DEV Community: Matej Minárik

Jumpstart Your Career With These Books

Matej Minárik — Sun, 10 May 2020 07:13:43 +0000

These books transformed my professional career. I'm sharing the initial list and would like to keep adding resources as I discover them.

I really wish I had discovered these books earlier in my career.

https://github.com/Math3v/reading-resources

Which books were transformative to your career? Let me know in the comments section.

What is the best day to kick-off a sprint?

Matej Minárik — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 14:11:15 +0000

TL; DR: Wednesday.

Note: I'm assuming one-week sprints in this article.

When I started thinking about this topic, I focused too much on the best day to have the retrospective and planning meetings. It turned out to be a wrong approach. The most important day of a 1-week sprint is the last day of the sprint. You need to make sure to finish all features, integrate them together, test them and deploy them to production. In order to have a successful sprint, the team needs to make sure the most effective day of week will be the last day of the sprint.

Some companies prefer Mondays to kick-off new sprints. I don't blame them. It aligns very nicely with how people think and structure their working weeks. The idea is you finish everything on Friday and enjoy the weekend with a fresh mind. Once you come back on Monday, you can pick up new topics with a fresh pair of eyes.

Not so fast!

I personally believe (and some research supports it), that Fridays are the least productive days. Meaning, the day when you need to bring all the goodies and focus, you're actually the least likely to be as productive as you need to be.

The natural response might be. Ok, let's push the kick-off to Tuesdays then. Meaning that the most productive day should be Monday. While it may turn out to work slightly better, Mondays are usually catching-up days, how-was-your-weekend days and remembering-what-i-didnt-finish-on-friday days. Having a two-days leisure time before the most important day of the sprint might not be a good idea:

People might experience some anxiety over the weekend about the work they need to finish on Monday.
The two day context switch might take its toll on remembering all the details one should finish.

What is the answer then?

Tuesdays are the most productive days of the week since the 1987 according to this. Having the Tuesday as the productivity peak, the natural choice to kick-off the new sprint should be Wednesday. I have worked a couple of years with Thursdays as the first day of the sprint and it worked great for me and for the team.

You start diving into the topics and tickets on Friday. Have a relaxing weekend with no stress. You already know what you need to finish next week, so there is a low-priority thread in your head that figures out some details about the upcoming work and reveals important questions to ask. Then as the week progresses, it builds the productivity slowly over the Monday and Tuesday until it reaches Wednesday. The most important day of the sprint.

When do you start your sprints? How does it work for you?

What should we REALLY be doing these days

Matej Minárik — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 21:17:28 +0000

Spoiler alert: Stay sane!

No, this is not another “what to do at home” or “how to be productive at home” article. I believe those only add up to the unprecedented anxiety most of the population is experiencing these days anyway.

I think we all need to first take a step back. Embrace the gratitude, because most of the population is still healthy. Be thankful, that we're not fighting each other. We don't have an ongoing war and we're not trying to destroy one another.

Instead, we are fighting together as a team. Isn't this beautiful? Whenever this crisis ends, it will spill us out stronger, more united and more humane.

So, don't try to satisfy your managers by being productive at home, while trying to juggle your kids, cooking, shopping, cleaning together with your anxiety, unease and fear.

Nobody can expect the same level of productivity from you if you worked for the past X years from the office. Especially given all the horrible news we're facing everyday and certainly not together with all the online meetings which try to keep the business as usual. Fuck that!

What should you really focus on:

have some "you-time". Ask yourself how do you really feel and what could comfort you.
talk to your significant other. How is he/she handling it and what can you do to help?
talk to your parents/grandparents. Pick up the phone, tell them you are doing just fine and listen to whatever they have to say.
take a walk. While we still can.
read a book, watch a movie, learn new skill (cooking), clean, play, write, paint, create and procreate.

This is not a promo but if you're interested how to handle the remote work, just read these amazing books from Basecamp, understand the principles and apply them to your company.

