DEV Community: Jackie Luc

3 Ways to end burnout

Jackie Luc — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 15:00:00 +0000

My friends and colleagues know me as the budding software developer that blows away expectations and delivers impactful results. Within a year, I accelerated our team’s software delivery process with countless CI/CD pipelines, re-architected and migrated several on-premises workloads into Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, and trailblazed the architecture and implementation of cloud native applications. The cherry on top: I received a promotion in recognition of my accomplishments.

Although my accomplishments were recognized by respected peers and mentors early in my career, I always fall short of my own standards and expectations. I know that there are more ways to deliver value and help others, but I feel like I'm not doing enough of that.

For over a year, I've failed to take action on my blog and share my thoughts on software development, career, and self-improvement. Although I was productive in other parts of my life, this part felt like being in a never-ending slump where I was stuck in a "fixed mindset" mode. On top of ramping up in a brand new role, I was also engaged in several side projects. At the time, I said "yes" to just about any project that came my way; this habit led to an overwhelmingly busy time. I didn't realize it until it was too late. I burnt out and my cognitive bandwidth was at an all time low.

Identifying Burnout

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest and motivation that led you to take on a certain role in the first place.

Burnout reduces productivity and saps your energy, leaving you feeling increasingly helpless, hopeless, cynical, and resentful. Eventually, you may feel like you have nothing more to give.

The negative effects of burnout spill over into every area of life—including your home, work, and social life. Burnout can also cause long-term changes to your body that make you vulnerable to illnesses like colds and flu. Because of its many consequences, it’s important to deal with burnout right away. (1)

I was extremely productive at work and I enjoyed tackling many challenging software engineering problems. I was highly motivated and well recognized as a trailblazer. In contrast, I believed my lack of productivity on personal projects was due to the effects of decision fatigue by the end of the work day. Although a possible contributing factor, it was not the main reason why I was experiencing burnout. The most tell-tale sign was the insurmountable mental block that I felt whenever I thought of writing even one sentence for my blog or one line of code for my personal projects. I kept thinking about the holistic end product, but felt overwhelmed and helpless because I couldn’t convince myself to translate my thoughts onto the screen. When I’m burnt out, I severely miss self-imposed deadlines and I get stuck in a soul-crushing vicious cycle—feeling more demotivated and detached instead of an increased urgency to get things done.

Start with why

Simon Sinek’s "Start with Why," explored the mission and purpose of organizations. Although Simon explores this idea with organizations, I believe it can also be applied to us. We know what to do and how to do things, but if we don't know why we are doing these things in the first place, then why should our projects or goals exist? Sinek’s methodology helped me cut through the noise of the discouraging thoughts and focus on surfacing the motivation that had been suppressed due to burnout.

"Starting with why" created a lighthouse that I can easily find, even in a sea of darkness, I won't lose my "why."

While procrastinating by watching YouTube videos, I stumbled across Jeff Bezos’ discussion on the "Regret Minimization Framework", which asks, “if you project yourself to 80 years old and look back on your life, would you regret your decision?” For Bezos, it made his decision easy to start a new business in the once-uncertain world-wide-web. We now know it as Amazon, a dominating e-commerce empire. He said he wouldn't regret trying even if he failed, but he would regret it if he didn't try at all.

I realized that I would regret it if I discontinued my blog and abandoned my purpose to positively impact others. Instead of procrastinating further, these concepts made it clearer and easier for me to make difficult decisions.

Clear up your cognitive bandwidth

If you feel overwhelmingly busy all the time (like I do), then you may be experiencing low cognitive bandwidth.

Cognitive bandwidth is: feelings of scarcity, whether money or time, prey on the mind, thereby impairing decision-making. When you’re busy, you’re more likely to make poor time-management choices – taking on commitments you can’t handle, or prioritising trifling tasks over crucial ones. A vicious spiral kicks in: your feelings of busyness leave you even busier than before.

