk and cooperate with other players and NPCs sooner or later.
This game is not designed for lone wolves, so the best tactic is to join the server and enjoy all the possibilities that you get while being connected to others.

Our life, especially work, consists of various projects (or dungeons, or quests) of different scales. Going to school is a long-term quest with different subquests, work-life usually consists of smaller dungeons (projects) with unpredictable difficulty settings, and so on.

Tackling larger projects at work is rarely a solo experience. In most cases, we have a team (game party for a specific dungeon or dungeon series). And that's the topic I would like to zoom into.

Every dungeon requires a specific set of skills from party members, and good and balanced composition is a sure way to increase the chance of success - finish the dungeon, deal with the final challenge (or a boss) and gain some experience and loot.

Let's look at the standard composition model that is used in most party-based games.
Let's say we have a team of 4. The classic scheme, in this case, is to have one tank, one healer, and two damage dealers. They work together to achieve the final goal and only a balanced team where everyone knows their role can succeed.

Tanks are usually very tough and resilient. They make sure that the dungeon monsters and focused on them, while the rest of the party can focus on dealing with them most effectively. Usually, tanks are pretty challenging to play since they are in charge of controlling battle flow - it's possible to proceed only when they did their part of the job or the whole party will be wiped in a breeze. They also should know the dungeon flow relatively well or at least the concepts that are used there.
In short, tanks serve as a bridge between their party and the rest of the dungeon. They can't deal a lot of damage, but they contribute in another way and everyone else depends on them.

Healers, on the other side, stay behind the party and ensure that everyone is alive and buffed enough to deal with the difficulties ahead. They pay close attention to the party-state and react as soon as needed. When not, they contribute to the total party power however they can. Sometimes they have a preventive playstyle instead of reactive and ensure that upcoming damage won't hit as hard as it should. But they do their best somewhere in the middle. It's a crucial class since, without their long-term support, the party won't be able to finish the dungeon, especially with large bosses (I.e. Difficulties and roadblocks).

Damage Dealers are the ones who do the heavy-lifting of dealing as much damage as possible as fast as possible (reaching the end goal of a dungeon/project). Ensured that the tank is taking hits for them and the healer keeps everyone alive and in sync, they focus on melting the problems around them in an as efficient way as possible. To ensure that they can do it, they should have a well-thought build (aka skillset and set of tools) - make a team of imbalanced characters without any synergies and you fail in the long term.

Select your class and join the team!

Now, let's try to map this to our real world. We have a team of 4 people and a project that has to be executed. You can't keep things moving without someone pushing forward and serving as a "shield". Someone has to step up to lead the way, lead others and be responsible so that the whole team stays alive. It's a tank!

Then, someone has to ensure that the team is functioning as expected. That they have all they need to execute, that all questions are answered timely, that information is flowing, and that everyone feels good. The tank can't handle it all since they are focused on a larger scale and are facing the OUTSIDE of the team. So we need a healer who is facing INSIDE and provides support out there!

And there are team members who focus on execution and implementation parts - Damage Dealers. It's the most important part since this is what will provide the final result - is a project (dungeon) finished or not. If they are supported properly, they should have no roadblocks and can focus on delivering the desired outcome. When needed and if duties allow, they are joined by tank and healer.

And that's it, that's our party. When it's balanced this way, when members know their roles and expectations, any dungeon can be cracked easily!

But why I should care about this and why I spent this time reading this, you might ask. Well, knowing how effective this setup works in virtual worlds, it's possible to look at your team from a different perspective. Ask yourself:

Do you have all the roles covered?
What is your role right now and do you fit it? Maybe you are meant to be in another role and be more helpful there?
Do you know what is expected from you by others? Are you sure that others are aware of what you are expecting from them?
Are there people who try to take over multiple roles and can't succeed in both?

