Productive Tuesday

Melissa Treviño — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 07:15:38 +0000

After working on a feature for 2~ months, it feels so good to tackle minor issues, those low-hanging fruits 🍊🍉🍇🍐

In one hand, I enjoy diving deep into a topic, like the TargetFramework property experience I recently worked at. It was a big PR that involved coordinating with other teams, designing the user experience with our PM, and break through interesting concepts on the .NET project system (i.e. Dataflow, still blows my mind but now I know more about that mythical creature that creates and transforms blocks of data to be later used). All of these learnings took a while to fully grasp them and apply them.

In the other hand, fixing bug or completing small issues gives me that satisfaction in a shorter period of time. Still could involve stuff that I don't know, but I can either infer from knowledge I already have or it's something I can easily learn.

So, today was quite fruity.

Which made me wonder: where did that expression come from? "Low-hanging fruit".

That's something I just recently learnt when I started working in the US (my first language is Spanish), and didn't give it a thought when I heard it in different work conversations.

According to the Oxford dictionary, it refers to something (or someone) that can be won, obtained or persuaded easily without much effort. It originated around the 17th century, but it had it's first appearance in print in 1968 in the Guardian newspaper.

A couple of Bing entries further down, and I found that it could be considered a racial micro-aggression. According to one of those entries, professor Mae Hicks-Jones, explains that "for African-Americans, if you say 'low-hanging fruit', we think lynching".

I also found that some of the examples on how to use that expression were... just bad: "women are like low-hanging fruit for you, dude" (who wrote this??).

I have made a mental note to erase that expression from my head, and to share this learning whenever I notice someone using it (unintentionally and unconsciously, most probably).

I'll wrap up and re-phrase that today was a quite productive day, I tackled easy items from my big to-do list.

And so it starts

Melissa Treviño — Tue, 18 May 2021 06:28:51 +0000

First of all, happy Monday! Surprisingly it was a very productive one for me. 😀

Mondays are the start of a week, and in that spirit, it's the day I'll start out sharing what I learn every day as a software engineer.

As an early-in-career SWE, I've noticed that most of my time is spent learning, looking at code patterns, trying to figure out how in the world Visual Studio works with so many teams collaborating -in a sense- on the same code. So I thought that sharing my learnings may be interesting.

I have a really bad memory

I write these entries for my future self, so that when I'm trying to remember how I fixed a particular thing or used a certain framework, I can come back and dust off that knowledge sitting in the back of my mind.

Explaining concepts makes things clearer

I have found that I fully understand a concept when I am able to explain it to somebody else; and if I can't, it is a good way to finding blind spots.

I'd like to see more representation of women in tech

I do not consider myself an expert, but I think anyone can share what they like out there. In the case of the world of tech, it is still a very male-dominated area of expertise (although I do sense a shift in the last couple of years, yay!).

It might be helpful for somebody else

It is not secret that a SWE's work is not to come up with the best solutions on your own; as the expression says, is not about reinventing the wheel. Instead, is about building your knowledge on the work and ideas of others, learning from their mistakes and experiences.

So with that in mind, I hope you (at least, you Melissa of the future) find this series handy.