Arguably worst of all, this mindset spreads to infect our leisure time–so that even when life finally does permit an hour or two for recuperation, we end up feeling like that ought to be spent “productively”, too. (2)

Triage your to do list

Start each week with a list of to do's and triage using the Eisenhower Matrix. This will help you gain more clarity and focus by visualizing and triaging the important things you want to accomplish.

As you complete your tasks, intentionally check them off. Your sense of accomplishment will be mentally associated with the action and the satisfaction is tangible. If you're a university student or a software developer, you most likely resonate with the sense of accomplishment of closing all of your browser tabs after completing a project.

To reduce my mental clutter, I created a system to prioritize the allocation of my mental space. I write down and triage every important or interesting thing that comes into my mind. With this, I'm able to prioritize and revisit the thoughts at a relevant or convenient time in the future. Although tedious at first, this process helped me reduce the amount of unwanted and distracting thoughts that linger in my mind and helped me maintain a state of flow.

Working on our to do's in the always-online world, we also must be mindful of the countless digital distractions that became normal. Further fueling our feeling of busyness, we frequently and mindlessly scroll on our phones for hours. To be productive, try to work with your phone faced down and in silent mode. Disconnect from the digital world and take frequent physical breaks. Get up and stretch, walk around outside, or do a short workout. It may be unthinkable because of the pressure from the mental demands from burnout, but be reasonable with yourself and take mental breaks.

Create and execute on micro-goals

Early in my university career, my motto for managing some of my assignments was, *" due in one week? do in one week."* I didn't know at the time, but this was Parkinson's law — "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Despite never missing a deadline, I was under perpetual stress because I spent most of my time procrastinating and cramming to completion. Timeboxing your tasks will help you be aware and conscious about the time you are committing to your activities.

On top of timeboxing, I now break down the focused task down to tiny, easily-achievable micro-goals. For example, if you were to write a blog post, you can break down the first micro-goals to be:

Open your editor
Name and save the file
Write one sentence
and so on...

Like Newton's first law of motion (objects in motion tend to stay in motion), simply getting started can build your momentum to keep progressing on your goals. When you stop, it can feel like you need to muster more energy than usual to get started again. Although the pressure of completing my projects can still be intimidating, it is no longer an impossible task. This is the power of micro-progression. As cliche as it is,

*"Slow progress is better than no progress."*

Many software developers may also not realize that they are already doing this. When trying to solve complex problems, they have to break it down into smaller parts so that it is easier to understand. This is known as decomposition. It may seem glaringly obvious and trivial at first, but this epiphany made me fully appreciate the shift in perspective.

Adjust your physical environment

The brain is very powerful with mental associations with the physical environment. A great example is getting into your bed is a cue for the brain to sleep. If you spend your time doing work or play video games in your bed, you can associate the stress from those activities into the physical space and can contribute to unwanted effects like reduced quality or duration of sleep. In contrast, if you originally get into bed in "relax mode" and you try to start doing work in your bed, it may feel more difficult to be productive than usual because your brain thinks it's time to sleep and not time to do work.

As someone who has grown up with the internet, I spend the majority of my time sitting at my computer desk. It is difficult to work on my personal projects in this space because it has long been associated with playing video games, indulging on YouTube videos, and endlessly surfing the web. For years, my brain has associated this space with relaxation, which makes it challenging to change my habits and become more productive.

Therefore, it is ideal you have a dedicated “productivity” space. If you don't have the luxury of space that is free from distractions and interruptions, working in public places like cafes, libraries, or co-working spaces are great alternatives.

Right now, there is a global pandemic and in the interest of safety, these public work spaces are likely closed for the foreseeable future. In this case, we have little to no choice but to work in the personal spaces that we have.

Given the new normal of remote work, try identifying and creating new mental associations to transition your mind into “work mode”:

Pretend to commute: If you used to commute regularly to work, pretend to commute (take a walk) and then return home to officially start your work day.
Do not disturb mode: Put your phone in silent or "do not disturb" mode and put it face down on your table or out of reach so that you won’t be distracted. Let your family or roommates know that you are working and do not want to be interrupted.
Caffeinate: Make yourself coffee or tea right before you start your work.
Put on some tunes: Play some music that will help you get into a state of flow. I personally recommend "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to" on YouTube or Spotify. You can also curate your own playlist specifically for work , I suggest selecting music with little-to-no lyrics because they are the least distracting.

