DEV Community: Nicholas Warwick

Min-maxing: Why you should consider unoptimizing your life

Nicholas Warwick — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 13:05:16 +0000

What is min-maxing? If you do not play video games you may not be familiar with the term. Min-maxing has its roots in gaming. It refers to the practice of playing a game with perfect mathematical efficiency, in-order to achieve the best possible chance at success. This could mean crafting the perfectly balanced gun in Call of Duty or choosing the perfect set of abilities for your class in a game like World of Warcraft. As an avid gamer and someone with a competitive nature I was a slave to the min-maxing process. Despite its clear hand in improving success, it sucks some aspects of the game away - the satisfaction of playing the game how you want to play it. You instead have to spend time doing research on how the play the game most efficiently. I didn’t realize how sucked into the process I was until it started bleeding into my life outside of video games.

I first noticed my addiction to min-maxing after I told myself I was going to start journalling. I began as most people do by handwriting my journal using a pen and paper. It didn’t take long before I began to question my speed while using a pen. Not only was it slow to journal with a pen, it was also less effective in-terms of storage, retrieval, and security. You can’t password protect a handwritten journal. At least not as easily as you can a computer. To be fair, the quality of my handwriting would probably not be decipherable by most either way. I was not naive to the fact that maybe efficiency was not the goal when journalling. Maybe the goal is to be more mindful and slow. So I dusted off my keyboard and started researching. I found arguments on both sides of the camp. I ended up trying out both hand written and typed to see if I preferred one or the other. Typing my journal opened a whole new can of worms as now I started looking into the best software for note taking and journaling. I spent a lot of time going down the the Obsidian rabbit hole..

After spending hours customizing note taking tools and trying different strategies I realized that I was not spending time doing what my original goal was in the first place - journalling. My takeaway from this was to always remind myself of my goal and to ensure that I do not get lost in the path to achieving that goal. Keep the path simple and allow yourself to dedicate all of your time walking down it.

The Trifecta - Why should you stay at your job? When is the right time to leave?

Nicholas Warwick — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 16:17:53 +0000

There are three pillars that I look for in any job: the idea or goal of the company, the day-to-day, and the compensation. In order to stay at a given job I need at least two of these pillars. In the following post I will dig into each of these pillars within in the context of the tech industry and explain what they represent and why they are important to me.

The first pillar is the company product or idea. It has to be something I believe in - something I am motivated to work on. No matter how much money I am making or how much I like my coworkers, if I am working on a project that does not motivate me, I will not be fulfilled. This may not be the case for you. In fact, a majority of my friends could care less whether they are sending rockets to space or working on a manure processing application (not saying manure processing can’t be cool). If that sounds like you, the following two pillars will be critical to your fulfillment at a job.

The second pillar is the day-to-day of the job. This encompasses a lot: work life balance, good coworkers, interesting tech, learning opportunities, etc. If I am working for a company with a cool product and a great day-to-day, money is less of an issue. That being said, if either of the previous pillars falter, that is where the third pillar comes in.

The third pillar is compensation. The importance of this pillar will vary from person to person. If you are new to the industry compensation should be your last priority (within reason). Your main goal should be to work at a cool company with great coworkers and learning opportunities. Focus on gaining skills to chase bigger paychecks in the future.

If you’ve lost one pillar, it’s time to start looking, although it’s not necessarily time to jump ship. It’s simply time to sharpen up your interviewing skills and see what is out there. You want to be prepared in the event that you start to see a second pillar crumbling. It is said time and time again to quit early. Don’t stay in a position that will burn you out or hold you back from opportunities and growth. These pillars provide a simple framework to do a pulse check on your satisfaction level at your current job and determine whether it is time to move on.

Standardize Not Caring About Standards

Nicholas Warwick — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 13:07:37 +0000

I remember my first time encountering a curly brace on a new line. The world seemed to stop spinning for a second. “This must be a mistake” I thought to myself as I moved the curly brace back to where it belonged, on the same line as the function declaration. I committed this change along with my other work and in good spirits awaited my PR review. To my chagrin, the only issue that was noted in my PR was the fact that I had not put my curly braces on a new line. I had officially had my first experience with formatting standards. Because this was my first job and I deeply respected my peers I quickly applied the fix and ensured that all of my curly braces were on a new line from then on.

From that moment forward I became a standards chameleon, adapting to whatever environment I found myself in. I would put curly braces wherever people wanted them, I would delete semi-colons if I needed to. If the environment I was stepping into had pre-defined ways of doing things, I would adapt to those ways. I should mention that I am specifically talking about formatting standards right now. I didn’t hesitate to suggest changes to more fundamental strategies if I thought it could make an impact.

This was not my last experience with clashing standards. I view most of these interactions now as a bystander. It’s not uncommon to see some of the most talented developers at a company getting in heated debates over the eslint file. I’ve even seen developers build entire separate micro services just so they didn’t have to adhere to the standards of the original codebase (yes that was the real reason). These developers, despite their talent, are missing the most important part of software development: the end product.

My point here is not to say that standards should not exist. It is just that they should not take up a meaningful amount of time and effort. There are tools to make adopting standards easier, such as Standard for JavaScript and Standard for Ruby. Both of these can help avoid painstaking maintenance and fruitless discussions around standards

This idea of adapting to coding standards may seem like a minor revelation, and it is, however, it was the spark that started the shift in my view of software. In the beginning of my career, I cared almost solely about the means of building a product. I was more concerned with using cutting edge technologies and standards than I was with what those technologies and standards amounted to as a product. I believe that as builders we should not lose sight of our primary goal - building great products. Any time wasted arguing about the means is time that could be better spent focusing on the end - ensuring quality and success of the end product. For new developers, dropping your attachment to standards is the first step towards this shift in thinking.

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