Just zooming out and thinking about this can give you really useful insights on why a specific project isn’t moving as expected or why there are conflicts in the team. Just take a few minutes to map out the roles and see if you have everything covered. Is everyone handling their role as expected? Are you missing something? Is the skillset right for the project? Thinking about this, even if you are just assigned to the project and being told what to do, will allow you to understand better what’s going on and provide an opportunity to contribute better and improve the workflow.

Now, change your perspective, put on your armor, equip your skills, and it's time to join another fun ride with your team!

P.S. Just be mindful about your playtime and don’t visit dungeons when you are out of mana. Don’t forget to recharge!

You can also read this post in my blog

How we do iOS at Pipedrive

Artjoms Haleckis — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 18:13:12 +0000

We have our own engineering blog at Pipedrive. It's a great way for anyone in the company to get some practice in writing and share stories about our achievements and learnings.

I did my part of a contribution as well and described our iOS release train process and overall flow of Pipedrive mobile team daily work.
To make sure that text is better discoverable, I won't be duplicating it here, so please check it out in our company blog.

Some thoughts about writing

I hear a lot from people near me, that they are afraid of expressing their thoughts in written format, and especially sharing it afterward.
In the age of Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, creating and sharing short content, visual, or 280-character long can take a few minutes. And once done, you start getting feedback right away in a form of likes and comments. Easy to produce and easy to consume, that kind of content took over regular blogging and demotivates people from sharing their real thoughts. The feedback loop for self-expression via writing more extended texts is much longer. It requires much more time to produce and to do concentrated work for a considerable amount of time. With attention span decreasing yearly, and multitasking cult taking over, this can become the challenge.

But the truth is that writing… is easy. Sometimes I hear that people won’t bother writing because no one will read it at all. Or they are afraid it won’t be interesting to anyone once published.
As Scott Hanselman mentioned in one of his awesome talks, your post needs only one more reader to double the keystrokes that you spent writing it, thus already doubling the value.

The key here is to not care about it at all. Just choose any topic that you feel confident in, or that you care about, and try to express your thoughts. As soon as few sentences are ready, there is a high chance that you will get into the flow. Meanwhile, don't try to check your social networks every 5 minutes and put your phone into DnD mode. Noise-canceling headphones with your favorite tunes will help as well.

Just try it out and don't be afraid to share the result afterwards!

Top 3 Things Every Productive Person Should Be Doing

Artjoms Haleckis — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 09:17:33 +0000

1. Stop reading those click-baiting stupid articles!

Yeah, that’s basically it

Now, when you feel disappointed enough that you won’t get your cheap dopamine dose right away, feel free to skip this text and jump right into your Instagram feed, Medium daily recommendations, or yet another way of getting another chunk of useless, but structured for easy consumption information.

Generation of dopamine junkies

It’s not cool to be bored these days. It’s also not cool to be doing nothing for a measurable amount of time. Every minute you are doing nothing is a potential waste of getting a like or consuming a new short piece of info that someone produced right now. And now. And a million times since you started reading this.

Also, there is your phone. It has notifications, right? And those sounds (or just buzz) and text popups. They make you feel so... alive? You feel needed, you feel important. You know that you ARE NOT MISSING OUT. Because something important is happening right now. And now. And a million times since you started reading this.

Why bother participating in the face-to-face conversation for a long-long hour, looking at the same face all the time, going deeper and deeper into a specific topic, if you can check how one of your endless group chats is doing every 15 seconds?

That’s how our dopamine-hungry brains got enslaved in the last few decades. If you were able to read this without being distracted or distracting yourself one way or another - great job, you might still be sane for the next few years at least, until we start getting ad popups in our AR glasses every minute.

There is actually Top 3 list here!

The reason why articles in the form of “Top X things every Y should do” exist is exactly the same and it works on absolutely same principles as modern generic social media and gadgets.