Taking steps forward

When you're faced with burnout and low cognitive bandwidth, a great place to start is to reflect and recognize it's effects on you and identify the possible causes of those problems. Start with "why" and use the Regret Minimization Framework to make it easier to answer the difficult questions. Why do you want to be productive? What purpose are you trying to achieve by being productive? When you are 80 years old, do you think you would regret it if you never tried?

Use any feelings of purpose and motivation to move forward, and guide your decisions and actions. Write down any distracting thoughts that come to mind and delegate them as future concerns to prevent them from recurring. These tips will help you gain control and help keep your cognitive bandwidth at a manageable level where you don't always feel busy.

Create a to do list and triage with the Eisenhower Matrix to gain clarity and focus on the important things you need to accomplish in a given time period. Timebox your activities to be conscious about the time you are committing. Keep in mind the effects of Parkinson's law and set easily achievable micro-goals. Incremental progress on meaningful work will make you more satisfied and more engaged with your work. Sometimes, it's also just a matter of getting started.

Adjust your physical environment to fit the needs of what task you are trying to accomplish. Be conscious of the mental associations and cues and how they subconsciously affect your mood, emotions, and your desire to complete your activities. Try working at a cafe, library, or co-working space instead of your bedroom. If those options aren't available or aren't working, try re-associating some of your spaces with using new and different mental cues to associate your space with productivity. You can try things like playing a work-specific music playlist that signals the brain that you are now in "work mode" or make a cup of coffee or tea right before you do your work.

These are 3 notable learnings that have helped me get out of my year-long hiatus from blogging and make progress to deliver and accomplish some of my personal goals. I understand that this is a lot to take in and learn, especially because if you're reading this, I can understand you are also experiencing some level of burnout or low cognitive bandwidth like I was. I want to make it clear that this is still very much a work in progress for me (Rome wasn't built in a day), but I'm no longer discouraged as I originally was.

Sources for quotes

Pushing boundaries, when industries collide

Jackie Luc — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 15:00:00 +0000

Collision is the fastest-growing tech conference in North America and was recently held in Toronto for the first time with over 25,000 attendees from 125 countries. At such a scale, it was wonderful to see the diversity and inclusiveness, especially when 45.7% of attendees were female and from several positions! This conference also brought the conversations revolving around tech and entrepreneurship from well-known individuals (or celebrities), like Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Timbaland, Steve Aoki, Akon, and more. It was a great experience absorbing the variety of perspectives from speakers that highlighted their thoughts and experiences in their respective domains. I’ll try my best to summarize the overwhelming amount of highlights from the talks that I attended and provide some thoughts and observations of the conference as a whole. I highly recommend those who are interested to learn something new to visit Collision’s YouTube channel to watch the videos that were uploaded. I know I will go back to rewatch some of the talks, as well as catch the ones that I was unable to attend due to time conflicts (there were about four stages that had speakers on all day).

A New Era of Entrepreneurship

Talk: https://youtu.be/2HfhTP6SYrc

Cloudflare’s co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn, and Canadian singer and songwriter, Jessie Reyez, took the stage to discuss what it took for them to be where they are today. Michelle and Jessie, although in different industries and different stages in life, revealed universal themes around what they thought was required to be an entrepreneur. Michelle told a story where she never thought to apply to business school at Harvard because of the competitive landscape and defaulted to applying to Canadian business schools. One day she had a conversation with a stranger from a cocktail party, who convinced her to apply to Harvard, and she was ultimately accepted.

“If you never put your name in the hat, your name will never get pulled.”