Photo by John Mark Arnold on Unsplash

Tired of turning Wifi/Bluetooth/Data off in Settings? (iPhone)

Matej Minárik — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 10:01:23 +0000

Every day before going to bed, I take my phone, go to Settings and turn Wifi, Bluetooth and Data off. There are two reasons why I'm doing this:

I don't want my phone to search and receive any additional (other than GSM) frequencies while I'm sleeping.
I don't want to hear all the notifications coming in right after the alarm wakes me up.

Since I'm "programmer-lazy" person, I was searching for quite some time for a solution and I stumbled upon the not-so-new Shortcuts app and set this one up:

My life is once again so much easier and efficient!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Being a happy developer

Matej Minárik — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 06:36:58 +0000

I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately. In my opinion, happiness is achieved by the right mixture of several ingredients. I'd like to share my mixture and I'm excited to hear about yours in the comments section.

Note: The ordering does not correspond to the importance.

Money

We need water, food, shelter, bed, health care, clothes, electricity, warmth, ...
We would like to travel, spend time with friends, go to movies, nurture our hobbies, surprise our spouses and family, play video games, watch Netflix, ...

Everything costs money. However, there is a certain point where more money does not bring us more happiness. A better car will satisfy you for a short period of time, but then you realize the satisfaction is gone and you need a new one. Our system is manipulating us that our problems will be solved once we buy that new shiny iPhone.

Money is a necessity but after a certain amount, it does not bring additional satisfaction.

Problem Solving

We love solving puzzles. We solve puzzles (tasks) all day. We are as happy as we can be, right? Not really.

If the puzzle is too hard, we might feel intimidated or even useless. If the puzzle is too easy, we might get bored. Neither of these feelings is supporting our happiness.

If your problem is too hard, try to split it into smaller parts. TDD will help you start by writing the simplest possible test and simplest possible code to make it pass. Then you add more complicated tests and more complicated code. Don't forget to refactor!

If your problem is too easy, try to refactor or optimize the surrounding code to make your problem more challenging and the Boy Scout Rule will help you make your codebase better.

Ego 2.0

I came across this term in the amazing book The end of procrastination. The gist of it is that helping others bring us joy, satisfaction and happiness.

I see it more as a matter of attitude, because not everybody can be developing semi-automatic drones with AI which fly around the world, pick up the trash and disposes it in the most ecological way.

There are plenty of great projects which help people communicate, connect, learn, teach, support others or just provide us the ways to unwind when we get back home from work. Finding the Ego 2.0 at my project helped me enjoy it even more.

Team

Only a handful of people are working alone. The rest of us are part of a smaller or bigger team. The team can really push you forward, motivate, help, teach, guide, learn from you and be there for you. But also, it can drag you down, frustrate, slow and demotivate.

I believe there should be a right mixture of giving to and getting back. You should be able to rely on your team and your team should be able to rely on you and your work.

Code Climate

68% of Developers Said They Work on Products with High or Very High Amounts of Tech Debt (117 developers took the survey).

While, it's very important to work on a healthy codebase, it's not very common. The quality degradation usually starts with the first broken window. From my experience, quality test suite and the synergic effect of the team making the codebase better with every commit can go a long way in terms of happiness and satisfaction.

Writing Clean Code is an awesome way to start making baby steps towards a healthy, readable and maintainable codebase.

What if my project lacks these characteristics?

The first step is awareness. Once you're aware of these areas, you can start assessing them and slowly improve them one change at a time.

Recently, I started to contribute to an Open Source project and found almost everything already in it:

working for free and giving back to the community stimulates the Ego 2.0
working with the right mixture of experienced developers and newcomers help you both learn and teach
we are free to pick the right project with good habits like writing automated tests, code reviews and 3rd party tools, which help to keep the codebase healthy
not every project is saving the planet, but we can definitely filter out those which do the opposite
bonus: stepping out from our comfort zone and writing code that can be seen publicly helps to build the personal "brand" awareness

This article will serve as a blueprint for my upcoming dev-talk. I would love to hear about your "happy ingredients". Which part interests you the most?