It’s easily producible content. Because you can basically toss any X random facts about Y and you’re pretty much good to go. Any order, and quality. What matters is how you structure it so that you can insert more ads for a better conversion rate.
It’s easily consumable content. Because it’s structured in the form of a list, and due to the way people consume information online, the majority will read only bold part of the text, to get an overview of your “top”. Anything else can be easily left out. As a reader, you will get your illusion that you now know additional “X things” about the topic, get your dopamine injection, and move on. This is especially true for longer texts or paragraphs. As a content producer, you don’t really have to work hard to fill this with anything useful or insightful. Just write some random text as I do now, who cares. Also, if you actually took your time to read this fully, you deserve a cookie. Go and grab one! The only important thing is that you have to make a proper ending for the section to make it sound smart.
It attracts more page views. A lot of media earn money from ads. Since our brains already know that this will be easy to consume info that will actually make us feel good in seconds, we most probably at least skim it, especially if “Y” is a topic that we are interested in. In the end, it’s not about sharing something useful in most cases, but in producing more page views. It becomes even more obvious when these lists are scattered between multiple pages, which is a pretty popular format for media-based tops.

Sooner or later, anyone who wants to keep sanity in the current state of modern technology silences their notifications on their phone for the majority of apps (you won’t miss them at all), narrows down the number of information sources and regularity of getting updates (weekly digests will do just fine), and stops reading yet another “Top 10 things every human being should be doing”.

Today might be the day you read the last one named this way.

Boring or bold?

Artjoms Haleckis — Mon, 04 May 2020 13:23:59 +0000

I finished one book recently, that I believe is a pretty bad one. It’s a wonder how it’s possible to take such an exciting topic as videogames and turn it into an incredibly flat piece of a book filled with unneeded information and uninspiring stories of dull people making business instead of creators that are the main force behind any kind of progress and innovation.

Though I greatly disliked the book and don’t recommend anyone to spend time reading it, a few thoughts never left my brain while listening to it.

Boring people kill progress

By boring I mean those people who like how stuff was back in the old days and are not able or are not willing to adapt to the new realities. By boring people I mean those who are not able to get excited from changes - is it a new piece of technology or new use of something old. By boring I mean people who want everything to be stable until they die - most probably because otherwise they will go insane.

This book has a fair amount of cases of such people. They didn’t believe that videogames could be something that the whole of humanity will be hooked on, or that there could be something more interesting than “television” or “just playing baseball”. Big boring business people that didn’t get even the concept of videogame and refused to fund those projects - “but wait, if the whole box is this small, where will you put the wires?”.

As a software developer, I’m in the industry for 10 years now, and my worst experiences were with that kind of people. Conservative, unbelieving, not able to adopt new approaches or adjust existing ones. The sad part is that it’s not age-related in any case. I have seen young people being like that. I have seen old people being like that. It seems that it’s more of a lifestyle. I’m happy that they are far away now.

Boring people kill progress because they are afraid that it will kill them in return. It’s hard to not be afraid when your life is in danger.

Please, PLEASE, don’t be one of them!

As a "weird" coincidence, those people tend do be describable by this amazing comic by Gudim

Bold people do progress

By bold I mean those who are aware that the world is always moving forward and that can change with it. By bold I mean those who are excited to try out new things - is it a new piece of technology or just a new way of using something old. By bold I mean people who accept the challenge to fight with instability for the sake of progression. And if they die in the process - it probably was worth it, as others will be able to learn from it.

Again, the book had a bunch of samples of those people as well. These were the people that pioneered the videogame industry by challenging themselves and others, by pushing technology forward, and, what is the most important, by not listening to the boring people. Bold people are the reason why we are still able to enjoy videogames, and it’s the biggest modern media nowadays.

As a software developer, my best experiences were with that kind of people as well. Open-minded, excited, always trying out new approaches and iterating over existing ones to find the best way to move forward. I have seen young people being like that. I have seen old people being like that. It seems that it’s more of a lifestyle. I’m happy that I’m surrounded by that kind of people right now.

Bold people do progress because they know progress will do them better in return. It’s hard to stop as soon as you realize this.

Please, PLEASE, be one of them!