To spread Michelle’s message, if there is something out there that you want to do, try — put your name in the hat. Jessie carried CDs with her everywhere because she is a firm believer that you have the choice to make opportunities. She went from DJ to DJ in a club and stumbled across Calvin Harris and eventually got her first big break as a songwriter for Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa with the song “One Kiss.”

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” — Milton Berle

The first step is to find opportunities. The next step is to start asking yourself these questions:

Am I solving a meaningful problem that I am passionate about? Why hasn’t it been solved before?
Can I assemble the team to make it happen?

Although the first question is critical, bringing an idea to life with a team can also be magnitudes in size more challenging to realize. Jessie affirms this idea by respecting the fact that no one person is capable of doing everything. Everyone has to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and assemble the teams to fill the gaps. It sounds like such a “duh” moment, but many founders and entrepreneurs encounter a common pitfall where they think that they will have an A-team right off the start, but in reality, it can be far from that. Make great attempts to find others who are as passionate as you are because people with passion will more likely help fuel the team out of tough situations. Sometimes the people with the highest growth and learning potential will be better for your organization in the long run.

“Everyone is just making it up as they go.”

As entrepreneurs, we need to realize that there is so much out there that we don’t know. The biggest asset and skill is how fast you can learn. The job demands you be naturally curious, passionate, and most of all, have a growth mindset to turn limitations into inspiration. With the world changing at an unapologetic rate, it is a choice — it is your choice — to continue learning to better yourself and your organization.

Access Is the New Ownership

Co-founder of Quinto Andar, André Penha, spoke about why he believes people will stop buying houses. His startup simplifies rental processes for tenants and landlords in Brazil, but it goes beyond that. They understood that renting is much more compatible with the flexibility and mobility that people want. With the enormous growth of companies like Uber and Airbnb, it is clear that access to mobility and flexibility are some of the core factors to satisfy the desires of this generation. We no longer need to spend upwards of a $30,000 buy a car to get from A to B. Instead we can pay $10. We remove the high upfront cost and trade it for a lower and more affordable price for usage. It enables people who normally don’t have access to such a luxury to have the opportunity to have access.

Many companies, such as WeWork and Lime, are following suit to provide access to these services that were once financially challenging to purchase. WeWork offers streamlined access to workspaces for small business and large companies. WeWork grew exponentially and is now embarking on a new endeavour to create an ecosystem of access in several industries including education and living with The We Company. They realize the power of communities and the demands for access and flexibility within each industry. Lime provides affordable access to smart mobility with their electric scooters and bikes. With the inefficiencies with the “last mile” in our day to day mobility, there is no surprise that people want options to get to their destinations more quickly and conveniently.

With large companies providing access to such essential aspects of our lives, it leads us to wonder what life would be like in the unforeseeable future. However, today, we have the opportunity to massage and mould many aspects of our lifestyles that we never had a decade ago.

The Future of Work

Employees are an essential asset to the success of a business. Without employees, ideas will never be realized, and nothing will be done to advance society forward. Every company in the world is fighting each other for talented individuals, and that should leave job seekers empowered to know that the ball is actually in their court and not in the hands of the companies. At Collision, several startups realized there was a gap to human resources and employee engagement. It is one thing to acquire talent, but it is another ball game to retain talent. The challenge is that there is no cookie-cutter solution to satisfy employees, and it is even more challenging to tailor the needs of the growing workforce.

Most executives say that they put the employees first (or second if the customer is first), but as we continue to pay top dollar for Customer Relationship Management, also commonly known as CRM, maybe we should also invest in Employee Relationship Management. Companies are getting better at understanding why people or clients purchase their products and services, but some companies fail to understand fundamentally why our employees work for them.

These were some things that I had learned from my experience at Collision 2019. These highlights were from the huge array of exciting dialogue that took place. You can engage me in the comments or my social media if you’d like to learn more or have a discussion! Overall, this was a positive and enjoyable experience that left me in awe and respect with what boundaries people are pushing in their industries.

How we won our first 24-hour hackathon

Jackie Luc — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 15:00:00 +0000

We won 1st place out of 23 teams, with over 200+ participants at CalgaryHacks 2018.

