DEV Community: Manny

NMT -> No More TLAS -> No More Three-Letter-Acronyms

Manny — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 22:11:42 +0000

This is just my humble opinion...

Please do not use three-letter acronyms.
The LOE to write out "level-of-effort" is minimal.

When messages become full of three-letter acronyms it starts to exclude people who are not "in the know" and if anything, the inquisitive will ask "what does XYZ mean?" which in my humble opinion defeats the purpose.

Others may not feel they're welcomed to ask the question as they may appear not knowledgable or able to "sit at the table".

Let's make the table welcoming in all the ways we can.

I may be a tad salty but I share my perspective from a person who will ask what every three-letter acronym means.

Forever.

The Day After Work Eve

Manny — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 22:13:50 +0000

Mat Ryer

@matryer

Happy work eve everyone.

00:55 AM - 04 Jan 2021

Tips to help re-adjust on the day after "Work Eve"

Take notes the day or two before an out-of-office(OOO) to review when you return
- Make it a short story
- Make it an outline with bullets of important aspects
Consider scheduling a few short videos calls that can be recorded (don't forget to ask!) to help capture and preserve most-important-tasks (MITs)
Be kind to yourself and create a simple To-do list of "chores" that can be performed when starting the return "to-work-day"

example.

1. Clear Email
2. Remove Auto Replies
3. Standup
4. Read Slack Notes
5. Drink Coffee

I took vacation starting December 14th, 2020, and have returned to work today January 4th, 2021 and it feels like forever since I was on my work laptop.

As I was pouring my morning coffee I thought to myself, "What was I working on?" and for a moment I felt a weird panic then I realized I took a few notes for myself on SublimeText before I went on vacation and also had a recorded Zoom call with my teammate prior to going on holiday.

I felt relieved.

Thanks, Past-Manny.

Signed,
Present-Manny

It's Going Down: Unexpectedly Unemployed and What I Did About It

Manny — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 20:09:14 +0000

TLDR: This is what I did immediately following the email that stated I no longer had a job,

Immediately apply for unemployment

Create an email chain of people's contacts via work email and cc your personal email to capture all correspondence

Create a Slack group and invite all former co-workers and teammates to keep in touch and coordinate any efforts

Create a Slack channel that is an aggregation of open roles and maintain that channel as a post-only channel with no side conversations (converse in threads)

Create appropriate channels to,

vent

have general announcements

keep in touch

Use social media to get the word out

being mindful of not spamming but also not hesitating to annotate people I felt okay requesting amplification from

Update the resume

Create a landing page to consolidate information

resume

recommendations

links to showcase achievements

short bio about yourself

Share landing page on social media

Call people I am close with to share the events that happened

Below is an elaboration on how I went about things.

On Monday, March 16th, 2020 I woke up to an email stating that the company I worked for has shut down operations effective immediately. For a moment, I could not believe it, but then I quickly realized this was the reality I was living and started my plan of actions.

The first thing I did was go to the Texas Workforce Commission site to apply for unemployment. (The U.S. Department of Labor has a list of each state's analogous entities)

I then participated in an email chain amongst co-workers that were sharing their contact information (phone & email) and cc'ed/forwarded it onto my personal email for safe keeping and to create a new Slack group.

I took all the contact emails and create a Slack group for all my former co-workers. There is a channel for general communication #general, a private channel that does not include the former CEO #eba which is used for discussion on planning and any solidarity actions, and #open-roles which is a post only (non discussion) channel that posts open roles that each of us comes across.

I then went onto social media, in my case, Twitter, and I wrote a series of short tweets sharing what happened, and asking for support from people that I am connected to on there. The sub-tweets gave high-level info about myself, a link to a conference talk I gave, and annotated several folks that I requested to RT for amplification.

My resume had not been updated since I landed for former role and so I went and located the resume I submitted. It was in .PDF format and I needed a way to convert it into .docx, and .odt (for LibreOffice) and to get onto a Google Doc for collaboration/updating/editing with several friends who offered to help get things together. I used adobe acrobat and their 7-day trial to convert my PDF resume into formats that I could work with in the future.

A friend of mine suggested I create an about.me page to consolidate all the information. It has a few features that I liked: pre-made templates, ability to upload resume, section to add recommendations, and the ability to have people directly email you via a form or button. What I found helpful about this was the ability to get something put together quickly to then be used to broadcast out. I then updated my tweet from earlier with a sub-tweet linking to my about.me.

From there, I started to follow up on correspondence from people who sent me suggestions to roles that had openings.

One of the most important things I did was call my friend up to let them know what happened and what I had already done. Hearing them validate my actions was important to hear. These are wild times we are in and hearing someone tell me, "You did good/You're doing good/Come over and hangout for a bit" and being there for me in what feels like a solitary endeavor means more to me than words can describe.

I share this with the community because I know there will be wilder times ahead for a lot of us and maybe what I did could be of help to those out there.

You are not alone.
Find each other.
Make plans.
Sow seeds.

Feel free to get in contact with me on Twitter at @mannyluvstacos if you have any questions, want to chat, play a game of chess, or say "Hi!".

Take care of each other,
Manny

It was great working with you all.
We all had our quirks and that is what made our interactions wonderful.
Thank you for the memories we made.

Hi, I'm Mannyluvstacos!

Manny — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 06:59:39 +0000

All journeys start with the first steps.
These are my first steps.

I started out as a Graduate Chemical Engineer and found myself going back to school to get a degree in Computer Science.

Along the way I wanted to learn as much as I could before I went back into the work world. I had ~3 years (2 summers) until I graduated and I wanted to soak in as much as I could in that time.

I interned one summer at Bazaarvoice, another summer at PayPal and began my full-time career at HomeAway in Austin, Texas in 2016.

While at HomeAway I helped re-platform the company's web applications to Node.js+Hapi.js

I had the opportunity to speak about that experience at NodeSummit 2018. I was inspired to submit a talk after having gone to NodeSummit 2017 as my first tech conference and that experience leaving a lasting impression on me.

I wrote about my first ever tech conference (NodeSummit 2017) here.

I left HomeAway in February of 2019 and I am currently working at Help.com.

I am interested in Node.js and GraphQL.
I am very interested in the inner workings of Node.js and the V8 engine.

My goals currently are to work on a few ideas and make them into open source projects that may be consumed by, and hopefully help, those in the tech community.

I just want to learn as much as I can while I'm here.
This is my first post, the next ones will probably be about ideas or thoughts that cross my mind with respect to technology, Node.js, productivity, growing older, and coffee.

I hope you enjoy them.

-Manny...luvstacos.