When I said it was our first 24-hour hackathon, I’m sorry, I lied. Two of the total five team members (myself included) had previously participated in CalgaryHacks 2017. We had a great idea. However, we had an overambitious solution, we were experimenting with unfamiliar technology, and we had huge scope creep, which destroyed our team’s morale and our project unfortunately never saw the light of day. We learned a lot from this experience and wanted to redeem ourselves in CalgaryHacks 2018.

So how did we do it?

1. Form the dream team

Obvious right? Team chemistry is vital to successfully collaborate and prevent burnout on any project. Whether you registered for the hack with a team or you registered alone, there are some key things that you should keep note of when forming a team.

Ideas will pivot fast

Don’t join a team solely because of the idea. Ideas will pivot fast. If you are trying to find a team that suits you, make sure that you take the time to get to know the team members. After all, you will be spending the next 24+ hours with them. During the initial idea and pitch discussions, it is important to work together to get buy-in from every teammate on an agreed idea.

Roles

It is highly recommended that you and your team discuss your strengths to maximize the value of your solution. Having agreed roles will help alleviate the friction that is natural in this environment and create alignment. When it comes time to start hacking, it will be easier to focus.

2. Understand the theme and the judges

Our theme was released two days before the hackathon — “long-range Internet of Things (IoT)”. The theme was open to interpretation and our team tried to interpret what constitutes as “long-range”. At first, we thought that long-range meant that our solution needed to connect to the internet using either WiFi or Ethernet. This assumption made sense to our team because “short-range” IoT would presumably use Bluetooth. We shortly decided to simply end our disputes and requested clarification on the interpretation. The organizers sent an official announcement stating that “long-range” meant “cellular”. We had to scrap our original ideas and think of something new. Remember, ideas will pivot fast.

Judging

If you are presented with an opportunity to meet the judges ahead of the pitch, make sure you take the opportunity to do so. You can gain a lot of insight on what each judge is looking for. You can leverage this information to create a strategy to satisfy the judging criteria.

In our hack, we didn’t meet our judges until it was our turn to present our pitch. What should you do in this case? We thought it was safe to simply have a focused and defined problem statement, a relevant solution with a scalable and flexible technology stack, and presentation slides to organize our pitch. We focused on the quality of implementation of our solution and our pitch over an extremely novel idea.

3. Start with the pitch

You may start feeling the pressure from the ticking of time and feel the urge to start hacking. Don’t start hacking yet. Why? You will miss the opportunity to define the motivation behind your idea and your solution. Battle-test and validate why your solution solves your problem. It is also a great time to discover any inherent flaws that cant be solved by simply coding. It would have been an expensive pivot if any deal breakers were discovered in the middle of implementation.

Having a defined motivation will also strengthen and deepen your understanding of your solution to your problem and it will make it easier to address shortcomings.

Our motivation and target audience

One of my teammates’ mom owns a cabin in British Columbia, more than a 3-hour drive from where she currently resides. She is attached to this cabin because to her, it is a home away from home. She would be worried about the status of the home and would sometimes make the drive to physically verify that the house is in good standing — no leaky pipes, no sewage backup, no broken windows, and more. The status quo is an ineffective and a time-consuming solution to her problem.

Our Pitch

You own a cabin or a cottage that you wish you could visit multiple times during the year, rather than once a summer. You arrive at the start of your summer vacation hoping to escape from the busy city life. To your surprise and disappointment, you find yourself a flooded basement and a broken window. You wished you had known of these issues earlier, so that these issues could have been addressed before your vacation started.

Our homes are one of the most valuable financial assets we possess. They house countless precious memories and we invest a lot of effort to attain and maintain our homes. We even go the extra mile to make it personable and welcoming.

House Guard is a home monitoring system equipped with several sensors used to detect and alert you of any problems using cellular data. House Guard can bring you peace of mind by displaying a health report of your home’s temperature, air quality, humidity, and detected motion, in a mobile-friendly and real-time dashboard. This dashboard enables you to analyze the data of your home, which can assist you in making informed decisions about maintaining your home. Know when to fix your sewage backups or leaky pipes, before it’s too late. In an event where a sensor is detecting abnormal activity, it will send an alert to you via text message. You can easily configure the threshold of each sensor to prompt when an alert needs to be sent. You can also provide emergency contacts for these alerts, enabling notifications to your plumber if your humidity is abnormally high, or the fire department if your house is detecting smoke or gas leaks. There is no longer a need for you to waste a large amount of time to physically verify the status of your beloved remote homes.

Our pitch wasn’t the best, but it built a concrete picture for the judges to visualize and understand the motivation behind our idea and our solution to our problem. We had clearly defined our target audiences and the problems that they experienced.

Validate against other demographics

We also targeted Airbnb hosts. I had personally met two co-hosts who owned more than 8 properties across Canada. They mentioned that our solution would greatly benefit them because they had a costly experience.

A guest in one of their properties left the balcony door open when they checked out. One of their employed cleaners entered the property and found it freezing cold and closed the balcony door, leaving after their cleaning was finished. Hours later, when new guests arrived, they reported that the basement had flooded as a result of leaking pipes and had to be compensated for another place to stay. The cost here is high — the reputation, which directly affected their business, was jeopardized. The cost of repair, rework, and repaint (as a result of the humidity) were in the thousands of dollars, and removing the property from the market damaged their revenue.

Be thorough with your pitch

In our pitch, we also mentioned solutions to relevant edge cases to our problem. When we had pitched and demoed our project to the 6 industry judges, they didn’t ask many questions. Pessimistic thoughts loomed over my head, but to my surprise, one of the judges remarked, “you guys were very thorough, I have no more questions to ask. Good job.”

4. Hack. Hack. Hack. Hack.

What are you waiting for? Hack away!

Thinking about taking a break? Take a break.

Thinking about sleep? Sleep.

Everybody hacks differently. Now is a good time to disregard the expectation that you and your team will be fully productive for the full 24 hours.

Do you have 3 coffee cups and 4 Red Bulls on your desk yet? If not, then I applaud you for your lack-of-caffeinated tenacity.

It’s only for 24 hours!

As you start hacking, you will realize that 24 hours is not a long time. If you haven’t realized that yet, let me tell you now — 24 hours is not a long time.

So how do we make the most out of our time? Avoid the fluff. Don’t chase shiny objects. They have no place here. It is imperative to ignore the distractions and focus on implementing the core of your solution to the best of your ability. As you hack, you will think of other great ideas, but remember to implement the core functionality first.Don’t spend time making your code look good. Don’t spend time perfecting your user interface. Who cares how pretty the user interface is if it is not functional and interactive? Focus on what delivers the most value — in most cases, it’s your prototype’s functionality that has the most value.

This will greatly help you and your team fight scope creep. If you and your team find yourselves changing scope frequently, then do you really have a defined problem, idea, and solution? If you find yourself in this scenario, then revisit the problem, solution, and your pitch before continuing on hacking. No amount of code can fix inherent design flaws.

Don’t repeat what has already been solved

Do you need a signup and login page with working authentication for your solution? Don’t build one. Everybody knows how authentication works and quite frankly, these problems have been solved over and over again. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to show that you know what a wheel is. I’m sure you have better things to focus on to create a functional prototype. You can explicitly inform the judges that you are assuming that authentication is handled correctly and that your application will reflect what a user will see or use once they are authenticated.

5. The final stretch

By the final stretch, I do mean that quite literally. Take this time to stretch! At this point, I hope that there was some thought put into how you and your team will present your pitch. Your patience may be running low, but I highly recommend that every team create presentation slides for the delivery of their pitches.

Focus and clarity

After 24 hours, you may be thinking, “why do we need presentation slides, why don’t we just wing it?” That’s sleep-deprivation and mixed emotions talking. Don’t listen to them. Having presentation slides organizes your thoughts with focus and clarity. This makes it very simple for you to present and also makes it very simple for your industry judges to follow along.

A valuable realization

Out of the 8 finalists in our hackathon, our team was the only team that had presentation slides for our pitch. After watching the other finalists present, we clearly saw the value of having presentation slides. Many finalists rambled on, had circling thoughts, and even paused because they didn’t know what to say next. The idea of having presentation slides is so simple, but arriving at the conclusion that it is needed is not as intuitive as you would think (especially with the pressures from the hackathon). I truly believe that we had a large competitive advantage and were scored generously as a result of delivering a well-organized and professional presentation.

6. Conclusion

Now you may be wondering — that’s it? Well kind-of yes, and kind-of no. I truly believe that a well-defined problem with a focused solution and an organized pitch delivery is what the industry judges will be primarily looking for. In 24 hours, there is a limit to what you can do in regards to technical implementations, especially for novel ideas. Of course, if the prototype of the solution is functional and has all the proposed bells and whistles, it will provide a huge advantage. However, I think that this is not the primary focus simply because most hackathons are available to people with all skill levels — from non-developers to experts. A hackathon is so much more than just hacking.

I hope that these tips help you gain some insight on how you could win your next hackathon! We had a great and enjoyable experience. We also had some scary moments where we had no functionally working — just a couple of hours before the pitches. If I have to give one last tip, it would be that you shouldn’t be afraid to fail. This will help remove a lot of pressure off of you! We originally joined this hackathon because we were all passionate about innovation and wanted to try and solve challenging problems. I want to make it clear that we didn’t join this hackathon expecting to win. We simply wanted to have some fun and you should do the same!

Our tech stack

For those curious about our tech stack, we had a very solid stack that brought our solution to life. We challenged ourselves to create something with real-time data and states, web-responsiveness, and have considerations to scale.

Particle Electron — this was the Arduino board with several sensors emitting data to our back-end server

Front-end — built with React using CoreUI (open-source template)

Back-end — built with Node.js with Hapi.js web framework using MongoDB in Docker and in AWS EC2

You just secured a new job, now what?

Jackie Luc — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 15:00:00 +0000

Congratulations! Your endless nights of revising your resume and rehearsing interview questions have finally lead you to secure your first steps in your career. Let out a huge sigh of relief and be proud of your accomplishments!As your first day is rapidly approaching, some of you may now be wondering,

“How can I maximize my learning opportunities?”

Don’t be afraid to succeed

Stepping into the industry, you may realize that you seriously lack business knowledge and tooling. Being at the bottom of the knowledge totem pole may make you feel incompetent, which can increase your self-doubt and maybe even your frustration. It is completely normal to feel this way at first. The great thing about being at the bottom is that there is only one direction you can go, and that is to go up. It is your responsibility to initiate and sustain your learning to build your own confidence.

How do we get out of a discouraging mindset? You need to accept that you are embarking on a life-long journey of learning. You need to remember that your work will have an impact on your organization as well as everyone around you. It is extremely easy to fall into the trap of continually doing mediocre work and coast through weeks, months, and even years. You should ask yourself, “will I gain any beneficial opportunities or experiences from doing mediocre work?” Most people will say “no", but will return to the vicious cycle. We all seem to like to preach, “don’t be afraid to fail”, but I think everyone is afraid to fail. As a result, most of us get fixated on doing “safe" work. I think that we need to challenge ourselves to acknowledge and embrace our shortcomings to learn and be better equipped for future opportunities. I believe that we need to challenge ourselves in order to do great work and contribute to the bigger picture. Instead, we should not be afraid of success. Don’t be afraid to succeed. You can turn your lack of business knowledge and the tooling to your advantage by being engaged in your work and challenge the status quo and most importantly, get consistent feedback along the way. A good first step may be to find the pain points in your initial work and improve the processes that your teammates might have originally been overlooked or over-engineered. You may ask questions like, “why does this task follow this process? How can we improve it so that we can use the time to do something more interesting or useful?” Start small and be patient.

Be willing to be uncomfortable

Post-secondary institutions have curriculums that safely define the scope of problems with solutions ready to satisfy your curiosity or understanding. As you get into the groove of things in your new role, you will realize that you will encounter many problems that have no apparent solutions. After all, this is the “real world”, and there is no textbook for that.

I felt discouraged when I couldn’t find viable solutions to challenging problems. I lacked exposure and was held back by a myriad of factors — business pressures and lack of technical and business context. It took me a long time to realize that it was okay to not know the answers. Why did it take me a long time? I felt uncomfortable sharing my shortcomings and my “I don’t knows”.

I learned that I must be willing to say,

“I don’t know the answer but, I am going to find out.”

or

“I don’t know if this is the right solution, but we should try it and test it out.”

Not one single person is expected to have all the solutions. Instead, we are expected to have the knowledge to be able to create or find the solutions. When I first started my internship, I was in an uncomfortable tug-of-war between convention (assumed knowledge and status quo) and unconventional (originality and innovation) ideas, practices, or solutions. From my experience, whether I knew I was right or wrong, it was best to share my conflicting thoughts with my team. No one is expected to solve problems in isolation. Your team will most likely have both the technical and business context to help you solve your problems or at the very least guide you in the direction of a promising solution. Your team is one of your greatest resources and it is imperative to work collaboratively to solve challenging problems.

“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.“

Know when to ask for help

A good rule of thumb is to always try to solve the problem by yourself first. It will greatly benefit you because you will gain the exposure and understanding you need. If there are no clear solutions, your next step may be to consult your favourite knowledge bank, Google. Say you had the question, “How do I sum the values in a column in Excel?” It is probably better to search on Google for this answer, rather than bothering your teammates. Search engines such as Google provides you resources and answers at your fingertips. We should utilize and maximize that power to our advantage to get quick answers to problems that had already been solved.

When you interrupt your teammates to ask them a question, it forces them to switch their context. We all want to keep the context switching to a minimum because work can get mentally challenging when there are multiple interruptions that take us out of deep thought, also known as “the zone”. So when is the best time to ask your teammates? The best time to ask your teammates is when there are business contexts or roadblocks. For example, “I’m not familiar with the next steps in the process, can you walk me through the process after I complete this task?” It is clear that Google can’t answer organizational related questions and your teammates will be your best resource for a solution.

If you feel guilty bothering your teammates (I know I do), it can be beneficial to openly discuss with your team how to effectively communicate as a team. If a problem is not urgent or it concerns multiple people, you can probably save your questions and ask them at the next related meeting. A good workaround to the potentially unwanted context switching is to request some time to talk about the problem through instant messaging. Even better, you could post your question or request in your team’s group chat channel. This way, your teammates will respond when they are ready to do so. This is beneficial for the entire team because every individual can choose when to discuss problems and when they do not want to be disturbed, which is a compromise between context switching and productivity.

How to frame your questions

What is this, kindergarten? No, but I can’t stress enough how often I get asked questions where I simply don’t understand and end up more confused by the lack of context or structure of the problem. If I can’t understand what your problem is, how can I help you solve it?

What are you trying to accomplish?
What have you tried? What are you struggling with?
What is the expected outcome? What was the actual outcome?

Why do I like this format? It provides an opportunity for the person asking the questions to slow down to reflect and understand their questions. When we think methodically, we can sometimes figure out the solutions before even having to ask the questions. I had many experiences where I solved several problems in mid-sentence, simply by explaining the problem to my teammate in this format. Not only does this method provide your teammates the context of the problems, it also provides them a way to formulate the questions asked. Gone are the days that they needed to spend lots of time trying to piece together your disarray of questions. Your mentors will be more equipped and enabled to understand your problems more quickly. They can provide a better learning experience for you by guiding you through the process of solving your problems. Lastly, this also shows your teammates that you have put some thought and effort into asking methodically and not simply asking a question for the sake of asking a question.